Gumption (34 page)

Although he had studied at the Los Angeles comedy institution the Groundlings Theatre & School, Conan was not yet really known at all as a performer, so much as he was justly considered one of the funniest writers in the business. That’s why it came as rather a shock when NBC announced in 1992 that he would replace David Letterman as the host of
Late Night.
Despite Johnny Carson’s preference for Letterman, Jay Leno had been selected by NBC to take over
The Tonight Show
for Carson, prompting Letterman to take his superior comedy stylings over to CBS, where he has reigned as Johnny’s successor regardless of his former network’s choice. We’ll examine this a little more closely when we get to a later anecdote involving a little historical item known as “Leno Shits the Bed.”

For now, the relevant point was that
Late Night
’s executive producer Lorne Michaels had seen something in Conan during his tenure at
Saturday Night Live
that made him think this young, gangly protagonist would be able to pull off such a move. As we have subsequently seen from the triumph of Conan’s show, as well as Lorne’s additionally winning late-night choices of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, there’s a reason that Lorne Michaels has remained the number one arbiter of television comedy talent in my lifetime. Of the unprecedented choice of Conan in 1992, Lorne had this to say:

I liked that Conan was young, intelligent, and that he had, like Johnny Carson, good manners. A good host always obeys the rules of hospitality, and Conan has an essential decency and work ethic that were obvious from the start. Sadly, talent and character do not often reside in the same person, but they do in Conan.

Naturally, it took the completely unknown redhead some time to acclimate the
Late Night
audience from the more folksy timbre of Letterman’s show to his newer, younger, and goofier style, but acclimate them he did. After a great deal of hard work over the early seasons, Conan led his show to a long-running string of seasons at number one in the ratings. I am no television expert—far from it, a status about which I am glad—but I know enough about how things work at a network to comprehend that a young unknown stepping onto the stage recently vacated by Letterman, struggling at first to build his audience but sticking to his comedy guns of weirdness, would have had to work his tail off to get his ship righted to the point where it was
sailing smoothly. That young man’s task would have required guts, stamina, and again, disarmingly provocative dance maneuvers. In sum: gumption.

As it happened, Conan and I were unable to secure time, neither upon a Los Angeles rooftop where Scotch is served nor in an historic Whitehall skiff as I rowed his (gi)raffish profile around the cape of New York. Instead, he and Liza invited me to dinner at their beautiful home. I had made the situation quite clear—that I would see him feted as a gesture of recompense, however insufficient, for the generous gift of his time and his mind and his heart. Liza responded that they had split a cow with another three couples, and so she would prefer to prepare a meal with said beef so as to make use of it (the beef was mightily good—the playwright can cook like she’s publishing a book on it).

Conilious (his preferred legal name) and I settled into the living room to rap. I have to say, despite always feeling at ease around him, I was just slightly nervous on this occasion, since we had earlier discussed the fact that the very next day was the last day of shooting
Parks and Recreation
forever. Only one day of filming remained, after 125 episodes over seven seasons, and yet no one had ever mentioned the inescapable fact that my character had purloined Conan’s own hairdo. I have appeared on his show several times, just fatalistically waiting for his team of attorneys to step out from the wings to slap me with some sort of cease and desist, but it has not occurred. Before I rest too easy, I do believe that I will look up the statute of limitations with regard to follicular homage.

I described the relative aims of my book to Conan, and we
discussed Theodore Roosevelt immediately, natch, and then we carried on into politics in general. He immediately cheered me by pointing out that, although, yes, our country does seem to be firmly lumbering forward in two ruts—one red and one blue—things are incrementally getting better nonetheless. Still I said, there are many singular news stories by which one can, as the result of their examination, grow despondent at the state of human compassion and decency in America. He replied:

We’re in a very stubborn period and it’s really hard to get anything done right now, but look at the Civil War. It was at that point by far the bloodiest thing that had happened on the planet Earth. Before the Constitution was even brought up, from the moment the British left and the treaty was signed in Paris, we were at each other’s throats. You know, Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Now, you don’t see Nancy Pelosi shooting Chris Christie on the shores of New Jersey and then fleeing in a rowboat. . . . The Civil War—Charles Sumner’s beaten practically to death with a cane on the floor of the Senate. We’ve had really dark, horrible episodes in this country, and we work them out and we keep trudging forward. It’s like that Beatles song—“I’ve got to admit it’s getting better. A little better all the time. It can’t get no worse.” You know?

Conan talked about the popular misconception that things used to be great in this country, like romanticizing the civil rights movement for example, when that was actually a quite messy and unclear period. It was a good sight better than the state of affairs at the time the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, but it’s not like you sign a
paper, or espouse an idea, and a nation of human animals just automatically “gets it.” He reminded me of just how complicated we are and how complex and glacial, therefore, our gradual improvement must be. I said that I was cheered by his perspective, and that I felt naïve for wanting the impossible—our nation of people, and ultimately our planet, to all treat one another with decency. My mistake was in reckoning this job of work as one that could ever be completed, which it cannot; but as Wendell Berry tells us, we simply must do the work that we are aware needs doing. That is the way.

Despite all the ways in which we’re still lousy people, Conan went on to describe a quality about our country that he finds to be one of its greatest strengths: our willingness to air our dirty laundry.

“We’re like a family that fights a lot, but it’s out in the open. The scarier family is the one that pretends like there’s not a problem.”

He pointed out, in reference to the recently released CIA torture reports, that while some of the activities our country gets up to may be shameful, he is not comfortable judging people in whose shoes he has not walked, and so it’s healthy to “let it bleed. Let it out. . . . That makes our country very unique—I don’t know that there’s very many other countries in the world where they would say, ‘Look what we did.’ I mean, the Japanese are having trouble acknowledging sixty years ago in World War II. We’re saying ‘We did this four, five, six years ago.’ . . . I think that’s a very positive quality that this country has; the civil rights debates and arguments and violence were all broadcast at the height of the Cold War, and it was an embarrassment to us, but . . . we let it bleed. We let it out, let people see what we are.”

I said, “That’s poignant. I’m grateful for your perspicacity.”

“I’ll look that up later.”

“I look up to you a great deal.”

“As you should.”

“Well, you’re tall.”

We got to discussing things, like young people and work ethic—one of my favorite harangues—and I have to say: I kept lobbing softballs about which I expected Conan to respond with intelligence and humor, which of course he did, but I suppose I was not expecting the richly gracious humanity that I found beneath his gingery crust. For example, I thought we would merely commiserate about kids always looking at their phones, and the vapid quality of so much of contemporary popular culture, but instead, I was handed:

You also have to remember that there’s a ton of young people out there killing themselves to go to medical school and learn how to be radiologists and physicists and to invent a better computing system—we just don’t see them, and it can make us feel like the whole thing’s going to shit and it’s the fall of the Roman Empire, but I think, No, there’s a lot of good people out there, they just don’t get as many YouTube hits. That’s the problem. It’s negative selection.

Boy, that cheered me up. As a guy from rural Illinois who now lives and works in the entertainment capital of the world, it’s hard to simply even drive to my woodshop without being deluged by billboards and garish messaging. The grocery store also dresses the slut, with the bullshit of tabloid headlines emblazoned in the vicinity of every
checkout station (a trend away with which, it seems, some modern chains are doing, thankfully). I mean to say, it’s been easy for me to conclude that we have indeed gone to hell in a handbasket, but Conan is right. The technique I need to perfect is changing my paths of travel so that they intersect the empty messaging as little as possible.

One good way to achieve that goal is by choosing to do work with people you like. You won’t always agree with them, but I believe that we humans, by definition, don’t
always
agree with
anybody
. That’s what makes us so goddamn cute. But if you can live and work with people you like, you can get a lot of work done in a way that enlarges every member of the team. If we don’t learn to stick together and put up with one another when something unpleasant occurs, then we risk being absent when something wonderful happens. Being alone is rarely any good, which is why we look for work to do that can be best achieved by many hands.

Conan: “In the meantime, we’ve created a little biosphere. We’re employing some people, and it’s nice. We’ve built a little community, and what’s the alternative? The alternative is me, here, building a ship in a bottle and probably drinking a lot of red wine and shooting at crows with rock salt. I picture the end of
There Will Be Blood
—you come visit me and I bludgeon you with a bowling pin.”

He told me about a time that another new, young writer on a TV show with him complained, “I don’t like it that we write this stuff, and then they change it. I don’t like that they change my words before they go on the air.”

Conan replied, “Oh, you know what’s interesting? You know whose work was never changed—they never touched it, and she had
complete control of everything she wrote? Emily Dickinson. She wrote it in her attic, and then she died. Probably coughed up blood and keeled over and that was it. And they found [her work] later on, and they never changed a word.”

We were talking about understanding the group dynamic, which always involves compromise on every level. That is the cost of working in a group, but it can also be the great benefit of working in one. And Conan pointed out, as he often has, that he understands the marriage of art and commerce; that if you’re going to depend upon a company with a broadcast channel to deliver your art to the audience, then that’s a relationship that has to be respected, by both sides.

I nodded, because my first impulse has always been to want to bad-mouth NBC because they never really got behind our show,
Parks and Recreation
. We never, ever saw a
fraction
of the incredible amount of promotion they would put behind their annual attempts at new comedies, even when we were winning some very high-end critical acclaim. Year after year, they would relegate us to the back of the line and instead plug their new shows very loudly in the hopes that those shows would become hits and earn them more revenue than our show with not-so-hot ratings, and then maybe they wouldn’t be fired for not earning enough revenue. The number of those new shows that came close to achieving that goal? Zero shows.

Focusing solely upon that information can certainly fuel my ire. What I quickly learned, though, partly from the wisdom of my producers Mike Schur, Amy Poehler, and Morgan Sackett, was that although NBC wasn’t demonstrably trying to advance our show, they also were not canceling our show, a move which, however distasteful,
they would certainly have been justified in making. But they didn’t. Oh, they almost did. Several times. There’s a story about one of our executives boarding a flight from New York to LA, and when he got on the plane we were canceled, but when he landed there had been a reprieve. But the end of the story is that they let us live.

We made 125 episodes of a show that I think is the epitome of quality entertainment—it teaches us lessons about being nice to one another and finding success in life—by God, it’s churchy stuff, but in a much more enjoyable package than any sermon to which I’ve been party, because it’s funny as shit. So, at the end of the arithmetic, my feelings toward NBC are composed of gratitude. Keeping our show on the air, numbers-wise, was not the best business decision for them (which is why they so desperately tried to create remunerative replacements), but nonetheless on the air they kept us. They’re still having a hell of a time finding their ass with both hands, in a landscape without mercy, and I don’t envy them their task. I wish them well and Godspeed.

I say I don’t envy them, because their jobs are made up entirely of commerce. Their concern is the marketplace, which can be a tough place to go to work, especially nowadays, what with technology changing perpetually and public tastes becoming much more diverse as they are presented with so many more options from which to choose when it comes to television programming.

Which has a lot to do with what I see as the cause of the whole
Tonight Show
debacle from 2009.

The whole thing started when NBC gave
The Tonight Show
to Leno instead of Letterman, which was undoubtedly a “numbers” decision. Johnny Carson had given his tacit approval of Letterman by
appearing on his
Late Night
show, while he did not visit Leno even though Leno
was guest hosting Johnny’s own show.
A few years later, Carson openly said that he had preferred Letterman as his replacement. Now. The fact that NBC either didn’t ask Carson’s opinion or they did ask but didn’t care enough about it says to me that then and there is when they began to devalue
The
Tonight Show.
It apparently became all commodity, with no humanity.