The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Dana Carvey became the front-runner. “Lorne wanted Dana to do it,” says Robert Smigel. “Dana talked to me about it. Carvey knew how much I loved to work with Conan. He said, ‘Yeah, you guys could both be featured players!’ I immediately formed a lot of ideas. I pictured a late night sketch comedy show with characters and guests—and guests who were characters.” Carvey ultimately changed his mind, deciding the grind would be too stressful and time-consuming.

  Lorne Michaels used his persuasive powers, and NBC went with the least experienced candidate: Conan O’Brien. Smigel desperately wanted to be part of the project. “I weaseled my way into doing the show with him. I was one of the senior writers at SNL and Lorne didn’t want me to go. To me, it was a dream. I knew who Pat Weaver was and I cared about that kind of thing. My dream was creating the show. Conan’s dream was hosting the show.”

  Michaels had O’Brien tape two weeks of practice shows to assure NBC it wouldn’t be a disaster, while Smigel went through the process of assembling a staff. Comedian Jeff Garlin recommended Andy Richter, whom Smigel knew through Chicago sketch comic Beth Cahill. O’Brien and Richter met at Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, and their chemistry was immediate. Jeff Garlin further recommended Louis C.K. “We watched Louis’s stand-up and watched two of his short films,” says Smigel. “Jeff Garlin recommended him and [comedian-writer] Dino Stamatopoulos pushed hard for him, so Conan and I went with it.”

  Louis C.K. was reeling from the implosion of the Comedy Boom at the time. “I was going broke. I was just devastated. I wasn’t making a living. I remember calling Marc Maron, who was living in San Francisco. I was up until dawn talking to him on the phone. I was so fucking depressed. And then I got a phone call out of nowhere from Robert Smigel. He said, ‘I’d like to take a chance on you. I’m writing for Conan.’ I didn’t even know what that was.”

  Michaels sent Smigel on a scouting mission to Second City, in particular to check out the buzz surrounding a kid named Steve Carell. “We went to a Second City show and Steve Carell wasn’t even there that day,” says Smigel. “There was an understudy doing his part. I thought, ‘Oh, well.’ I saw the show and I thought the understudy was hilarious! The understudy was Stephen Colbert.”

  Smigel arranged a meeting with O’Brien and Colbert, expecting the same chemistry he’d enjoyed with Andy Richter. “I wanted him to meet Colbert. It was just the three of us at a bar, but there wasn’t anything comfortable about it like when he met Andy.” Colbert said, “We met at a bar, had a couple of beers, talked. I submitted some jokes—and didn’t get hired.”

  Late Night with Conan O’Brien premiered on February 13, 1993, and Louis C.K. quickly put his stamp on it, creating recurring pieces that were used for years. “Louis was the most prolific and probably the best writer on the show,” says Smigel. “I created a fair amount, but Louis created more than anyone. He created bits that were done for years, like ‘Actual Items,’ ‘Staring Contest,’ ‘Bad Fruit Theater’ and ‘Patterns.’ He was super-strong.”

  Smigel created a signature bit that was done the first week on the air. O’Brien conducted phony “via-satellite” interviews with people like President Clinton, in reality a photo with Smigel’s human lips superimposed over the mouth, a takeoff on the low-budget Clutch Cargo cartoon of the 1960s. “We did the Clutch Cargo bit on the second show. The audience laughed so hard—it was such a thrill. Everything I wanted was happening. We were doing something different from any other talk show.”

  The program’s comedy was decidedly weird. While the people responsible for it would become critical favorites in another fifteen years, reporters at the time were dumbfounded. They dismissed Late Night with Conan O’Brien as a lousy Letterman knockoff and dismissed O’Brien as an inept personality. Rick DuBrow at the Los Angeles Times wrote, “In the wee hours after Letterman and Leno, NBC’s new Conan O’Brien series was an awkward, fumbling yawn.” Tom Shales at The Washington Post wrote, “O’Brien’s show just lies there, as lifeless and as messy as road kill.” TV Guide said, “[Conan is] a twitching frat boy who thinks he’s much cuter and funnier than he actually is.” The bad press affected the studio audience itself. “December 1993, our first winter, was the worst time I will ever have,” said O’Brien. “I’d go out to do the warm-up and the back two rows of seats would be empty.”

  Late Night with Conan O’Brien remained on the air against all odds, a testament to the power of Lorne Michaels. Critics did not let up. “They hated it the whole time I was there,” said Louis C.K. “We just fought to stay on the air, constantly faced with extinction. Every Friday the word would come, ‘This is probably our last week,’ and everybody would call their agents.”

  New hires were signed to hesitant thirteen-week contracts and writers quietly inquired about other gigs. Louis C.K. continued to do stand-up. “We’d be there until three in the morning working something out. So I’d literally say, ‘I’m gonna go to the bathroom,’ and I’d go downstairs, hop on my motorcycle, run to the Comedy Cellar and do a set, then come back and try and play it off like I took a big shit.”

  Late Night with Conan O’Brien cast many of its sketches using people out of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a new sketch collective that was considered hipper than its precursors. Founded by Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh and Matt Besser in Chicago in 1991, it acted as an alternative to Second City, which was by then touting itself as a tourist destination. “We had no respect for any other comedy enterprise in Chicago,” said UCB member Horatio Sanz. When the collective moved to New York in 1996, members started to show up with regularity on The Daily Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “They were like a repertory company for us,” says Late Night with Conan O’Brien writer Brian Stack. “The first sketch I wrote at Conan was called ‘Andy’s Little Sister,’ and Amy Poehler starred in it.”

  While critics complained about Late Night with Conan O’Brien, David Letterman was impressed. He told the staff, “The more I watch the show, I realize you guys do an incredible amount of comedy, and the stuff that is produced is at a very high level. The volume and quality of the stuff just knocks me out.”

  So much so that Letterman wanted Louis C.K. for his own. “I was trying to get on Letterman as a comic,” said C.K. “My manager approached Letterman’s show for the fiftieth time. They said, ‘Would he write here? ’Cause that would really make us interested.’ And we said only if I could do stand-up. I didn’t want to write on Letterman. I hadn’t even been on the show yet and I’m meeting David Letterman. He said, ‘Look, I saw your Conan reel. You’re really, really great. We really feel like this show needs to go somewhere new. So the idea of having you come here and shaking things up is exciting to me. So will you write for me?’ He just asked me point-blank. And I just said, ‘Yeah.’ What am I gonna do? And it was a miserable three months. I had a rotten time there. So I quit.”

  Meanwhile Smigel left Conan to write a “Da Bears” screenplay with Bob Odenkirk. It was commissioned by Paramount, but the studio shelved the project. Dana Carvey was going through an equally frustrating period. After having passed on his late night opportunities, his intention was to make quality comedy films, but those hopes were quickly dashed by studio interference. Carvey recalled, “After these horrible movie experiences I said, ‘Oh, man, I really would love to do something with Smigel, who I enjoyed so much. Maybe we’ll do a variety show somewhere.’”

  Carvey, C.K. and Smigel joined forces and devised a sketch comedy program. “I had really wanted to do it on cable, HBO,” said Carvey. “Robert and other people really believed, ‘You have the face for prime time. You should be with a big audience.’” In order to cast The Dana Carvey Show, Smigel acquired the rejected audition tapes from Saturday Night Live and went through them. Among the people he looked at were Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gasteyer and Tracy Morgan.

  Out of the tapes only comedian Jon Glaser was hired, as his weird sensibility seemed to fit. “My celebrity impression
was the head coach of the Detroit Lions and my political impression was King Hussein of Jordan,” says Glaser. “I didn’t get SNL, but Robert Smigel liked my King Hussein and told me he wanted me to do it for The Dana Carvey Show.”

  At Second City, Stephen Colbert had been Steve Carell’s understudy and Jon Glaser had been Stephen Colbert’s understudy. Smigel hired all three of them.

  Adding to the roll call of future giants was a taciturn writer named Charlie Kaufman. It was the first job for the man who went on to write Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “His writing submission was not fantastic,” said Smigel. “[It] was up and down, but kind of interesting. There was one sketch that was a very meta treatment of Unsolved Mysteries. It was one of the most brilliant sketches I had ever read, and it was enough for me to hire him.”

  With future giants like Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and Charlie Kaufman all involved, how could it miss? The Dana Carvey Show premiered on ABC on March 12, 1996. Within seven weeks it was canceled.

  The Dana Carvey Show had Tim Allen’s high-rated sitcom Home Improvement as its lead-in. For anyone else this would have been an asset, but unfortunately these two programs had completely different temperaments. The Dana Carvey Show was on Disney-owned ABC, but its approach was more in line with Carvey’s initial HBO ambitions.

  The very first sketch of the series featured Carvey playing President Bill Clinton, telling the American people he “felt their pain” as the “compassionate president” and would nurture them. He then opened his shirt, exposing six nipples and breast-feeding a litter of kittens. “The president breast-feeding was probably the worst decision I’ve ever been involved in,” said Smigel. “It was Louis C.K.’s idea. I foolishly got very excited about it, and Louis even said, ‘You know what’s great about this? We’ll be able to really draw a line in the sand for people. Are you with us or aren’t you?’ For some insane reason, just a purely naïve moment of thinking about nothing but making myself laugh, I agreed with him. I was so stupid. I didn’t even watch Home Improvement. I should’ve taken a second to watch five minutes of it. I’d heard Tim Allen had done coke and gone to jail. Then, about five shows into it, after a horrendous ratings drop-off, with every week getting worse and worse, I finally tuned in to Home Improvement. I was absolutely mortified. Not just for myself, but for the audience to whom I’d subjected The Dana Carvey Show.”

  Louis C.K. lamented that it was an “amazing pool of talent and we just couldn’t turn it into anything. And the network hated us. I was so depressed.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The New Millennium

  Comedy entered the new millennium. George W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-third president of the United States, and some felt it was great news for comedians. One could get laughs by simply running clips of the president’s malapropisms, without any additional joke writing required. But if President Bush was good for comedy, the events of September 11, 2001, had the opposite effect, and some wondered if it spelled the end of comedy as we knew it. How could one laugh amid such tragedy and devastation? How could one possibly find anything funny about it? Comedians were at a loss for what to say and how to say it.

  All the late night comedy programs from Letterman to The Daily Show happened to be on hiatus the week of September 11. They were scheduled to return the following week, but the writers who usually wrote the jokes about the week’s events were paralyzed. Comedy was a futile pursuit as the smell of charred bodies lingered in the air.

  David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart all did their comedy programs from New York. No one was quite sure how to proceed. Even the process of worrying filled them with a sense of guilt. “We were all walking around feeling dazed, not knowing if we should bother to write anything,” says Late Night with Conan O’Brien writer Brian Stack. It seemed superficial to concern oneself with a comedy show while other New Yorkers were searching for lost relatives. Vinnie Favale, vice president of CBS’s late night programming, says, “I didn’t even think we could do television again.”

  “There were definitely mixed feelings,” says Guy Nicolucci, a former writer for both O’Brien and Stewart. “There were a lot of people who felt that we shouldn’t go on the air yet. It was very clear, however, that all the hosts wanted to go on the air.” Former Late Night with Conan O’Brien writer Jon Glaser remembers, “I questioned why we were going back. It was strange and it didn’t seem right. Why do we care? It seemed meaningless.”

  Late Show with David Letterman returned to CBS on September 17, 2001. “It was very hard, because it was a comedy show,” says Favale. “Letterman had the license to go serious. He didn’t need anyone by his side to come up with that first show after 9/11. It was honest and raw.”

  Late Show with David Letterman opened cold, without its normal theme song. Letterman sat behind his desk and addressed the camera. “Welcome to the Late Show. This is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked. I need to ask your patience and indulgence here . . . If we are going to continue to do shows—I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes . . . It’s terribly sad here in New York City . . . You can feel it. You can see it. It’s terribly sad. Terribly, terribly sad. Watching all of this, I wasn’t sure that I should be doing a television show . . . So to come to this circumstance that is so desperately sad—and I don’t trust my judgment in matters like this—but I’ll tell you the reason I am doing a show, and the reason I’m back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani.”

  Letterman spoke for eight minutes about the city and the bond of sorrow uniting the country. He added one sentence of levity: “Thank God Regis [Philbin] is here so we have something to make fun of.” Much of the commentary was devoted to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whom Letterman mentioned seven times in eight minutes.

  Both before and after the tragedy Giuliani could be a polarizing figure, but he was the voice of the city during its season of grief. When Saturday Night Live returned to the air on September 29, 2001, the mayor was there. SNL opened with Paul Simon singing his song “The Boxer” while emergency workers stood around him. The segment ended with Mayor Giuliani and Lorne Michaels having a brief on-camera conversation. “We needed some moment to sort of give us permission to start again,” recalled Michaels. “So we did a joke with Mayor Giuliani where he talked about what had gone on and the importance of what we do for a moment. I said, ‘Can we be funny?’ And he had this joke we’d given him, ‘Why start now?’”

  Late Night with Conan O’Brien returned to the air the night after Letterman. “We went into work,” says former Conan writer Michael Koman. “Everyone was very silent. It was this general sense: ‘What do we do? Does this even happen anymore? How do you put on a comedy show?’ I felt everything was going to end. My feeling was less that it was dishonorable to return than what reality are we even writing from?” There was no opening monologue for the first couple weeks. The writers whose specific job was to write the monologue wondered if they would ever write another. Conan writer Brian Kiley says, “We couldn’t do any jokes for a while. When we did there would be an ooooh and you’d feel the audience tightening up. This was a real scar.”

  Late Night with Conan O’Brien opened without a theme song, and O’Brien addressed the camera from his desk: “I will be very honest with you. I have no idea how to do what we’ve been doing—tonight. I have no idea tomorrow. I have no idea how to do it the rest of the week. I have no idea how we’re going to get back to doing this again . . . I have never ever felt more unsure or more at a loss than I do tonight.”

  Jon Glaser remained skeptical about the choice to return, but then a friend of the show visited the set. “There was a guy named Chris Edwards, a retired fireman and policeman. He became an actor and we used him a lot. He showed up with another fireman and they were dressed to go to a funeral. The whole staff—fifty or sixty people—gathered around him. He said, ‘It’s so gre
at you guys are back on the air because every day we’re down at Ground Zero or at a funeral. At the end of the day we go back to the firehouse and watch your show.’ It made me feel better. Most of the time it was just a stupid show, but this gave it meaning.”

  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart returned on September 20, 2001. One anonymous staffer claims it was a selfish decision. “Stewart went on that Friday and said, ‘I can barely stand to be on the air . . .’ The son of a bitch rushed on the air to show how heartfelt he was because he needed to have a piece of the spotlight.”

  The Daily Show began like the others, with a “cold open,” Stewart addressing the camera from his desk. “Good evening and welcome to The Daily Show. We are back. This is our first show since the tragedy in New York City and there’s no other way really to start the show than to ask . . . are you okay? We pray that you are and that your family is. I’m sorry to do this to you. It’s another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought speech of a shaken host . . . It’s something that unfortunately we do for ourselves so that we can drain whatever abscess is in our hearts and move on to the business of making you laugh.”

  Comedy returned, but it was a struggle. “After 9/11 I couldn’t think about anything else for months,” says Robert Smigel. “I couldn’t write comedy about anything. SNL did that first show and there was a benign recurring sketch going on. The prop guy said, ‘I’m not ready to watch this.’ And I understood that. That’s how I felt. I couldn’t think of anything but the tragedy. I tried to write some things, and they just didn’t fly.”