As many other things in the 30s, TV had migrated to America from Europe. And it blew up. Not right away, but after the last soldier came back home, the TV machine was underway. Debuting in 1950, Broadway Open House made millions of Americans fall in love with sketches and short interviews. Exactly 13 years later, some Conan O’Brien guy was born, and some 43 years later, while he was an unknown comedy writer, he got hired as a TV host for a Late Night Show.  

This piece highlights five episodes of Late Night with Conan O’Brien that aired before 90 percent of the readers were even born. Partly owing to anemoia, partly to a thriving interest in the past of the American TV scene, we try to introduce what it was like in the 90s and early 2000s to sit in front of the TV at 12:37 AM ET on weeknights. The order here presented tries to follow the smoothest path to be introduced to the genre of 90s humor without too much damage to a modern human.  

1. October 10, 1996 

Samuel L. Jackson and some wild animals are a great start to being introduced to the world of Conan. Earlier that same morning, a fire alarm forced everyone to evacuate the studios. The program is taped at around 5:30 PM as an hour-long, uninterrupted show, then it is sent to the montage room where everything gets perfected, and then it’s aired. So technically, it is possible to tape the show practically anywhere. Moreover, putting a rerun isn’t something mind-blowing and quite possible as an option. But Late Night with Conan O’Brien left us something different. A few hours late, after dark, they taped the show outside the studio building on the streets of New York City. What could have been a rerun turned out to be an example of why some TV shows run for decades and others not. We have Samuel L. Jackson telling a story about the New York subway while sitting in a massage chair, a bird that is not among the smartest eating meat, and raw gold pouring over our eyes.  

2. March 10, 2006 

An unusual episode with a rich backstory. It’s 2006 and Conan decided to insult every nation in the world in alphabetical order. Before he got to the letter F, thousands of postcards arrived to defend Finland. He insulted it even faster. A thousand more arrived, this time with threats. Conan apologized. As he did so, he used his similarity to the re-elected President of Finland, Tarja Halonen. He created a campaign in support of himself/the President and when she really won, the holy connection to Finland was established. This episode is entirely shot in Finland. O’Brien visits his fellow fans deciding their destiny, attends a few Finnish TV shows, and meets the President herself. It has the feel of both a travel show and a talk show, stitched together with quick-hit interviews. It constantly changes the points of attention and brings new flavors of humor and experience. Taking the show outside the studio peels back the curtain — you’re not just watching TV, you’re watching TV get made. 

3. June 23, 1995

An episode that shows that stepping out of one’s comfort zone isn’t always forced by the circumstances, but sometimes it is a voluntary creativity search. The Show embarks on a boat and goes floating in the Hudson River. It was taped a bit earlier to take advantage of daylight, so it reveals a few production secrets. Also, the crew could be seen at the beginning as for much tighter space on a deck. A stunning view and a fresh look withstand time challenge and could be just enjoyed by us nowadays as it was on the summer night of 1995. And for our enjoyment, poor writers were forced to compose marine jokes all day while the camera crew rented a chopper — because drones didn’t exist yet — to shoot a flyby. And this is what brings us closer to their work, something that we don’t always feel at the cinema, but here we get the straight connection to the work done by a group of people doing what they wanted.  

4. September 13, 1993 

To fully understand a show, one should watch it. So, this list must include a ‘normal’ episode, where the writers were not so stressed about the whole thing going down and the production team had time and space to prepare everything. The very first episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien didn’t go smoothly. In fact, it really wasn’t even good. You don’t need to be a scholar of humor or TV to feel that it is not just the time that separates our humor from theirs, it’s also quality and delivery. But I am going to state an awfully obvious thing: to get somewhere, you need to start walking. Bear with me, when you see that episode, you can feel something, even behind the curtain of mundanity as you could almost see the Conan we know. I am convinced that it is not a nostalgic look back with the knowledge of the present; conversely, we could see the start of the journey, a rough and difficult one, but it led us to the humor perception we have now. Give it a shot and watch this episode in its entirety, and while at it, revisit Jimmy Fallon’s first episode from 2009. Together, they serve as a reminder that sometimes all it takes is to start. 

Humor and our lives in general keep pacing faster and faster. SNL sketches from the past feel slow, the best late-night TV program that made thousands of people fall in love with Conan feels sometimes slow and misfiring. But everything changes and adapts to new interpretations. All art. This deep dive could give a glimpse of what it is like to get older and stop understanding the youth or the other way around, to get the oldies. It’s a unique piece of TV — and now Internet — history that you can find on archive.org or simply YouTube. Or buy a tape.  

Viktor Smolkin

Fonts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien
https://www.youtube.com/@conanobrien