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Ted Cox -- Chicago Daily Herald -- Tuesday, May 09, 2006 -- Section: Suburban Living When Conan O'Brien brings his NBC "Late Night" talk show to Chicago this week, starting at 11:35 p.m. today on WMAQ Channel 5, it will be a homecoming of sorts - not just for the show, which was here in 1989 with original host David Letterman, but for O'Brien himself. O'Brien too was here in the '80s, when he was a young comedy writer trying to make the transition to performer. "I can't say I got my start in show business there," O'Brien said last week on the phone from New York City while preparing to take "Late Night" on the road, "but Chicago is where the nickel dropped for me." O'Brien joined the writing staff of "Saturday Night Live" early in 1988 and struck up a friendship with Robert Smigel, who would later be key to "Late Night's" success as a writer, as well as the lips behind the "Clutch Cargo" interviews and, of course, the puppeteer behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. "Robert and I just started riffing ideas off each other right away," O'Brien recalled. "We were like two separated twins that spoke the same language." Yet the Hollywood writers' strike that summer deprived them of their livelihood, so Smigel recruited O'Brien and Bob Odenkirk to join him in Chicago to put together the "Happy Happy Good Show." "I think he could tell I was a frustrated performer," O'Brien said. It was a collection of sketches originally considered too outre for "SNL" - even though it included later "SNL" and "Late Night" staples like "Da Superfans" and "In the Year 2000." Although legendary now, "the show wasn't terribly well-received," O'Brien said. "It wasn't a big success. And I was living in an apartment without air conditioning." In fact, he was rooming with Chicago comedian Jeff Garlin, who would later become famous as Larry David's sidekick in "Curb Your Enthusiasm," in a Wrigleyville place formerly rented by Dan Castellaneta, soon to be famous as the voice of Homer Simpson. Yet they seemed far removed from future stardom. "You're doing this show," O'Brien recalled, "and it's in a small theater, and you're not always filling it, you're probably losing money on this, you're getting mixed reviews, you're not sleeping at night because you're sweating so much, they're putting the lights in at Wrigley Field so you can hear helicopters all the time. And yet that summer was when I realized I'd rather be up in front of a crowd making no money than be writing and making a really good living." That's the key transition in O'Brien's metamorphosis into the popular host of "Late Night" - and the heir to Jay Leno at "The Tonight Show," where he'll move up to take over the top slot in TV talk in three years. Because there are any number of late-night talk-show hosts who have been erudite interviewers with witty repartee, like Jack Paar or Dick Cavett. And O'Brien proved himself as a comedy writer at the Harvard Lampoon, "SNL" and "The Simpsons" long before he took over "Late Night" with Letterman's move to CBS' "Late Show" in '93. What makes him exceptional, however, is his ability, developed over the years, to be funny in every moment, in everything he does - above all, his skill as a physical comedian - to the point where O'Brien has attained a state of comic grace. While O'Brien had done improv before in Los Angeles with the Groundlings, that unique brand of comedy first flowered in Chicago in the "Happy Happy Good Show." That's why O'Brien made sure to return to the Victory Gardens Theater on Lincoln Avenue where the "Happy, Happy Good Show" was performed (and the fondly remembered Potbelly's sandwich shop across the street) when he first came to town last month to shoot remotes for this week. Still, it's not as if O'Brien's humor as a host sprung fully formed from the head of Lorne Michaels with his debut on "Late Night." Rather, it developed over the years, as O'Brien gained confidence and a certain comfort level. "It's not about becoming funny," he said, "it's about learning to be funny the way you were always funny - in a very unnatural situation. "When I auditioned for the show, I was such a long shot, I didn't get that worked up about it," he added, calling it "a lark." "I was just goofing around, and I think that came out and that's how I got the job," he said. "Once they gave me the job, all the blood drained out of me and I thought, 'Oh my God.'" Little by little, though, he won over doubters. "All my life, I was never the guy who showed up on the first day of school, jumped up on my desk and made everybody laugh," he said. "I was the kid who, by the end of the year, everybody said, 'Yeah, Conan's the funny guy.' But I did it my way, and in a way I had to do that on a national scale. "If I had called my producer in here in '96 and said, 'I'm going to come out and I'm going to jump on my monologue mark and I'm going to spin around, then I'm going to pull on invisible strings on my hips, cut them both, then I'm going to row a canoe and hiss at the camera and start leaping around, and that's my plan,' I think he would have thrown me out the window." Yet that's what he's done, night in night out, and he's made it seem natural - and naturally funny. Combined with the one-liners supplied by his crack writing staff and his witty ad-libs as an interviewer and the contributions of Smigel and, in the early years, sidekick Andy Richter, another Chicago product, his brand of comedy has made "Late Night" the best of the late-night talk shows. "What's in you will come out," O'Brien said. "And that's the good thing about Conan O'Brien and the bad thing about Conan O'Brien. We're finally at the stage where you're seeing the Conan O'Brien who was doing a pretend talk show into a mirror when he was 12." Now he brings it all back home in this week's series of shows at the Chicago Theatre. "There's so much Chicago in the genetic code of our late-night show, with the writers and improvisers we've worked with over the years," O'Brien said. "There's a reason a lot of improvisation began in Chicago. Chicago people aren't tough. They'll give you the benefit of the doubt. ... The soil is nurturing." For instance, as one of the remote gags he taped in advance on a visit to town last month, he started playing blues on a Halsted street corner, complete with a little hat for tips, and a crowd gathered. "They're not crossing their arms and trying to be snarky," O'Brien said, "they're going with it. They immediately get the spirit of it and they help support the silly thing you're doing." Then, on his birthday, April 18, he was walking with friends to Twin Anchors, the popular Old Town rib joint not far from Second City, when a city bus stopped alongside him. "Conan!" yelled the driver and urged him to get onboard. "Conan!" yelled all the passengers as he stepped in. "And I'm saying, 'We'll see you in a week and a half, and they're going, 'OK!' And that's not going to happen in New York," O'Brien added. "There's a warmth that I think is special to Chicago." That warmth nurtured his own brand of humor and put him on the path to being the wittiest, the funniest and, yes, the best of the late-night talk-show hosts. "It was important to me to take the 'Late Night' show to Chicago," O'Brien said, "and hopefully someday with 'The Tonight Show' I can come back." |