Just finished reading Live from New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live. Haven’t watched the show regularly in a long time, but the book reminded me how much I loved this show throughout most of my life. Every era has some great stuff, but as far as the book goes, the most interesting stories are (unsurprisingly) from the first five (best) seasons. Still, there’s some really fascinating stuff about Norm MacDonald’s “Weekend Update” and Janeane Garofalo’s bad experience with the show. The least interesting stuff is in the last chunk of the book—the Will Ferrel/Tracy Morgan/etc. years. While I enjoy a lot of that period of the show, most of them are pretty boring people comapred to Bill Murray or Phil Hartman. I’d love to see the book updated, since it’s ten years old now. Really fun read, and much, much better than the Simpsons oral history.
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (Rodman Flender; 2011)
Most reviews of this behind-the-scenes look at Conan O’Brien’s Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television tour have focused on how Conan comes across. Most of the reviews paint him as an asshole, but I don’t really think Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop portrays him that way at all.
After Conan O’Brien was forced out of The Tonight Show, he immediately began planning a 44-city tour across North America in order to fill out the nine months he was contractually obligated to stay off television. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is a chronicle of that tour, and it’s one of the most fascinating and entertaining films of that kind in many years.
Conan is visibly upset about the whole situation, spouting many thinly veiled (and quite amusing) insults toward Jay Leno and NBC president Jeff Zucker. I suppose other people, when viewing this film, saw two scenes, and concluded that Conan O’Brien is an insensitive prick. In one, O’Brien forces his entire staff to speak into a banana if they want to say anything at a meeting. His female assistant jokes that it’s “demeaning.” In another, Conan persistently mocks friend Jack McBrayer’s southern accent. As McBrayer plays a ridiculous southern caricature every week on 30 Rock, I don’t really see how Conan went “over the line” at all.
The performance clips here are very funny, but it focuses more on the musical numbers than comedy bits (though the songs are obviously comedic). Some highlights include Conan painting his white, upper-middle class upbringing as a tough childhood by framing it within the southern blues song “Pork Salad Annie” and the re-purposing of the Masturbating Bear (a character owned by NBC) as the Self-Pleasuring Panda.
O’Brien almost comes off as aggressively nice, even to his detriment. He never refuses autographs, and he only begrudgingly refuses pictures in one scene, even when he’s exhausted and doesn’t want to talk to anyone. This tour comes across as an interesting experiment for Conan (even if it didn’t change much; his TBS show is much the same as his Tonight Show and Late Night before it), and Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop chronicles the behind-the-scenes process in glorious detail.
