Here are the clips I posted about last night. Look at about the 2:45 mark in this Letterman clip:
… and then here’s the Conan clip:
May
24
Tag Archives: Conan O’Brien
May
23
Same joke
It is not unusual for two of the late-night talk shows to make the same or a very similar monologue joke about a current event. (Sometimes, “InfoMania” on Current TV will highlight this, with a feature called “Same Joke.”)
But tonight, “Conan” and “Late Show With David Letterman” had, not a verbal joke, but a piece of produced visual comedy in common. Both hosts made jokes about Newt Gingrich’s supposed Tiffany debt and then said they were surprised at his appearance on CBS’s “Face The Nation .”
And then, both Conan and Letterman showed a clip of Gingrich on “Face The Nation,” with gaudy jewelry superimposed on his face. In Conan’s case, the most prominent piece was a crown; on Letterman it was a tiara. But the production technique, the source material and the joke itself were identical.
The clips aren’t online yet, but I’ll have to look for them tomorrow and post them side-by-side. I don’t think it’s anything but coincidence, but it’s quite a coincidence.
Nov
08
Counting the hours
Aug
23
Pep Boys, Andy? Really?
One of the funniest parts of the Emmy Awards in the past has been the announcement of the writing nominees for the late night comedy shows. Each year, the shows come up with some amusing way of listing their writing staffs. One year recently, for example, the writers for “The Colbert Report” were introduced, standing side by side on a New York City sidewalk. At the end, an angry Stephen Colbert walked in and gestured at the writers, and the camera widened out to show that they were lined up in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater, home of a different New York-based talk show.
Unfortunately, those writing awards were moved from the main Emmy telecast to the untelevised Creative Arts Emmy awards held last weekend. But the staff of the former “Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” brought the funny anyway, with a nod to the fact that soon after their Emmy-nominated episodes were broadcast, they were, um, unemployed:
Jun
12
Conan and the Kings
Last year, for the first and only time, I had access to the T-G’s press tickets for one day of Bonnaroo. But I chickened out at the last minute. It’s not that I wasn’t curious about going, it’s that I didn’t want to go by myself, and the day I’d been stuck with didn’t really have anyone I was really and truly passionate about seeing.
This year, the T-G let Bonnaroo slip through the cracks and didn’t apply for press credentials. If we had, I would have dearly loved to have been there Friday, for two reasons: Conan O’Brien, who brought his “Legally Prohibited From Being On Television” stage show, and Kings of Leon, who were the Friday headliners and, by all accounts, delivered a phenomenal performance. I used to have “Use Somebody” as my ringtone, and I’d have loved to have seen my fellow PKs live and in person.
SPIN magazine reported it thusly: “The Kings, who started at Bonnaroo in a small tent in 2004, now rule the compound. Jay-Z and Stevie Wonder may be playing today, but this is the Kings’ castle. ”
For that matter, I would have loved to see Steve Martin in his bluegrass set.
Apr
12
Lopez Tonight
I will have to watch “Lopez Tonight” (for, I admit, the first time) this evening to see George Lopez’s reaction to Conan O’Brien’s announcement today.
Conan’s new TBS show will push “Lopez Tonight” back by an hour. According to Bill Carter of the New York Times, this was originally a deal-breaker for Conan. Conan had been on the wrong end of such an arrangement at NBC, which is why he left, and he — understandably, and to his credit — did not want to do to George Lopez what NBC and Jay Leno had done to him.
But then, Lopez personally called Conan and asked him to accept the arrangement. Lopez probably feels that a 12 Eastern / 11 Central show with Conan as his lead-in will turn out better in the long run than an 11 Eastern / 10 Central show with TBS’s sitcom reruns as a lead-in. I think he’s right, and I think having the two talk shows back to back will be good for both of them.
As I said, I haven’t seen George Lopez’s talk show before, although I’ve seen his standup comedy, and I think he probably likes an atmosphere like TBS where he gets comparatively little interference from network executives and can do his own style of comedy. I think Conan will thrive at TBS for just those same reasons. Conan’s last two weeks at “The Tonight Show” were some of the funniest shows he’s ever done, and it’s because he didn’t have anyone to impress and could just relax and do the show he wanted to do. TBS may give him less of a budget (I wonder if Andy or Max will be there), but I believe he’ll have much more free rein than he did at NBC or than he would have at FOX.
FOX, it is true, has a more free-wheeling approach in general than the three traditional networks, but the network was reported to be bristling at the cost of launching a new late-night talk show and was going to have to please a lot of unhappy affiliate stations from whom it would be forcibly taking an hour of late-night air time. I think FOX would have breathed down Conan’s neck in the same way that NBC did.
Even though Craig Ferguson is on a broadcast network, CBS, he has made the same kind of tradeoff Conan is making. Craig’s show is — as he likes to remind us — run on a low budget, I imagine lower than Conan’s will be at TBS. But the network lets him do his own thing.
Jan
16
Live from New York, redux
I’m an idiot.
In my earlier post about how and whether SNL would address the late night talk show controversy, I didn’t give a moment’s thought to tonight’s SNL host, Sigourney Weaver.
I had known in the past, but long since forgotten, that she was the daughter of an NBC executive from the 1950s, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver.
During his tenure at NBC, Weaver is responsible for creating two shows that became NBC’s flagships and are still on the air today.
One of them is the “Today” show.
The other one …. well, let’s just say the other show Pat Weaver created has been in the news this week.
SNL addressed the late night controversy in the cold open, an amusing but relatively-toothless sketch with Jay, Conan and Dave as guests on “Larry King Live.” (Cast member emeritus Darrell Hammond played Jay, Bill Hader played Conan, and Jason Sudeikis was a wordlessly-mugging Dave.) But then, in her monologue, Sigourney made very brief reference to it, noting her father’s role.
I’ll wait and see if Seth makes any reference to it during Weekend Update.
The show is still falling prey to this year’s recycling epidemic; the first sketch, about a women’s darts tournament on ESPN, is recycled from a previous sketch about a women’s bowling tournament.
Jan
16
‘I don’t want to see all the fighting …. Conan, it’s yours’
Several times over the past week and a half, Jay Leno has whined about being fired from his first tenure as host of “The Tonight Show.”
Well, here’s how he described that transition on the day it was announced back in 2004:
Jay’s 2004 Announcement – watch more funny videos
Jan
16
Live from New York?
I’m curious to see how, and if, “Saturday Night Live” addresses the late-night kerfluffle this evening.
On the one hand, it’s a big, public story and everyone would no doubt expect them to address it some how. And Conan, remember, is a former SNL writer; he was picked for his old “Late Night” hosting job by SNL creator Lorne Michaels, and “Late Night” often had SNL cast members as guests.
On the other hand….
NBC executives Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol (Ebersol produced SNL during the early 1980s) have made it clear that they aren’t happy about some of the shots the other late night hosts have taken at Jay Leno. Of course, it’s also likely they aren’t happy at the shots taken against Zucker, but they know complaining about that would be counter-productive.
As further proof of their thin-skinnedness on this issue, it’s rumored that one provision of Conan’s exit negotiations is that NBC wants him to commit to not criticize his former employers.
There’s also at least one report Lorne was miffed that he didn’t get to keep his executive producer credit when Conan moved west. That same report notes that Conan’s departure from NBC helps the future prospects of Michaels’ current talk show protege, Jimmy Fallon.
As I say, it should be interesting to see what SNL does tonight, if anything about this season of SNL can be called interesting.
Jan
14
The LaRosa conundrum
People understand that actors play parts. Whether you think of acting as “pretending” or whether you subscribe to method-acting notions of empathetically channeling some part of your own personality, everyone understands, or should, that the character and the actor are two different people. I have never met Jack McBrayer, but I doubt he’s exactly like Kenneth the Page on “30 Rock.”
We have all heard stories about actors specializing in easy-going heroes who turned out to be ambitious or misogynistic jerks in real life, or about great horror villains who, in real life, are adored by their friends and love to play bridge and make tiramisu.
I think we also admit that a similar dichotomy is possible for people who play “themselves,” whether as radio personalities or talk show hosts or observational comedians. Even in these cases, the private personality might be different in some ways from the public persona — and we’re usually OK with that, as long as we aren’t slapped in the face by it. But sometimes the gap between the persona and the personality is too jarring to get over.
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