He is a funny person though sometimes I find I’m not in the mood for his style of humour. I’m not particularly fond of his string dance. He can be irritating sometimes, with his cackling laughter and just plain irritating-ness (but that can probably be said of most boys).
But I like his impeccable comic timing. His pauses, and the way he uses awkward glances. And I find myself strangely unable to tear my eyes away from his orange and gravity-defying structure that is his hair. I’m also awed at how freakishly tall he is, especially when he stands to greet his guests and they barely come up to his shoulder. (At that height, with that hair, I half expect him to be standing in the North Seas generating electricity from wind.)
And he wrote that commencement speech to the Harvard Class in 2000. For a long time I wondered if it was really by him, but I never should have doubted. I mean, if it’s on the Internet, of course it’s real. That speech that I read when I was still new to writing, and that I still read once in a while, just for fun. Not because it’s by-now famous, or well written, but also because it’s truth well told.
(If you need to ask what speech, *roll eyes*, it’s this one. And in case you’re a still sceptic, I’ll save you a trip to snopes; here’s a video of him giving that speech.)
Two words: The Simpsons.
I guess I have to give it to the man. Part demi-god he may be, but he’s also human after all.
We all have days when we’re just flying, and we have the other days. We have days when we’re all in the zone, and days when we couldn’t write something worthy of a cubicle wall at a greasy truck stop. (Or at least I do.) We just hope for more of the former and as little of the latter as possible.
So, when Conan is funny, he’s funny. And witty. And sharp. And smart. And I like those times. Take a look inside the man’s mind (before the aliens come and take it away for dissection).
This is Conan O’Brien on Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.
Another one for the Moments-of-Truth book is the part where Conan talks about what he does (and how it defies rational thought):
“When something’s your job, it’s your job. And they call it that for a reason. When it’s going well, I’d do it for free. When it’s not going well, I would rather do anything else. Because it’s painful. Half my career has been pain management.”
