Conan O’Brien – Late Night’s Best Kept Secret
O’Brien was born on April 18th, 1963 in Brookline, Massachusetts, the third of six children in an Irish American family. Dr. Thomas O’Brien, his father, was a research physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital an associate professor at Harvard Medical School where he specialized in infectious diseases. His mother, Ruth, is a former partner of a prestigious Boston law firm. He has four brothers and a sister. The six foot four inch tall O’Brien was the valedictorian of Brookline High School and entered Harvard after graduation. He became a writer for the Harvard Lampoon and during his sophomore and junior years he served as the Lampoon’s president. He graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1985 after concentrating on American History and Literature.
Conan O’Brien moved to Los Angeles, California after graduating from Harvard to join the writing staff of the HBO comedy show “Not Necessarily the News.” For two years he stayed with the show and performed frequently with improvisational groups like The Groundlings After “Not Necessarily the News” he worked as the lead-in comic for the Fox Network’s “The Wilton North Report”, which ran for but four weeks. O’Brien moved on from there to the “Happy Happy Good Show” based in Chicago, Illinois. In January of 1988, Lorne Michaels, producer of “Saturday Night Live”, hired O’Brien as a writer. He spent three and a half years on SNL and was responsible for such recurring sketches as “Mr. Short-Term Memory” and “The Girl Watchers”, the latter of which featured Tom Hanks and Jon Levitz in its debut. He also appeared as an extra in a few skits, sometimes in a speaking role. He and the other SNL writers were awarded an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series in 1989.
Conan O’Brien left SNL in the spring of 1991 to write and produce a television pilot show. ” Lookwell”, starring former Batman star Adam West, was broadcast on NBC in July, but not picked up in the fall as a series. O’Brien rebounded by hooking up as a writer and producer for the Fox animated comedy series “The Simpsons”, where he also served as a supervising producer. O’Brien credited “The Simpsons” with salvaging his television career in a 2000 speech he gave at Harvard. In April of 1993, Lorne Michaels chose O’Brien to be the replacement of David Letterman’s as host of “Late Night with David Letterman” and the show’s name was changed to “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”. The show was bombarded with poor reviews for the first couple of years, reportedly cancelled by network executives but allowed to remain on a week-to-week basis when there was nothing to replace it on the schedule. Letterman remained a firm supporter of O’Brien’s talents throughout this period.
The show began to build a fan base and eventually became a success. “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” went from being panned to being nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series. Five different times, O’Brien and his writing staff won the annual Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Comedy/Variety Series. In 2001, O’Brien formed his own television production company, which he named Conaco. The popularity of the show, which followed “The Tonight Show”, grew to the point where it was averaging two and a half million viewers each week, tops by far in its time slot. Conan, and his oddball sense of humor, became trendy; he even was made the host of the Emmy Awards in 2002. In September of 2004 NBC announced the plan to replace a retiring Leno with Conan as host of “The Tonight Show”.
O’Brien married former advertising copywriter Liza Powell in Seattle, Washington on January 12th, 2002. The couple has one daughter, Neve, born in October of 2003, and a son named Beckett, who came into this world in November of 2005. The comedian often takes shots at his own network, saying his show is under funded and that NBC’s rating are dismal. He will make light of his red hair, his pale complexion, overweight celebrities, politicians, and other television series. He makes use of hilarious puppets and celebrity heads on a TV screen such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mouth moves as he “converses” with O’Brien.
In October of 2005, O’Brien pointed out the amazing resemblance he has to the president of Finland. The fact that the president of Finland is a woman did not stop the self deprecating comic from doing several bits about this coincidence. He even went as far as to plug the politician for a second term. The publicity carried all the way back to Finland; O’Brien actually met with the woman after she was re-elected.
Conan O’Brien’s style and ability to poke fun at himself as well as others, has endeared him to a huge fan base in the United States and other countries. He is sure to become even more mainstream when he takes over as host of “The Tonight Show” in a few years. Until then, he will remain in the late, late night time slot, where he will continue to make millions of insomniacs laugh themselves to sleep.
