Watched Conan O'Brien's speech last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Some real sharp material read by a guy who sounds like he didn't read it in advance.
You know, I liked Conan from his first day hosting Late Night and I watched as he got better and better. At some point — around the time Andy Richter left and Conan decided he didn't need a sidekick — I began to sense a little too much polish. His routine last evening reminded me of why, late in his run on that 12:35 show, I shifted my TiVo Season Pass over to Craig Ferguson…and don't have one for Conan's current program. He's a very funny man at times and everyone who knows him tells me he's one of the nicest people in the business. Most of them also tell me though that I'd like him better when he's off-stage and not trying a bit too hard to come off as a slick professional comedian. I can believe that.
The guy they need these days at those dinners — though they won't hire him since he'd genuinely wound some of the attendees — is Bill Maher. Maher's kind of the opposite of O'Brien in that everyone thinks he's a much less appealing person off-camera…and my brief encounters with him would bear that out. But he does "own" his material in a way few current topical comics do. You sense that even if Maher didn't write that joke about Mitch McConnell, he knows who Mitch McConnell is and actually shares the point-of-view expressed in the joke. When Conan did his Mitch McConnell joke last night — eyes rarely straying from a typed script — I got the feeling that if you tried to engage him in conversation about it afterwards, it would have been, "Mitch Who? Oh, yeah…he's one of those Senate guys, right?" Maybe he wouldn't say that but that's how Conan comes off to me. So do the two late night Jimmies and a lot of other comics these days.
The late Lorenzo Music and I were once talking about one of his many gigs, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He believed the presentation of Ted Baxter on that series had actually changed the standard for news readers in this country; that they'd successfully made a laughingstock of the anchorman who loves the sound of his own voice and the image of himself on the monitor…but doesn't really know or care what he's reading. Lorenzo believed that depiction had sent TV news producers scrambling to find anchors who seemed to have a more genuine connection with the copy they were reading off the TelePrompter. Like most of the comics we've seen at the Correspondents Dinner, O'Brien could have used a little more connection with the lines he was delivering. Some of them were very, very clever. And most of those performers at the dinner could have used (should have used) a TelePrompter. When you're insulting people in the audience, you ought to at least pretend to be looking at them.
In case you missed it, here's his entire speech…