If A Funny Guy Falls In The Forest, Does Anyone Laugh?

 Good night, Conan. I can remember when you were just a punchline. I can remember when you were just a barbarian. What I cannot remember was a time when I watched your program. Which is a shame, really. The bits and pieces that I caught by merely by happenstance or via clip on one of those newfangled video clip machines hosted by Al Gore on is "Internet" were uniformly amusing.

And that makes sense, because Conan O'Brien is my generation's funny guy. If things like that matter, he is a year younger than I am. But he's packed a lot of comedy into those years. He was president of The Harvard Lampoon while attending that august institution, and started writing for the HBO show Not Necessarily The News about the time I was working on my Bachelor of Arts degree. He supplemented this experience as a performer in the legendary comic training ground of The Groundlings. He was considered funny enough to be hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1988. During his three year tenure there, he wrote "Mister Short Term Memory" and "Girl Watchers," which puts him in a pantheon of memorable SNL skits not starring John Belushi or Eddie Murphy. He left the show, telling his boss Lorne Michaels that he was burned out and needed to do something else. 

That something else was becoming a writer for The Simpsons. He wrote Marge Versus The Monorail, for heavens sake. This should have been sufficient to make him a comedy legend. But that wasn't enough. He was still aiming for the stars. In 1993, he grabbed the brass ring that was the vacancy left by David Letterman leaving NBC's Late Night. Now he was in front of the camera.

Which is where he stayed, more or less, for another twenty-eight years. First, he slipped quietly into the vacant spot on The Tonight Show, a gig which lasted a tumultuous seven months when Jay Leno decided to "retire." Jay and NBC didn't really want that to happen, so they finessed Conan out of the host's chair in a move that would have made Machiavelli laugh. After a contractually negotiated hiatus, he was back again on late night television, this time on WTBS.

And there he stayed, for eleven more years. The realities of a new world of cable and streaming TV chopped his show into an half-hour format a couple years back, which may have been enough to let the rest of the air out of his comedy tire. On June 25, 2021, he pulled the plug on himself and his WTBS show. 

He's still out there, doing a podcast, being funny in different but distinctly Conan ways. And it's probably only a matter of time before his star rises once again. Because Conan O'Brien is a funny guy I just never watched.