PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT Interview With Conan O'Brien part-2
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O'BRIEN: I took a lot of criticism. Some of it deserved. Some of it excessive. And I'll be honest with you, it hurt like you would not believe. But I'm telling you all this for a reason. I had had a lot of success. I had had a lot of failure. I looked good and I looked bad. I've been praised and I've been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary --
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MORGAN: You wrote this incredible commencement speech at Harvard particularly year 2000. And I want to sort of tell the story of what happened to you after you left Harvard through the prism of the speech because it was -- it was a wonderful life template, I think, for anyone who is considering life after college. You said, you see, kids, after graduating in May, I moved to Los Angeles. I got a three- week contract at a small cable show, I got a $380 a month apartment, a terrible dump. I bought an awful car. You said it was a car that -- Isuzu?
O'BRIEN: The Isuzu -- MORGAN: Isuzu.
O'BRIEN: It's something called the (INAUDIBLE) which -- MORGAN: They only manufactured for a year because they found out technically it's not a car. O'BRIEN: No, it was -- I don't know what it was. It was a hair brush more than it was a car.
(LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: A terrible car. MORGAN: But you go work on a show for a year. And you must be thinking, I'm a Harvard graduate, I've got on the show, life is beautiful. O'BRIEN: I'd love to pretend that's what I thought. But I never feel that way. Anyone who knows me will tell you I never think we're in good shape now. I've never done that. But yes. I -- I got that job and then as I said in the speech my writing partner at the time and I lost that job. And then a lot of series of misadventures and highs and lows.
MORGAN: At one stage, you're sent to the Santa Monica (INAUDIBLE) and Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: And you're sitting there thinking how did a Harvard graduate end up here. O'BRIEN: Yes. But you had -- I had those thoughts many times where you -- and Los Angeles is a very -- when you don't have a job in Los Angeles, there's something about it that's more profoundly depressing than maybe not having a job other places. MORGAN: Well, because they're all around you, are success stories. O'BRIEN: Yes. And --
MORGAN: Billboards.
O'BRIEN: Yes. Everything.
MORGAN: Everything. The whole machinery of the city.
O'BRIEN: Exactly. MORGAN: Is geared to achievement, success. Not failure.
O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: I mean when it's great, it's the best place to be in the world. When it goes wrong, it's the most lonely place on earth. O'BRIEN: Also in this town, when you walk on a sidewalk, you're perceived as a failure. When you -- and so -- what happens is if you --
MORGAN: If you walk you're perceived as a failure. O'BRIEN: Exactly. So I just was -- you know, you can -- you can walk on three blocks in this town and people will pass you, who know you, and say, that's too bad what happened to Conan. O'BRIEN: I guess, you know, he's -- they -- it's not like New York or any other city in that way. You just -- so yes, that was a very -- there's lots of intense kind of despair. MORGAN: You then get a big break. "Saturday Night Live." (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE MYERS, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE": I believe this gentleman has something to say. O'BRIEN: Well, I just completed your course. I never dreamed I could be this handsome. Thanks, Lange.
MYERS: You're handsome. Give that man a round of applause.
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MORGAN: And after a year and a half, they read your sketches, they give you a two-week tryout. The two weeks turned into two seasons. You think, I've made it. O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: And I'm "SNL" superstar. And you get so cocky, you think, I'm going to go and write my own TV show. And off you go. Original sitcom. It's all going good. The TV show is going to be ground breaking, you write.
O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: It was going to resurrect the career of TV's Batman Adam West. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: Sounds like a fool-proof plan, doesn't it? MORGAN: Even as you're saying this -- O'BRIEN: Doesn't it? MORGAN: I'm fearing the worse. O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: It was going to be a comedy without a laugh track or a studio audience. It was going to change all the rules.
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: And here's what happened. When the pilot aired, it was the second lowest rated television show of all time.
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: It tied with the test pattern they show up in Nova Scotia.
(LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: Yes, true. True. But I've seen the test pattern and it's funny. It's a very funny test pattern. MORGAN: So what are you thinking now? You've had this terrible disaster. Then you get a break. Then you get a little above yourself. Think it's easy. Then you get another disaster.
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: What is going through your mind?
O'BRIEN: I think, you know, I'm Irish so we're just -- we always think that the worst is 10 minutes away or five minutes away. And so there's part of me that was always half expecting that. But yes, I think you constantly think it's over. I mean I've had that feeling of, well, I guess it's over about 35 times in my career. And one of them was just five minutes ago.
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MORGAN: I mean is it the kind of career -- it always strikes me as odd that it's the kind of career comedy that attracts a lot of quite neurotic insecure people. O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: It's almost like the worst thing they should be going in for because that pressure -- like I said earlier, to make people laugh is like nothing on earth. I've done afternoon speaking. O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: And when a joke doesn't work and there's a terrible reaction, it feels awful. O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: I can feel the sinew of my body starting to compress.
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: I don't know how you guys do this. O'BRIEN: Well, first of all, I've never experienced what you're talking about. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: Every joke has worked, 35,000 of them. And they've all gone brilliantly. You know, what's interesting is that for me I'm one of those people that -- comedy is the release. Comedy is the -- doing comedy, although it can be scary and difficult, I find more agony in other things. You know what I mean? In -- if someone asked me to make them a sandwich, I would have more fear revolving around making that sandwich and insecurity than I would about doing comedy. So comedy in a strange way is the escape from --
MORGAN: Is there an art to comedy? People who have worked with you tell me that you have an incredible instinct for what is going to be funny. What I don't know is whether the instinct is what makes you laugh or your instinct is what you think will make an audience laugh. O'BRIEN: I don't think -- MORGAN: Which is it?
O'BRIEN: I don't think about -- I just try and think about what I would have liked and -- MORGAN: What you would personally find --
O'BRIEN: What I would personally find funny. I don't know how to do it the other way. You make slight adjustments over the years. You learn this kind of thing probably wouldn't work for these reasons. But to me, there's a very strong -- comedy and music are very close together. And that's why musicians are always fascinated with comedy and want to be comedians. And comedians want to be musicians. Myself included.
We just -- there's something about having an ear for it. And the people I really like have a comedy ear. They just -- they have a sense. They have a sixth sense about what might work. And they go with that rather than trying to extrapolate what's the audience really going to like. MORGAN: Your comedy took you to the chance to audition for the host of a new late-night show. Obviously the biggest break of your career. You debuted on the September 13th, 1993. You said, I was really, really happy. I thought I'd seized the moment. I'd put my very best put forward. O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: This is still the commencement speech.
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: And that was when the most respected of widely-read television critic.
O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: Tom Shales.
O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: Wrote in "The Washington Post," quote, "O'Brien is a living collage of annoying nervous habits." O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: "He giggles and jiggles about. He fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark and beady little eyes like a rabbit. He's one of the whitest white men ever. O'Brien is a switch on a guest who won't leave. He's the host who should never have come. And let the late show with Conan O'Brien became the late, late show and may the host return to whence he came." O'BRIEN: Yes. Yes.
MORGAN: And then you say, there's more but he gets kind of mean. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: Yes. Yes.
That was --
MORGAN: You get absolutely buried by the number one critic.
O'BRIEN: That was the nice part. That was the nice part, yes. And --
MORGAN: And when you read that, what did you feel?
O'BRIEN: I think a kind of weird elation? No. I'm -- (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: I always respond inappropriately. You know, at the time, it's devastating, you know, to -- who can read something like that and not be devastated? I've never thought about my eyes the same way again. They are rotten beady like --
MORGAN: They are quite beady like.
O'BRIEN: Thank you. I'm having them completely redone. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: They're going to be twice the size. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: It's a very rare operation you can get. And I'll talk about it later. But I remembered, you know, at the time there was an intense amount of criticism. You think about it, replacing David Letterman at the height of his abilities. And I always said I was sort of like the great -- the greatest -- one of the greatest baseball players ever, Ted Williams, departing the field --
MORGAN: You haven't got to tell me about replacing TV legends. O'BRIEN: Exactly, right. But like, you know, someone like Ted Williams leaving the field after a brilliant career and everybody going crazy and cheering and then them saying don't worry, his replacement's here, Chip Whitley. (LAUGHTER)
O'BRIEN: And a guy like me running out. Hi, Chip Whitley here. Don't worry about Ted Williams. I'm going to catch up real soon. And then, you know, striking out right away. You can imagine what the reaction would be. So I never in my heart had any -- really had any ill will towards people because I think -- if I could have -- if I had not been myself and had watched Conan O'Brien debut after David Letterman, I'd have been horrified as well. MORGAN: What you didn't know that day at Harvard, 2000, was of course you were going to land the holy grail of comedy. O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: "The Tonight Show." O'BRIEN: Right. MORGAN: And then you were going to have another down moment.
O'BRIEN: Oh, yes. And in a way, you know, I say I'm going to go on to have more, you know, bigger failures. I wrote that thinking, "not really." (LAUGHTER)
MORGAN: Let's take a break. Because I want to hang on the big --
O'BRIEN: Yes. MORGAN: The big moment. Whatever you want to call it.
O'BRIEN: Right. Right.
MORGAN: Let's find out what you really think after the break. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If you get hit by a softball?
O'BRIEN: Yes. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't get softball. It's soft ball but the ball is not soft at all. And if it hits you --
O'BRIEN: This is a "Seinfeld" routine. This is incredible. That was great. That was observational comedy. I'm going to get you in a comedy club tomorrow. You should do 10 minutes on this. It's really funny.
