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At least this many.
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How many more of these can I fit in here?
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LATER…
11 pm-ish:
That was an educational experience. I don’t know if it was worth $60 in train fare, 10 hours of time and reaffirm-ment of my own insignificance, but the whole point of education is to learn things you did not previously know.
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Anybody coming to this site for the first time should strongly consider not trying to read this entry.
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Unless something goes wrong (and it has every right to) I will be visiting the Late Night With Conan O’Brien program during one of its final exhibitions on Wednesday. I applied for tickets, not expecting to even be acknowledged, and so did not consider the various factors that would keep me from enjoying a multi-hour event in an environment I cannot intermittently excuse myself from and where somebody will check my belongings before I go in.
(Alas, this is a long one.)
On the popular website latenightunderground.com, my dissing of which I thought reason enough to not give me tickets, viewers were invited to report their favorite memories of the program during its tenure so that compilation packages may better reflect the interests of a few hundred impulsive quackoos on the internet who happen to watch the show among purportedly millions of others. You will be amazed at how long I can complain about such a thing.
It worried me how many people were saying “RING SPIN! CONAN ON ZIPLINE! HORNY MANATEE!” in response. Especially worrisome, as the alternative this person cited in “the Repeater” refers to a character which does not exist or has been misremembered, and therefore has no chance of edging out less desirable potential “highlights.”
Despite our squabbles, (warning: that’s longer than this is) I still love Conan, but I don’t want to be watching tapes of writer strike and/or viewer submission filler on new shows (what the caps-lock part refers to), especially not from within the room where it happened, where by the very nature of its unscriptedness, meaning there’s less stuff to memorize and/or do, I should at the absolute worst have to watch it again live in the studio. “Ring spin” is the absolute worst bit the show has ever done, on account of its monotony on just a single occasion and the fact that it was seen on far more than a single occasion. Conan placed, on his desk, his marriage ring, set it spinning, then watched it until it fell. If he was of the opinion the ring had not spun for long enough he would spin it again. And I watched it all! And then I wrote about it! Can you imagine how this makes me feel?
That’s good. I’m glad you’re paying attention, because there’s still 7kb of text left. Another request that shows up far too often is “Walker Texas Ranger Lever,” a bit in which Conan would move a switch which would signal the director to cut to a particularly violent or stupid clip from the program Walker Texas Ranger. Even though these clips are specifically selected for the purpose and frequently very amusing, once again it is not the work of the show’s writers and not the thing I showed up to see clips from, if indeed I showed up to see clips. I wouldn’t ever say to someone
This person couldn’t even remember it was Walker: Texas Ranger, heshe only remembers Chuck Norris, who becomes less worth remembering every time his name is typed on the internet.
Conan’s mock feud with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert was probably one of the better writer strike segments, but it only because it was such a blatant moral violation of the Writers’ Guild strike conditions designed to prevent good material from appearing. until they can no longer afford $70+ monthly charges! Ha ha, ho ho! Lemme at them recessions!
I suppose it’s not entirely surprising a majority of the requests are for stuff less than two years old; logically, anybody who stopped watching at any point before now would not have seen the request for input. Yet I’m still typing stuff, for my unwriter is currently on strike.
Late Night w/ Conan has something like 2500 broadcasts going back 16 years to reharvest material from, devised and performed by, and I so hate to say it, a consistently enema nominated staff of writers, and I don’t need my time wasted with already inherently repetitious stuff from a relatively recent, relatively brief period none of them were involved with. I did dabble for a bit in CBS’ Late x2 Show with Craig Ferguson, but I had to give it up because it was just too much Craig goofing off without a script. The actual scripts were lousy and, making frequent reference to the improvised bits, therefore lazy as well. Some of Mr. Ferguson’s tangents were brilliant and potentially hilarious, but by no means where they all and I don’t need that every night, besides. Imagine if I updated this site every day. That would not be good.
I also too frequently encounter orders for “Harland Williams interviews,” which are more of the same stuff. Just some guy in a chair saying random things. Occasionally funny, usually annoying. I will give that I absolutely hated him before he talked to Conan, when I associated him with nth tier straight-to-video Disney movies and myserious phantom Animal Planet Game Shows,
but if I was in the mood for barely tolerable I could watch Jimmy Kimmel watch people dressed as superheroes watch youtube and go to my mattress a half hour earlier. Actually sooner, because the last twenty minutes of Kimmel’s show is commercial breaks and bad musical guests.
“Fagerstrom” refers to yet one more script-free moment, when Conan, while in Finland, encountered a mailbox or something that said “Fagerstrom” on it and he lost his mind laughing at it.
I question the accuracy of Conan’s “faggerstrum” pronounciation but don’t know enough to state with certainty I consider it inaccurate. What’s important is that anybody with access to a telephone book and a guess at the spellings of derogatory or rude words can probably recreate an experience just as good or better without having to write out a plea and wait until 12:30 am on an unspecified date. As far as Quakers go, though I would like to get my weekly fix of frilly coats, big hats and buckled shoes as soon as possible, I am fairly certain random-capitalization anthony intended to type “Quackers,” the name of a duck that Conan brought into the studio just because he thought the duck was fun to look at. No. No ducks.
Ducks are like seriously mispelled dopes. Even their names are misspelled. dopes at least have the decency to not be legally entitled to names.
Again with the zipline: Conan has some odd apparratus installed in the studio and asks viewers to suggest what he should do with it. As you might guess I spent entirely too much time devising suggestions which nothing came of, and was quite unable to enjoy what happened instead. This one especially hurt, as the person who drew Conan kicking John Wilkes Booth was obviously more in tune with Conan’s way of thinking, and more importantly a better artist than I was. How am I supposed to be better than everyone at all times if I can’t even be better than everyone on single occasions? Fortunately, by virtue of being a single gag that took fifteen minutes to execute, I can pretend that’s why I don’t want to see this one again.
The only legacy sketch I detected much of a yearning for was If They Mated, that which Conan has referred, on air and in magazine interviews I read back in 1997 as “the writers’ favorite bit.” It being so because it only involves the graphic department visually merging the heads of public figures and getting as horrifying a result as possible, and then showing that on TV. This was not done during the strike, which suggests the writers do have some involvement in it, even if only to say “make the forehead bigger” or “no no, use his eyes, they are much creepier.”
But all in all I am optimistic about the coming day’s events. Even though it will take over two hours travel each way and then I have to wait an hour at the building if my reservation is validated, and then AHHHRRRHHHHHHHHH I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY A LARGE BIRD
Mxy sez:
I’ve been saying ‘dude’ for years in the hope that robot ninjas show up and fight me. The as of yet unused nunchucks have left permanent marks on the side of my waist.
This show started airing in South America like six months ago. In the beginning I missed a lot episodes because every time I saw the same gag I assumed it was a repeat. I’ve grown wiser.
It airs with some delay (on top of the 16 years): the episode that ended 27 minutes ago was set during the week before the latest Super Bowl. Whenever that is. Anyway, that means there are still several episodes left before the show ends, which is good because I’m not sure if they’ll air that other show Conan is supposed to be taking over.
Alicia sez:
You have to watch Craig on more than one night to get the gest of his comic genuis. Yes, he is off on some nights but honestly is Jay, Conan, Dave and the rest red hot where your rolling on the floor peeing your pants because your laughing that much everynight? I doubt it. Besides Craig is the “only” late night host out there on his own everyone else has a band and a sidekick or two so cut the man some slack he’s a one man show. For me Craig makes me laugh everynight not all gut busters but most anyone can read a joke or two it’s takes a star to get you to laugh about almost nothing. Love craig and he’s nice eye candy too. Keep us laughing our sexy cheeky monkey, Craig.
Fleeplezeep sez:
Frupwuftch. I wasn’t expecting anyone to actually read that, much less say something to it. I will address you two later when that becomes feasible.
Fleeplezeep sez:
Howdy.
Mxy: they do re-use a lot of setups and props. I don’t even know if I would find it all that interesting if I hadn’t been with it for so long. There’s almost certainly better, more consistent stuff on at that hour somewhere. There’s surely as many hours of good Conan material available free on the internet as there are total broadcasts remaining, good with bad, so certainly don’t go out of your way to watch them, with the hope that suddenly you will see what I see in them, because it may not really be there.
Alicia: I hated Conan when I first found out about him. He made me mad. I try to not dismiss people immediately, but it is hard to resist the urge.
As far as Mr. Ferguson is concerned, for rather a few months I saw the full second half of his program (the cbs affiliate here airs Extra! after the normal Letterman Late Show), and then more recently I took in the full program while Conan was in a re-run phase or interviewing people I had an especial lack of interest in. It was only during this period that I experienced Ferguson overload. Merely an example: One night he suddenly started talking about Murder She Wrote for no reason and it was great and then after that the [late late] show began and kept doing Murder She Wrote themed sketches which at best rehashed the improvised non-sketch remarks and at worst went nowhere. I have to assume the JK Rowling sketches came about the same way. Maybe they didn’t, but the result was the same.
It may be inferred by some of my remarks that I have overloaded on Conan as well. It may merely be that I am sick of desk chat type programs, which I will have no problem with once I accept it.
I don’t really want a one man show, and if I wasn’t sure before, Conan without his legion of idiotic characters during the WGA strike helped me realize that. I will agree that a band does not add much, and can be outright oppressive if you’re in the same room with one, but it’s always good to have another person present to work off of if you’re just making it up as you go along. Craig’s e-mails are sort of like a surrogate side-kick person, except then I feel like I have to get him to read mine, which he won’t, so I’d keep writing them, to nobody, and I never take that sort of thing well.
Mxy sez:
Well, I enjoy it. It’s a good show to have on while doing nothing on the laptop at that hour. Sometimes I even stop doing nothing and pay full attention to it. And they even invite bands I like from time to time!
Maybe the old episodes avaliable online are even better, but I still can’t get used to that whole “watcing TV on the computer” madness. And downloading episodes of a talk show to then play them on a TV screen through a DVD would feel unnatural and a little insane. If someone told me they do that I’d stop going to their house.
A "perv" sez:
I once stumbled upon a picture of Craig Ferguson up on stage dancing with the Wiggles, of whom he had apparently become an honorary member. It is not impossible that this event resulted in his performing the Numbers Rumba, possibly for the duration of an entire day.
It is further worth noting that I can just as easily imagine Conan doing the same were he afforded a similar opportunity.
Fleeplezeep sez:
Mxy:
You’re probably right. It seems to be my own instinctual inclination to have the exact same reaction to someone who I share an interest with as somebody who likes another thing better and says so. Negativity and insincerity are all I know.
I don’t think you’re legally allowed to watch the clips on the oppressive nbc website from outside the country anyhow. Although the various youtubish clips, to which I meant to refer, are totally illegal, and I am not even allowed to watch, so that matter may not be worth mentioning at all (but I did).
“perv:”
I remember seeing Ferguson with some Wiggles. Nobody mentioned any rumbas, much less one involving numbers, thankfully.
I certainly would never put similar affiliations past O’Brien, though he’s more into Appalachian music.
bimshwel.com sez:
Bimshwel.. May I repost it? :)