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.
| ON SCREEN |
| ‘Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop’ |
| » Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars |
| » Stars: Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter |
| » Directors: Rodman Flender |
| » Rated: R for language |
| » Running time: 89 minutes |
O’Brien inherited “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno in June 2009, and was forced by NBC to give it back to him in January 2010. By late 2009, Conan had lost about 2 million viewers a night, while Leno’s prime-time talk show didn’t keep enough people watching late-night local news. Never mind that it might have made ratings sense to bring back Leno: Most Americans proudly announced they were on “Team Coco,” siding with the underdog who had gotten $45 million when NBC bought out his contract. (Though $12 million of that went to his staff.) When he announced his tour, with a single tweet, tickets sold out in some cities almost immediately.
Conan is still bitter about the very public feud. “There’s fuel there, because I’m angry. I’m really, really angry,” he says about creating his stage show. “Sometimes I’m so angry I can’t breathe.”
Like the best artists, he funnels his feelings into his work, transforming them into something better. This doc lets us sees the process by which he does so. But even better, “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” gives overwhelming evidence for its title statement and shows us a man who can’t help but give the people what they want — no matter what it takes out of him.
