Conan O’Brien’s final episode as the host of “The Tonight Show” aired last Friday, and damn it, I’m feeling a little sad over it.
I know — pop culture isn’t really my beat. And I know it’s foolish to get too emotional over the career troubles of a well-regarded talk show host who made more money in the seven months he hosted “The Tonight Show” than I likely will in a lifetime.
Conan himself made it clear in his Jan. 12 statement rejecting NBC’s plan to push his show to 12:05 a.m. that “no one should waste a second feeling sorry” for him, especially “in a world with real problems.”
There is no shortage of natural and man-made disasters in this world, and even for someone who self-identifies as a big fan of Conan, some perspective is needed. Conan’s reported $33 million severance package, for instance, is more than 25,000 times the per capita gross domestic product of Haiti — tears for Conan are clearly unnecessary. Time and emotional energy, as Conan repeatedly averred in his last several shows, are more urgently needed elsewhere.
Besides, it’s silly to assign too much meaning to a TV show that exists primarily as a vehicle for celebrities to shill their latest movies.I’m cognizant of all this. But I’d be lying if I said I was unaffected by Conan’s swan song.
I am, admittedly, one of the fans who didn’t watch his show religiously. But I can say that it was always comforting to know that whenever I was having a bad day, a hilarious redheaded man would be on the TV, bouncing around the screen like a caffeinated giraffe and doing comedy that was sometimes brilliant, occasionally endearingly dumb and almost always surreal and creative.
In fact, I remember a Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago when I was bemoaning the fact that my plans that evening consisted of laundry, ice cream and Conan. One of my best friends, who goes to school in Virginia, wrote me a card that said, “When I’m snuggling up with a pint of Chunky Monkey and waiting for Conan to come on, know I wish I was snuggling with you.”
Yeah, I remember frustratedly wishing that about her, too. But Conan was a good enough plan B.
And it’s not just frustration over the fact that my bad-day fixer has been taken off the airwaves. I started watching Conan during my sophomore year of high school, and I remember how excited my friends and I were that Conan would be getting “The Tonight Show” in 2009. He’d be starting the show as we were finishing up college, and I took some comfort in knowing that as I was supposed to be growing up, at least Conan will still be blithely making a delightful ass out of himself.
And surprisingly enough, his words have proved to be a source of (at times, much-needed) inspiration for me. When Conan addressed the graduating class at Harvard in 2000, he spoke of the importance of taking chances and getting up from failure, urging graduates to “fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally and remember that the story is never over.”
When Conan addressed the graduating class at New York’s Stuyvesant High School in 2006, he told the college-bound graduates to “take a moment every now and then to breathe, look around you,” and to avoid rigidly following a set of plans at the expense of exploring and experimenting.
This really shouldn’t sound too eulogistic. Conan will likely wind up back on TV once his no-compete clause expires (right, Fox?), and even if he doesn’t, the world will, indeed, go on. But in an industry that seems to favor homogenization, I think it’s worth taking note of a genuinely unique guy who seems more than a little decent as well.
Good luck, Coco! I’m with you.
Joe Dellosa is an advertising senior. His column appears on Tuesdays.
