The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [36]
When a writers’ strike hit the TV business early in 1988, shutting down production on SNL, Smigel and another staff member, Bob Odenkirk, decided to try creating a stage show of sketches too outrageous (they thought) to ever make it onto television. They had witnessed some of O’Brien’s wilder moments in the writers’ room and perceived someone like themselves: a performer caged inside a writer and not so quietly thrashing in the effort to get out.
Smigel and Odenkirk, who had made their first comedy bones at the Players Workshop in Chicago, asked Conan to join them in a show they were putting together that they would mount in Chicago that summer. It sounded to him like a fantastic adventure, and Conan jumped on board.
The income from this exercise figured to be so minuscule that Conan asked his new partners if they knew of some way he could save on housing expenses. Odenkirk, as it happened, had a friend with an apartment that might have an empty room, and a call secured the space. Jeff Garlin, then twenty-six and himself just trying to break in as a stand-up, had rented a place in his native Chicago within steps of the home of his favorite team, the Cubs. All he had to offer was a tiny room with no window and barely big enough to squeeze in the futon Conan was going to use as a bed. O’Brien took one look and concluded, “Not even by prison camp standards is that a room.” But it was cheap, and he didn’t expect to spend a lot of time there anyway.
Most of his time was going to be consumed first with putting together and then with staging the review, which they had decided to call “The Happy Happy Good Show.” They rented out the Victory Gardens Theater on North Lincoln Avenue and got ready to rock and roll.
Conan had written a few sketches with Daniels. In one he played a character called “Kennedy Baby” and simply rolled on the ground in a diaper, saying “a dep, a dep, dep,” and other gibberish in a Kennedy accent. For another character, “Spoon Eye,” he came out holding a spoon over his right eye and in supercilious fashion would ask for questions from the audience. Whatever anyone asked of Spoon Eye, from politics to the weather, the answer would always contain the word “spoon.”
The biggest hit of the “Happy Happy Good Show”—and there weren’t many, because even the performers thought the show was only erratically funny—was a sketch Smigel had created called “Chicago Superfans.” Later a legendary SNL sketch, it featured a mustachioed character named Bill Swerski and his deeply Ch-caeh-go-accented mates celebrating coach Mike Ditka and “Da Bearss” with copious quaffs of lager and mounds of Polish sausage.
That summer of 1988 in Chicago was torrid at record-setting levels. Conan’s little windowless cell had no air-conditioning. He would return from the theater and enter the hot box like Colonel Nicholson getting into the corrugated torture oven next to the River Kwai. He would collapse onto his now permanently sweat-soaked futon, but not before he and Garlin spent some quality time together deconstructing their lives and careers, with Conan frequently setting off on one of his unfettered comedy rolls. Garlin would sometimes wake O’Brien in the middle of the night because he wanted to hear again something that Conan had said that destroyed him earlier in the evening.
But nothing killed Garlin quite like one regular bit he and Conan cooked up that sweltering summer. Joan Rivers had just flamed out in her effort to start up a late-night show for Fox, and the talk in the comedy business was about possible replacement shows and all the different names people were kicking around as candidates. Without any kind of forethought, sitting around the apartment, O’Brien and Garlin fell into a byplay that quickly took the shape of a new talk-show entry, one they called, for no apparent reason, “Wild Blue Yonder.”
Conan played the host—but not as himself. Instead he pulled up his deadly impression of the onetime Star Trek actor George Takei. In this conceit, Takei had somehow landed the new Fox