Conan O’Brien can’t stop: It’s true. Barred from appearing on television for eight months after publicly losing his gig hosting “The Tonight Show,” the comedian couldn’t simply take the opportunity for a break, perhaps in sunny Mexico with his pretty wife. He had to do something even more difficult than appear on live TV five nights a week: appear live onstage nearly nightly, sometimes twice a night, for two months. Not only that, he schmoozed before and after the shows with fans, executives, and other people not his friends, always with a smile and a handshake. So if O’Brien seems a little testy now and then in this documentary that captured his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour, you can’t blame him. It wasn’t only his own career on the line in this risky series of shows: The comedian had a staff to support along with his wife and two kids. (Who, incidentally, don’t laugh at his every joke as his personal assistant and writers seem to do: “You look silly, Daddy,” his daughter bluntly tells him at one point.)
The redheaded Irish Catholic from Massachusetts has what is surely a compulsion to perform. “All I know is I like being in front of an audience,” he says at the beginning of this doc, as the idea for the tour is just taking shape. “Can you have fun without an audience?” director Rodman Flender asks him. Conan can’t even respond.
