The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [88]
The exchanges with Carson may have been fleeting, but they were enough to validate for Conan the emotion he felt for Johnny and the show that had made him famous. O’Brien took to calling The Tonight Show “sacred ground.”
In many of his private moments, Conan felt the surge of adrenalin—he was getting The Tonight Show, Johnny’s show. How exciting was this? And eager as he was to get it, he continued to have flashes of doubt: This is about me? And I’m that kid from that elementary school whose pants don’t fit? And do they know that I had acne as a teenager? Do they know that I don’t always know exactly what I’m doing?
Those moments, which had come in abundance in his early days of Late Night, were much more sporadic now. Still, he recognized that ever proximate condition: the imposter syndrome—the thought that, no matter how successful you became, “they’re about to catch up to you.” Conan encountered it with some frequency, but was comforted by knowing the syndrome affected everyone in show business, as he became aware one night when the comic Chris Rock visited Late Night as a guest. At the time Rock mania had gripped the land, and Chris was being celebrated everywhere as the comic genius of a generation.
On the show Rock sat down next to Conan and within seconds had the crowd by the throat, wringing gales of laughter out of them with just the slightest effort. Conan felt blown back by the power Rock commanded over the audience, shooting out one explosive line after another. It seemed to Conan that everything around Rock had turned liquid, the air around him was so blazing hot.
Then the commercial break arrived, and Conan leaned over to tell Rock, “Man, that was fantastic!” And Rock stretched close to Conan’s ear and said, “I just hope they don’t catch on.”
To outsiders Conan mostly kept his guard up in revealing any cracks in his confidence about the coming change in his professional life. But sometimes the lingering insecurity seeped out unexpectedly, as in a moment after he performed for advertisers at NBC’s infront presentation in the spring of 2008. While chatting with a small group that included Lorne Michaels and Tina Fey, celebrating the renewal of their 30 Rock sitcom, OʹBrien got a sudden faraway look in his eye. He pulled aside one of the group, someone Conan had known since his first year at NBC.
“Can I ask you something?” Conan leaned in to whisper. “Will you root for me?”
Those shaky moments hardly dominated Conan’s days and nights, though, for he had far too much to do and think about. Beyond daily preparation for the Late Night show, Conan and his staff, led by head writer Mike Sweeney, had begun noodling, even a year in advance, with ideas for the coming Tonight Show. They sorted out what bits they might retain (definitely “Conando,” the wildly exaggerated takeoff on a Spanish-language telenovela, with Conan in pencil mustache) and what they might have to abandon (“the Masturbating Bear,” “Vomiting Kermit”).
Already Sweeney had beefed up the writing staff with a few additional monologue specialists. They knew The Tonight Show would demand a longer monologue than Conan had ever performed on Late Night. There he had mostly followed Letterman’s precedent from his days on that show and tossed out just four or five gags before moving on to the more creative comedy.
But over the course of this last year, the monologue began to creep up to eight to ten jokes a night. That did not begin to approach Jay, who often hit the thirty-five mark, but Conan was stretching, a concession to the need for a substantial top-of-the-show joke barrage at 11:35. The additional jokes tested the limit of Conan’s stand-up technique, which he had never really needed to perfect before, since it wasn’t his signature thing. Now he had to work on