Lost in the Cone Zone

Conan O’Brien is not to everyone’s taste. That’s why it was a big risk when NBC decided, in September 2004, to name him the next host of The Tonight Show, effective 2009. Since the announcement, Jay Leno has continued to win his time slot by a wide margin while playing the affable comedy professional to David Letterman’s crotchety uncle. At 58, Leno, the hardest-working man in show business since James Brown, is not ready to hang it up soon writes Jim Windolf.

Another complication arose in NBC’s changeover plan last month, when the modest Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which holds down 12:30 a.m. for CBS, beat Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the ratings for an entire week. This had never happened before, and it came at a bad time for the network and O’Brien. Out of all the late-night hosts, with the possible exception of the sleepy Jimmy Kimmel, Ferguson seems the least ambitious. Unlike O’Brien, Letterman, Leno, and Jon Stewart— all of whom seethe to be the best in their field— Ferguson seems content to put on a nice little show. A former film director and sitcom second banana, he has the relaxed manner of someone who has already proved himself, at least to his own satisfaction. He’s warm, non-neurotic. He would probably make a great dinner-party guest. But his show, which is friendly, civil, and homey, is more about keeping a time slot warm than creating something new or setting the ratings on fire.

So it must have been a shock to O’Brien and his bosses when Ferguson won the week. Especially given that Leno— who was energized by the writers’ strike, during which he trounced a fully staffed Letterman— continues to pull big numbers, while, not coincidentally, taking frequent on-air jabs at NBC. So, has the network placed its bet on the wrong man?

The executives seem committed to going through with it. If they change their minds and decide to keep Leno on at 11:30 p.m., they must pay O’Brien a penalty of a reported $45 million. (Which they can certainly afford, given that The Tonight Show brings in an estimated $160 million per year, according to Variety.) But word leaked out of NBC earlier this week that the network will formally name Saturday Night Live alumnus Jimmy Fallon as the next host of Late Night, suggesting the plan is a go. The announcement is expected to take place tomorrow, during the network’s upfront presentation.

Furthermore, NBC Universal recently sold its 34-acre Burbank lot, the longtime home of The Tonight Show and other NBC programs, according to an April 24 internal corporate memo scooped up by Broadcasting & Cable. Major renovation work is under way at the Universal Stage One lot in Universal City, which was home to The Jack Benny Show between 1961 and 1965, and the leaked memo went on to say that “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien … will move to Universal Stage One in 2009.” In January, the Los Angeles Times reported that O’Brien had purchased a home in Brentwood—complete with wine cellar, sauna, screening room, and other L.A. amenities— for more than the $10.5 million asking price. So it looks like the changeover is really going to happen, even though Leno will likely receive offers for the 11:30 slot from ABC and Fox and maybe even an offer for an Arsenio-style syndication deal from Sony.

But if O’Brien’s brand of innovative comedy proves to be like a dog whistle that can be heard only by his current group of roughly 2 million regular viewers, NBC could be in danger of losing a time slot, a show, and a way of watching TV that it pretty much invented in the 1950s. All that pressure could be enough to wilt the host’s famous pompadour.

On a wall to the left of his desk, O’Brien keeps framed photographs of his heroes— Letterman, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Jack Paar. There’s no picture of Leno, and that’s significant. Leno is a joke-delivery machine who excels in taking a newspaper story and making it the pretext for a punch line. He hits his target about half the time. He’s a wholesaler, the Wal-Mart of comedy, and he treats his viewers like customers. When a given joke doesn’t work, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand— unlike his predecessor, the nimble Carson, who relished the challenge of charming laughs out of a failed laugh line by taking his audience gently to task, or by blaming his writers, or simply by giving the camera a quizzical look.

O’Brien is no joke-delivery machine. He does all right in the craft of setup and punch line, but he took off as a performer only when he was able to reproduce, before the camera, what had made him so funny in the writers’ rooms where he had worked as a contributor to The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. And it shows: a lot of Late Night’s bits have the feel of something that made an unshaven comedy writer do a snot laugh at 2 a.m.

O’Brien’s opening monologue is more a series of gestures than jokes. He points to audience members for no reason, performs his “string-dance,” spins on his mark like a fool, paddles an invisible rowboat, and makes a fetish of his hair to a degree that would do Larry Sanders proud. Whenever a female audience member shouts, “I love you, Conan!” he replies with a curt “I love you, too, sir.” It’s a dumb line that always gets a laugh. If the audience seems overexcited, he says, in a falsetto voice, “Keep cool, my babies.” So his opening remarks, instead of serving as a satirical digest of the day’s events, function mainly as a way to establish a goofy atmosphere, which he, in moments of mock grandiosity, calls the Cone Zone.

In trying to pull off this high silliness, O’Brien has more in common with Steve Martin or Andy Kaufman or even Chuck Barris (in his Gong Show years) than any of his fellow late-night hosts. He wants to re-create the mood you fell into when you were eight years old laughing hysterically over nothing with your cousins in the backseat of your dad’s station wagon. On the nights he succeeds, it’s great. When he fails, a dead-air mood falls over Late Night, and we find ourselves in public-access hell.

His contemporary and main comedy rival (to my mind), Jon Stewart, makes a perfect foil to O’Brien. Where O’Brien depends on slapstick, Stewart goes for verbal wit. Where Conan tries to create a comedy candyland that exists at a distance from the real world and its troubles, Stewart and his correspondents take the world head on and do battle with it. The Daily Show draws nearly a million fewer nightly viewers than Late Night, but it seems to be the more talked-about show, and Stewart has gotten Hollywood’s blessing, with two consecutive Oscar-hosting jobs.

Stewart’s comedy is political, satirical, sceptical. Just beneath the laugh lines you find, simmering, a possibly naïve desire to make the world a better place … or at least the need to leave behind a record showing that some of us weren’t falling for the lines put out by politicians and their hack counterparts in the media. O’Brien’s comedy—apolitical, absurd—suggests the world has fallen into a state that lies beyond satire’s reach. Which may be why his sensibility brings to my mind the 1970s comedy of Martin, Kaufman, and the giddy Gong Show: it rises out of a mood of defeat similar to the one that pervaded the air in that gloriously stupid decade.

Stewart’s more hopeful show— which has its roots in the political comedy of the 50s and 60s— pokes holes in the official story and regularly demonstrates the misguidedness of the war through its careful, albeit comedic, examination of those in charge. Running gags on Late Night, on the other hand, have included the Masturbating Bear, the Horny Manatee, and Raymond, a man with large plastic ears (played by Late Night writer Brian McCann) who hands out tubes of Preparation-H to audience members while singing a little ditty about the discomforts caused by haemorrhoids.

If Stewart is fact based, O’Brien is steeped in a world of cartoonish fiction. The real world rears its head on Late Night only in the mundane-on-purpose conversational segments featuring the host and his bandleader, Max Weinberg— conversations so dull they make you think the real world, with its idle chatter between bored co-workers, is no place you want to be. This running gag, like many Kaufman bits, makes its point by overstaying its welcome, which can be tough to deal with at 1 a.m.

Stephen Colbert, by the way, falls halfway between Conan and Stewart, it seems to me. Like O’Brien, who was once a member of the L.A. improv troupe called the Groundlings, Colbert has a background in theatre. The way he runs from his desk to his interviewing chair, with his arms outstretched, like Julie Andrews traipsing across a meadow in The Sound of Music, shows a performer completely at home in the world of physical comedy. And yet The Colbert Report shares with its big brother, The Daily Show, the mission to expose the blow-dried egos that keep things humming along on their idiotic course. It’s comedy with a purpose. Late Night has no discernible purpose, and that’s partly what I like about it.

Like Leno and Letterman, Stewart paid his dues as a stand-up, and it shows— he’s primarily a talker whose moments of physical comedy come out of the Rodney Dangerfield playbook. In a battle-of-the-late-night-stars segment that ran during the writers' strike, O’Brien had a mock physical fight with Colbert and Stewart. If you check the tape, you’ll see O’Brien and Colbert really going at it, the hams, while Stewart lurks in the background, seemingly wanting no part of such improvish shenanigans.

Right now viewers don’t have to choose between O’Brien and Stewart. But that could change: Stewart’s contract with Comedy Central is up at the end of 2010— coinciding with Letterman’s expiration date with CBS. Stewart seems a natural fit for the Ed Sullivan Theatre and may very well end up going head-to-head with O’Brien. (Then again, by that time, people may no longer be watching TV in real time. Time slots could have little importance.)

I think what Conan attempts has a greater degree of difficulty than what Stewart is after. And it’s way more ambitious than the pot-roast-and-potatoes comedy served up nightly by Leno. But Stewart and Leno, although far apart in how hard they hit, are alike in that they’re both public servants: their nightly jokes are useful. They help people make sense of a crazy world. So it makes sense that the workmanlike Leno gets the ratings and the sharp Stewart gets the buzz. Conan’s rarefied sense of what’s funny could leave him with nothing more than his cult of admirers— a group with a high tolerance for arbitrary silliness— even after he finds himself at the revamped Universal Stage One.

Recent episodes of Late Night suggest Conan may be trying to inch his way toward a more plainly relevant style of comedy as 2009 draws near. His monologue is longer, its jokes more pointed and more obviously topical— sometimes even satirical in that banally partisan Daily Show manner. A recently recurring Late Night comedy piece has various members of the cast saying stupid things, only to have the word “Ass,” in large red letters, stamped onto the screen, covering their faces. This is beneath the imaginative stuff Late Night fans have come to expect. Another tedious piece has an offstage announcer with a heavy-metal voice shrieking the names of recent guests whose names begin with the letter J. Those two recent bits are dangerously like the stinko gags that have polluted Letterman’s show since Rob Burnett took over as executive producer, in 1996. And Late Night’s usually sublime 18-minute opening has lately been interrupted by a round of commercials, which breaks the comic momentum. Is Universal really so hard up for cash that it needs to mess with its Tonight Show host-to-be?

I’m hoping O’Brien won’t change too much as he prepares for the big job. It would be better for him to go down in the Cone Zone than in some other place less beautifully absurd.