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Conan O’Brien: the serious business of a comedy tour
April 20, 2010
By Carl Unegbu (ComedyBeat)
Conan O’Brien a.k.a. “Coco” is a very busy man these days, which is pretty odd considering that he is currently unemployed for the first time in 17 years. In January this year, he quit his job at NBC in a huff and was then banned from his beloved line of work until September this year. And while he stays on the sidelines, he is required not to disparage his former employer, which had filled his pockets with a whopping $32 million as the price of these restrictions. Yet, O’Brien is hardly staying on the sidelines of comedy and has been out there hustling and making waves and of course, true to character, staying in everybody’s face.
On February 24, 2010, about a month after his departure from NBC, he debuted on Twitter and within ten minutes of his first tweet he had a few thousand followers. His twitter bio fittingly reads: “I had a show. Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account.” And not one to disappoint expectations, O’Brien has caused a stir with his provocative tweets ever since he came aboard the twitter bandwagon.
O’Brien jokes that he stays busy to avoid being asked to “help out around the house” since becoming officially unemployed. But seriously, he has a lot more reasons to keep busy than just trying to avoid helping out with house chores in the O’Brien home. It’s business, Stupid! And O’Brien gets it alright.
For starters, he has just signed a deal to return to late-night television at 11 p.m. in November at cable station TBS.
But November is still a long way off and O’Brien has quickly figured a way to stay busy and keep his comic engine revving in the many months before that time. So, the funny man has recently embarked on a two-month 30-city comedy tour across American and Canadian cities, dubbed “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour.”
The music and comedy tour began in Eugene, OR on April 12 and will end in Atlanta, GA on June 14. And it will cover venues ranging from the 2,500 seat center in suburban college towns like Eugene OR to the 10,000 seat Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT. At $40 a pop, the comedian’s show tickets have sold out in a way and with a speed that one would usually only find for a Bruce Springsteen pop concert or a major league game.
Buzz aside, the tour has real value for O’Brien. It will give the Ivy League comedian the chance to test his comedic chops in a relatively unfamiliar format: the no-holds barred territory of live stand-up comic. This time O’Brien gets to speak to live audiences and to try to set up and deliver the “killing” punch lines and draw the laughs without the kind of filter and structure that a TV show would provide. It’s rumble time, now.
Five days to the start of his tour he gagged on his twitter site that attendance at his tour “will cure all known diseases.” Only time will tell if the tour lives up to the hype.
But come November, it’s not going to be all fun and games any more, let alone a free lunch. With ratings and revenues declining, especially at the networks, these are especially challenging times in the business of late night TV and O’Brien needs all the momentum help he can get, whether from his exploits on twitter, or his comedy tour or any buzz-worthy antics he can manage to create. In the fall, he faces a competition as stiff as can be in late night.
At his new 11p.m. time slot, O’Brien will be wading into the storm of the late night ratings wars When he debuts at 11 p.m. he will immediately go head-to-head in a ratings contest with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central for a half hour. During the next half hour from 11:30 p.m. late night titans Jay Leno (NBC) and David Letterman (CBS) will join the fray. And speaking of 11:30 p.m., don’t forget Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and his “Colbert Nation.”
And O’Brien faces brutal pressure to perform at his new home TBS and to do it soon. To spell it out, O’Brien almost needs to win the late-night ratings contest or at least to hold his own in that rat race. In a manner of speaking, TBS has literally bet the ranch on him as its prince of late night, after toasting him as “the comedic voice for a generation…that will make TBS the choice of comedy fans for years to come.” Perhaps in another context, their eagerness to snag O’Brien might be considered almost embarrassing, and in a gesture of generosity fit only for royalty, TBS has given him things no other “interested’ television station was prepared to offer, as one could tell from O’Brien’s difficult negotiations with Fox.
Aside from the money, which is reportedly “bigger than any other deal he’s ever had”, TBS has also rolled out the red carpet for him at 11 p.m. by moving poor George Lopez and his show “Lopez Tonight” out of the way. For good measure, TBS has also sweetened his deal by giving him his own show, something that neither Jay Leno nor even the legendary Johnny Carson had at NBC.
In the end, considering what lies ahead for the “Coco” man this coming fall, his high decibel comedy tour with all its bells and whistles and all the rave about his tweets can only add up to a warm-up for the big rumble ahead. The jury is still out on how well O’Brien, who turned 47 last Sunday (April 18), will hold up in the coming storm. But most betting folks would figure he’ll do just fine.