Conan O’Brien is pissed.
Not now, of course; he’s fine now. He has his own talk show again, on outlying cable station TBS, and after some bumpy first months, he’s found his groove again. He’s free to trot out his familiar tics and shticks — The Rowboat, The Burlesque Dance, The Masturbating Bear — and tweak NBC and Jay Leno with virtual impunity every night. He’s even undertaking that pinnacle of talk show confidence — doing his show live from Chicago, New York and his hometown of Boston.
But watching Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, an on-the-road documentary of the TV host’s tour of America filmed shortly after being blasted out of the Tonight Show seat by NBC, you can’t help seeing O’Brien a little differently. Here, the red-haired comedian is bearded, barbed, wiry and wired. At times, he suggests what happens when you back a wild animal into a corner: it lashes out, it fights back.
The year is 2010, and Conan is in full beard mode, granting bitter interviews to 60 Minutes, among others. It seems NBC has not only given him the boot, they’ve legally embargoed him from performing on television, radio or the Internet for six months. A virtual gag order on being funny! Not one to take this lying down, the feisty Irishman announces his 44-city “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour.”
He figures he can channel some of this “steam energy” coming from this anger and take it on the road, bring it to the people. “You can go out there and talk to people,” he says. What starts as a little tour quickly turns into sold-out performances in big cities; suddenly the pressure is on Conan. And it shows.
The film offers unexpected glimpses into fame and its effects on celebrity. It’s not Truth or Dare, Madonna’s calculated self-documentary that rarely gave a fully candid depiction of the pop diva at her worst; here you see Conan turn into a bit of a megalomaniac at times, as he helms a live touring production. His self-deprecating shtick, so well-known to fans of the show, actually masks a tough-as-nails showbiz hide. At times he’s shown berating his staff, fans who greet him backstage, his female assistant (who seems very close, indeed, to Conan’s private moments) and even celebrities who drop by to wish him well, such as Jack MacBrayer, who plays the country doofus Kenneth on 30 Rock. In one scene, Conan is shown behind a piano backstage, improvising a song about MacBrayer’s rural roots. “I smell wet hay,” he jibes as MacBrayer enters the room. “What a rube!” he jeers. It comes across as mean-spirited, and you can see O’Brien growing more exhausted and punchy as the tour progresses.
“All I like doing is being in front of an audience,” O’Brien tells the filmmaker at one point. So, O’Brien is asked, do you think you can have fun without an audience?
Conan doesn’t answer.
One amusing exchange has Conan threatening to fire his female assistant, Sona, for ordering butter sauce with his grilled fish takeout delivery. “Sorry to have to let you go over this,” O’Brien says, while checking his phone messages. “I really don’t want to lose my job,” she half-pleads. “I think I can be good.” “Yeah, that’s what people who are going to lose their job say,” Conan fires back. It’s all a gag, of course, but there’s grain of truth in this glimpse into O’Brien’s fired-up ego.
As the tour wears on, hints of O’Brien’s anger spill over to his entourage. He airs his displeasure when asked to do a “meet and greet” with William Morris Agency execs and fans the afternoon before he is to perform live. “I’ll be doing a show for them before the show,” he mock-chuckles. “Blow out my voice.”
The anger, O’Brien admits, gets resurrected each night when he thinks about the NBC suits who once made his life a living hell. “It’s like a gallstone,” he says of his rancor. “It just has to work its way through my urethra and finally drop into the toilet.” Or like Prometheus, getting his liver chewed up each day, and having it grow back.
Oddly, only a small portion of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop documents his live road show. But this is good; it saves the polished performances — Conan strapping on his beloved guitar and twanging out On the Road Again, dancing with his female back-up singers, Vegas-style, or jamming with Eddie Vedder and Jack White — for the big finale. It validates the earlier rehearsal footage, which often comes off as lame in its germinating stages (though O’Brien himself is often spontaneously funny, even while being acerbic). Clearly, O’Brien was born to be up on a stage, clowning around.
The movie ends with a title card announcing his new show has been picked up by TBS, and so there’s a happy ending. And what do we learn from all this? First, that performers, particularly those on the knife’s edge of comedy, are always much more complex than their TV screen personas might seem. And secondly: nobody puts Conan O’Brien in the corner.