Conan
O'Brien

He had been preparing for that night, in a sense, since 1981. That was the year he left Brookline High School as valedictorian and headed to Harvard, where he studied history and literature, played drums in a band called The Bad Clams, and somehow got himself elected president of the Harvard Lampoon. Twice. The Lampoon has produced more network comedy writers than any creative writing program in the country, and at the time Conan ran it, the magazine was less of a hobby than a recruiting pipeline. By the spring of 1985 he had a magna cum laude diploma and an HBO job, in that order.

Within three years he was at Saturday Night Live, writing for Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey, picking up an Emmy and the unmistakable habit of writing fast and broad. In 1991 he migrated to The Simpsons. He wrote Marge vs. the Monorail. He wrote Homer Goes to College. Either of those scripts would have been a career; he wrote both before his thirtieth birthday.

Then came one of those late-night decisions that look romantic in retrospect and reckless at the time. In 1993, when David Letterman vacated NBC's 12:35 slot for CBS, Lorne Michaels - who knew Conan from SNL - bet on the writer no one had heard of. The first reviews were brutal. Tom Shales wanted him cancelled by Christmas. He nearly was. But Conan kept writing, kept dancing the strange little dance he'd invented to pad airtime, kept befriending Andy Richter and a horse with vertebrae issues, and slowly, then quickly, became the show his harshest critics had wanted him to be.

By 2009 he had hosted Late Night for sixteen years and earned the move to The Tonight Show. By 2010 he had lost The Tonight Show, in a network shuffle that produced one of late-night's great farewell speeches and one of its great public unravelings. Most hosts would have taken a year off. Conan booked a 30-city tour called Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television, then went straight to TBS, where Conan ran for eleven more years.

The trick, by then, was no longer the hosting. The trick was the slow, very deliberate construction of Team Coco - a digital studio that owned its own clips and its own audience. While other late-night hosts complained that YouTube ate their lunch, Conan's team uploaded their clips at midnight. By the time Conan walked away from his nightly show in 2021, he had a podcast network, a touring business, a travel show, and a brand that had outgrown a single network. SiriusXM bought Team Coco in 2022 for a reported nine figures. The headlines wrote themselves; he kept making the show.

Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, the podcast that launched in 2018 as a quiet experiment, became the loudest thing in his second act. The conceit is in the title: an aging, mildly bewildered host suspects his guests don't really want to spend two hours with him. Then he keeps them for two and a half. It became, depending on the week, the number-one comedy podcast in the country. In May 2025, Team Coco started releasing full video episodes on YouTube, which is to say Conan invented podcasting, then re-invented it, then decided to put his face back on television without asking anyone's permission.

Conan O'Brien Must Go, the HBO Max travelogue that grew out of the podcast's "fan calls," sends him to Norway, Argentina, Thailand and Ireland to embarrass himself in the local language. It won an Emmy. A second season is in production. He is, at 62, working more than he was at 35, which would be obnoxious if he weren't so visibly delighted to be doing it.

In March 2025 the Kennedy Center awarded him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. John Mulaney, Stephen Colbert, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman, Bill Burr and David Letterman turned up to roast him. His acceptance speech - earnest, looping, slightly out of breath - went viral. The line people kept quoting was the one about being weird for a living being a kind of public service. He meant it. He has always meant it.