by John Ortved
I was sort of the monkey in the room. They would say, “Okay, do that thing!” “Go do this!” or “Go do that!” and I would do it. I was very happy to. “Oh, you want one of those ones? All right, fellas, I’ll give it to ya. You want number eighteen? I’ll do it.” I had a lot of sugar energy; I still do. I wasn’t able to sit still.
BRENT FORRESTER: Conan had a number of bits. Late at night in The Simpsons’ writers room—you know, everybody working late—a security guard would come by and make sure that everything was okay in various offices on the lot. He came by and said, “Okay, everything’s good in here? All right, fine.” And Conan just happened to be standing by the door. And then, when the security guard turned to leave, Conan said, “Everything’s just fine, indeed!” And then he did like a fake double karate chop on the guy’s neck. [Laughs] And that was just considered hilarious—like vintage Conan O’Brien. Give the security guard a double karate chop on the neck.
Another famous bit: Conan would pretend to be talking about someone and not want that person to hear—but put his hand on the wrong side of his mouth. That, alone, was considered really funny.
Another of Conan’s digressions involved a product named Jub, which he talked about often. He and other writers used to riff about horrible commercials for it, where the people would just say “jub jub jub jub jub jub jub” over and over, as many times as they could before they ran out of time. Or they would have a startling attention grabber, with someone yelling “There’s trouble at the school!” followed, of course, by “jub jub jub jub jub.” In the fourth season, Selma inherited an iguana from her great-aunt Gladys. In tribute to Conan, the writers named it Jub Jub.
JAY KOGEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): He had a small apartment in Beverly Hills, but it was nothing fancy. He had these nice guitars. You’d bring beer or soda, and you’d hang out and there’d be funny people there.
Writers are generally of an ilk, and they tend to make jokes more than communicate their true feelings and emotions. We’re not an emotive bunch. We take pride in being silly and making jokes, even at the expense of each other. And that’s the relationship, so sometimes we don’t know each other on a deeper level. But Conan and I actually had a nice relationship. I feel I knew Conan at a deeper level. We had serious talks.
CONAN O’BRIEN: When I look back at the stuff I did at the Lampoon, and I look back at the stuff I did writing sketches for Saturday Night Live, I realized that I’ve always had a very visual sense of humor. Even when I was on the Lampoon, I drew a lot of cartoons, and even my written pieces had a cartoonish element to them. I realized later it was always important to me on the Late Night show that things look funny. Words are important, but I always thought there should be an element of things you do on the show that might be funny even if you had the sound off.
I was very influenced by Warner Bros. cartoons and silly physical humor, the Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies and things like that. When I came to The Simpsons, that was a big release for me. I finally found myself in an animated world, and people could create what I was talking about. If you had a strange idea for something in Mr. Burns’s basement, or a monorail system snaking through the town of Springfield, it could happen. I remember it being a little bit of an aha! moment.
BRENT FORRESTER: The Simpsons was not initially cartoony. The first few seasons, it was an animated show about a family that was highly realistic. The conventional wisdom is that the show changed after the monorail episode, written by Conan O’Brien. Conan’s monorail episode was surreal, and the jokes were so good that it became irresistible for all the other writers to write that kind of comedy. And that’s when the tone of the show really took a rapid shift in the direction of the surreal.
But Conan had a little too much energy for the writers room. When David Letterman announced he was moving to the 11:30 spot at CBS, NBC began looking for a replacement to host Late Night. Lorne Michaels thought of Conan.
JAY KOGEN: He’d always said, “I’ve got this thing with Lorne Michaels, and we’re trying to put something together, and I really want to be on TV.”
GAVIN POLONE, former agent for Conan O’Brien, Simpsons writers; executive producer, Curb Your Enthusiasm: Lorne came to him wanting him to produce the show, and in a nutshell we sort of said, “Lorne, this is not the direction he wants to go, to be a producer. He wants to perform.” Lorne started talking to him, and while Conan was mulling it over, NBC was talking to different people about taking the job. There weren’t that many people they’d want. And at the same time I think a lot of people were also resistant to the idea of taking Letterman’s job because they’d be compared to him. So at some point or another we started talking about the fact that Conan would like to host his own show. And Lorne wasn’t totally against it. There was some discussion about him doing 1:30 if Greg Kinnear was gonna move up to 12:30. But Greg Kinnear wanted to be an actor, so that didn’t fully work out.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: We had left the show and then we heard that Lorne Michaels was talking to Conan about being the guy to replace Letterman. And it made complete sense to us, because Conan was so funny. We never would have thought of it in a million years, but as soon as you heard it, it made sense.
GAVIN POLONE: We came to this agreement that they would do a test with Conan on The Tonight Show’s stage and see how it went. So we furiously put that together. We got Jason Alexander and Mimi Rogers to be the guests, and Conan worked on a monologue—and he did a great job.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: One of the weirdest experiences of my life was going to see Conan’s tryout for Late Night, because it was done on the stage at The Tonight Show. That was back when Johnny Carson was still hosting the show (the curtain looked a certain way—it was this multicolored curtain), and seeing this friend of yours, this guy that you worked with, walk out from behind that curtain and deliver a monologue was like something you could only dream up that you couldn’t ever imagine actually happening.
The whole thing was being beamed back by satellite to New York, where Lorne Michaels was watching and probably other NBC executives.
So Conan came out and did an approximately twenty-minute version of a talk show. And then we all ran down and hung out on The Tonight Show stage, because we couldn’t believe it, and sat in the guest chair and did all the stuff that a tourist would do.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS, postproduction supervisor, The Simpsons (1989–97): It was like, They’re not gonna hire Conan. He’s a writer. Then it happened.
CONAN O’BRIEN: I have to tell you, it was pretty harrowing, and it’s a part of my life that I wouldn’t … I’m glad that part’s over. Because it was just such a giant transition.
I remember very clearly: we had just done a script. It was the day we were going to record an episode and we were all sitting around this table. A phone rang and someone said, “It’s for you, Conan.” It was my agent, Gavin Polone, and he just said—it was probably like ten o’clock in the morning—and he said, “You’re the new host of Late Night.”
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: The day he got hired, Conan came over to hide, basically, in our offices. And he was just lying on the floor, in a doorway, hands over his head, like, Oh, my God! It was just so bizarre.
MICHAEL MENDEL, postproduction supervisor, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons (1989–92, 1994–99): He was passed out facedown into this horrible shag carpet. He was just quiet and comatose down there on that carpet. I remember looking at him and saying, “Wow. Your life is about to change, in a really dramatic way.”
CONAN O’BRIEN: It was a feeling of, You’ve just been handed a huge responsibility. It was a little bit like being told, “You’ve just been designated as the first American to fly to Mars and back.” So you’re excited, because part of your dream has always been to see Mars, but there’s also a feeling that you’re probably gonna be killed.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: He’s going to be the new Letterman, and I think it just hit him once he got the job. Wow. That was amazing. It was almost like the s
cene from Goodfellas, except that, you know, he didn’t get whacked. He actually became a made man.
CONAN O’BRIEN: Everyone heard the news, and John Swartzwelder—he’s this incredibly good-looking guy; he looks like a turn-of-the-century constable; he looks like someone who would arrest an anarchist for throwing a bomb at Archduke Ferdinand’s carriage—was sitting there and smoke was trailing off his cigarette. He just looked at me and said, “I’d watch your show.” And that meant a lot to me, because he’s not a guy who will say something he doesn’t mean.
And I thought, Well, I got John Swartzwelder, I’ve got one viewer, anyway. And other than that I remember not seeing anybody too much after that.
I didn’t own a suit. I just had a zip-front jacket and three pairs of jeans. So Gavin bought me two suits, ’cause I had to go in and people had to get a look at me. Someday I gotta write it all down. It was a shock to the system, I’ll put it that way.
GAVIN POLONE: Conan had a bunch of clothes [before Gavin took him shopping], and me and him were standing out in the parking lot, you know, looking at different sport coats that he had in the trunk of his Ford Taurus.
CONAN O’BRIEN: Some executive at Fox—who I don’t remember, and that’s probably for the best—said, “No, no, no. He still owes us money on his contract.” It was like a year’s salary or something. So I think NBC paid half, and I paid half. I actually had to pay my way out of Fox, which always felt a little strange. I’m sure Simon Cowell has that money now. He’s using it on hair gel.
GAVIN POLONE: So then, after NBC wanted him, Fox would not let him out of his contract. It was really shocking, actually, because we thought they would. I think it was a guy named Steve Bell, really hard-assed us and I’ll never forget it. They actually demanded money. And it wasn’t a situation where he was going to compete against them. They could have built goodwill, and they just dispensed with all of that, so they could try to squeeze a writer (who wasn’t making huge money to begin with) out of $100,000. It’s pretty funny.
BOB KUSHELL, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1994–95): I had come in right after he left, but everybody was egging him on, wanting him to succeed, loved him. Loved him. But was very critical of him.
Every day at lunch we watched an episode of the Conan O’Brien show—I believe Jennifer Crittenden brought in the tapes of the show from the night before—and we deciphered it, talked about his progress, and I remember vividly everybody yelling at the TV, “Oh, this intro is too long!” And, “You don’t have to set things up like that, Conan,” because everybody knew him.
And subsequently all of those bad habits that Conan had at the beginning went away. He is so enormously talented at what he does, but just to be a part of the group, his close-knit group of friends watching him go through those growing pains, was very funny and very exciting.
BRENT FORRESTER: You know, Conan had wanted to hire me for his new Late Night show. I’d come off of Mr. Show. Bob Odenkirk (creator and star with David Cross of Mr. Show) was the big writer—the guy we all worshipped—and Odenkirk knew Conan O’Brien. And when Conan started up his new show, he said, “Who are the good writers?” And Bob said, “You should hire Forrester.”
And Conan called me up. I told him I’d do it. He just got me fired up—I wanted to work on the show so badly. David Mirkin had taken over as Simpsons show runner and was in communication with Conan. And when Conan told him he was going to hire me, Mirkin said, “Aha—over my dead body.”
They hired me at The Simpsons basically to replace Conan. Mirkin poached me. And I felt so bad about telling Conan that I would do his show and then bailing on it to do The Simpsons, which was a no-brainer. I couldn’t go on this unknown talk show, as opposed to like the greatest show on TV at the time. But I felt that I had betrayed Conan’s trust by having said I would. So, as a goodwill gesture, I sent him four ideas that he could do on his show—and two of them he did. One of them was: “When you start your show, act as if you don’t have enough money to do live satellite feeds. And then just show a photo of the person you’re interviewing and animate the lips.” [This became a famous Late Night bit.] And, interestingly, they dropped the premise.
And then, of course, the merging of the two heads became a signature bit of theirs. [Conan shows photographs of two celebrities, then combines their worst/weirdest features to see what the couple’s offspring would resemble.] What’s funny is, to this day, if I submit a list of ideas—story ideas, for example—to The Office, I always title them, so that they stand out on a page. And I titled that bit “If They Mated”—M-A-T-E-D. Which, on the page, scans okay—but coming out of your mouth is very ungainly. And always sounds like “If They Made It.” But, for some reason, they never changed the name of the bit. And it sounds wrong to me. It’s just an example of, If I knew you were gonna use this, I would have given it a better title. And they actually made a book of it. The book is called If They Mated. And Conan mentions that I came up with the idea and then wouldn’t work on his show.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY: In those early years, periodically we’d go to New York and visit Conan. It took me years to believe he was actually hosting the show. All these years later I haven’t fully digested that Conan O’Brien became the host who followed David Letterman. I still don’t believe it.
TWELVE
Institutionalized
In which Marge teaches me everything I ever wanted to know about sex but was afraid to ask … shockingly, Smithers likes the work of Tennessee Williams … nerds like the Internet … and very few people like a short, fat, cynical movie critic.
The cooling off of Bartmania might have meant some smaller ratings (and an eventual return to Sunday night, where The Simpsons has happily sat since 1994), but it gave the writers an opportunity to take their explorations even farther. Between Seasons 2 and 6, the writing became more jam-packed with jokes and clever allusions, the social satire grew richer, and yet the emotional resonance was maintained and sometimes even deepened. The golden age of The Simpsons coincided with the show’s expansion into foreign markets, its move into syndication, and the popularization of the Internet—all factors that solidified The Simpsons as an institution, not just a hot TV show of the moment. Episodes like “Mr. Plow,” “I Love Lisa,” and “Flaming Moe’s” were widely referenced and quoted, becoming ingrained in the young audience that lapped up the show each week.
GERARD JONES, satirist, media critic: You know, The Simpsons clearly seemed to come, to some extent, out of the Reagan culture, the “Let’s go back and pretend we are the country we pretended we were in the fifties.”
After this flirtation with the fake wholesomeness that people went through, I think it was crucial to George H. W. Bush to stay the course. But he didn’t have that same weird charisma of Reagan to make it seem somehow plausible. So it began to shake apart. I think the Bush years were about everybody catching on to the phoniness of the cultural aspects of the Reagan revival, which I think in turn opened us up to buy more of the funny, hip, sleazy charm of the Clintons. They had a weird quality about them that people were open to, especially since things were going fairly well. The cold war had been won, there was no new boogeyman. Americans in general just rolled with our own ease at that point, with our own cynicism.
That made a context where The Simpsons felt really mainstream and relevant as opposed to antimainstream and relevant. It felt comfortable and familiar and it could be more of an up-the-middle hit instead of the more troublemaking, out-of-the-urban-left hit it was early on. In the beginning there had been a fairly big anti-Simpsons backlash, at least from the conservative end of the media and the culture. Not just conservative in the sense of political right wing, but people who worry about things changing too quickly and in a bad direction, which often includes a lot of liberal psychologists and parents and educators. All of them saw Bart as this sort of terrible role model for kids, and there was a big fear of this kind of stuff.
Pretty soon they certainly weren’t worrying about Simpsons. By about �
��94, they probably started watching it and it became wholesome and ordinary.
Personally, from the mid-nineties onward, I cannot remember ever hearing someone being booed without the refrain of “Are you saying ‘Boo’ or ‘Boo-urns’?” following soon after. My peers and I recognized the smell of Otto’s jacket, we knew that food could taste like burning, and that things were funny because they were true. We wanted to try “efficient German sex” with anyone who would “Choo Choo Choose us” and were aided and abetted in our efforts by alcohol, which was confirmed as the cause of and solution to all life’s problems.
Like Seinfeld and Friends, as the show progressed, viewers became more attached to the characters. But in terms of plot and setting, animation allowed the characters to go anywhere, anytime, realistically (within The Simpsons’ world), in a matter of frames. Homer could grow hair overnight, his new appearance catapulting him to the position of executive at the power plant; Bart and Lisa could take over their summer camp with force; we could follow Homer’s snowplow business from start-up to success to ruin. Like other sitcoms, “crazy” things could happen each week, with everything going back to normal by the end of the episode, but with greater deftness, creativity, and excess. The writers became expert at portraying the Simpsons’ relatable struggles in their increasingly crazy lives: the impotence and alienation of childhood, the drudgery of work, the ills of consumerism and the media that preach its saving graces, the lackluster and faceless institutions that dominate our lives. In other words: they kept it real.