THE "NEE-HA!" CONAN O’BRIEN INTERVIEW:
17 FEBRUARY 1999

PART 1 - PART 2 - PART 3

CONAN: I’m not crazy about that. I think probably, I bought an expensive guitar. A 1950’s, it’s called a Gretch 6120, and you know the guitar that Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats plays? A big orange guitar, it’s kind of a famous type of guitar. I bought one of those and it wasn’t cheap, but I just felt like you gotta live a little. Probably just pure indulgence other than like my rent and my apartment.

CONAN: Well I guess it’s gotta be with my current girlfriend or else I’m in a lotta trouble. I think probably…we took a trip where we went to Ireland and then Italy. And it was probably in Italy. Italy is just a really romantic place you know. I’m Irish-Catholic so I’m not very good about talking about my romantic moments. I’m too uptight. You know how my people are we never discuss these things, but, probably just being in Italy and having too much to drink. [laughs] That’s when I’m at my most romantic.

CONAN: I think saying that I’ll do this show with no experience. Don’t you think that qualifies as pretty outrageous?

CONAN: That’s a tricky one, it’s hard to have just one best day… The day I saw "ET" for the first time.

CONAN: Never being able to see "ET" again.

CONAN: "ET"… How long can I get away with this?

CONAN: If I could change one thing about myself it would be that I worry too much. I’m a worrier. I get too self-critical and like "you better do a good job and hope this is a good show today". I think sometimes I’d have more fun in life if I didn’t. I struggle with it because part of my personality actually helps. I worry and so I work extra hard on the show, and I worry and I really prepare… And I think it helps make the show funny, but sometimes it just gets in the way, and it means I don’t have as much fun as I could have.

CONAN: People come up to me in the street and go "Hey it’s CoNan the Barbarian"…

CONAN: Yeah they still do it occasionally and you really want to say "Did you *just* come up with that?"

CONAN: Oh, I’m paying them respect. I must bow to Andy. I must bow to Max. That’s my way of showing respect. And it also loosens my lower back.

CONAN: Tomorry! I bet Tomorry comes back at some point. It’s just that we do things for a while and then we feel like "ok we did that enough let’s move on" You know, and that’s how we found the Shirtless Moron and PimpBot. You gotta keep moving, the show is like a shark, if it ever stops moving it dies.

CONAN: A bunch. I love Robot On The Toilet, I love Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, I love it when Don King comes on in the Clutch Cargo… but I’m just scratching the surface, there’s so many that I really like. Oh, I love Andy’s little sister, that’s one of my favorites.

CONAN: [laughs] I like it! It’s very flattering. I like that my fans wear giant retainers over their teeth.

I like doing the song improv... where I pick up the guitar... There are a lot of sketches that I really like. I used to love the sketches with Oldy in them and I was sad that he passed away coz I really loved the sketches with him. I love some of the Satellite TVs, you know, like Clive Clemmons, or the Bill Reilly Jim & Choke Channel. I like it when we use puppets. I love some of the things we do where puppets catch fire and things like that. Just love anything with puppets getting hurt.

CONAN: I think I have a pretty good sense.. I don’t want to really hurt people, I’m too thin-skinned myself to do that. I don’t really wanna hurt people’s feelings. But if something’s really funny, I just feel like it has to be put on the air somehow. I don’t think I’d ever stop something really funny from going on the air. You can just tell when something’s really funny.

CONAN: No, it really wasn’t because you can’t stand in the way of something like that. If the same thing like, say Andy got a part in a movie or something and he was going to have to be gone for a month, if he came to me and said "I’d really like to do this movie" I’m not gonna say "no you can’t", as long as they come back I think people should be allowed to do their side things. It’s healthier and it makes people feel happier about working here…

CONAN: We did once. No, it was Al Kooper, Jimmy played with him, but it was Al Kooper playing one of his songs off of his album. But yeah I think we could have the ReKooperators on. We could do that.

CONAN: That was reeeeeally great. That was one of the happiest times here at the show. The minute it was over I got really depressed.

CONAN: Yeah! Because I felt like "Oh boy what do we do now?" But I really was happy with how it came out. I really loved doing the show in the Saturday Night Live studio. That was so much fun. I just felt really great about it. I was happy when the show came out, couldn’t believe the fan response. It was really nice, I was thrilled.

CONAN: Oh it was fun. At the end I had to sing the Sesame Street Song with the puppets – that was the hard part. Coz you just keep thinking "what am I doing? What’s happened to me?" When you walk onto that set, it’s oh my God, I grew up looking at this street and here I am, I’m on it. **This show is scheduled to air on May 11**

CONAN: Probably Oscar The Grouch, because he’s so mean and I was always intrigued that they had the guts to put a really mean puppet on a kids show. He used to scare me when I was a kid.

CONAN: Oh I love Canada! Most of my favorite comedy comes from Canada. SCTV was a show that was on in the late ‘70’s early ‘80’s and it was the funniest, when I was growing up and coming of age that was my favorite TV show. And the Kids In The Hall. So many hysterical people come from Canada. One of the reasons I’ve always really liked Canada is that when my show first began people in the States… Americans, because they thought "who is this guy? – he’s no Letterman" they were really mean about the show and they weren’t very nice about it, but Canadians, from the very beginning, were very nice about the show. They appreciated the odd comedy and they were actually paying attention to the comedy that we were doing and they weren’t judging it negatively. In the beginning, in the early months of the show, you’d sometimes see really enthusiastic people in the crowd and invariably they were from Toronto. I’ve always really appreciated Canada, in a lotta ways they’re ahead of us in comedy. We’re playing catchup.

CONAN: Um.. I think just thinking of a new name for "The Year 2000". That’s what I’m going to do that night. Stay up really late with a couple of writers and we’ll think of another name for it.

CONAN: Yeah well I got a little misty eyed when I saw "Life Is Beautiful" the Roberto Benigni movie. Oh "Muriel’s Wedding" when the mother commits suicide in "Muriel’s Wedding" that really bothered me. I got really upset when that happened.

CONAN: I have feetie pyjamas, you know the pyjamas with the little feet on them that children wear? I have a pair of those, it has all the "Star Wars" characters on it. They’re very comfortable.

CONAN: [laughs] No I didn’t because my Dad, coz he works with germs and everything, so he was strict about us not playing. But also it smelled bad at his lab. Labs smell bad they just smell like chemicals and I just hated being in there.

CONAN: I hope so it’s just very expensive and the network tends to give a lot of the money to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I think we’re going to get to travel sometime this year though. I bet you in ’99 we get to go somewhere. Whether it’s somewhere really fun or somewhere really cheap I don’t know, but we’ll get to travel.

CONAN: As long as we took it on the road it could be fun. I used to say we should take the show someplace really odd, we should take it to Greenland or something that no one else would do, but the network probably wouldn’t give us the money to do that. Maybe we’ll get to do a week in Los Angeles or something like that, or a week in some other American city. I’d like to do a week in Cuba. And in the end film me and Andy being arrested by U.S. Customs people. But I don’t know if that’ll happen.

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