From June 11-14, Conan O'Brien is blowing into the Windy City for a week of shows, as part of the TBS Just for Laughs Chicago Comedy Festival and to eat deep-dish Chicago-style hot dog pizza. Maybe he'll swing by Da Bears stadium or that reflective orb thing, of which everyone who visits Chicago posts a Facebook picture. Or maybe he'll do some Second City improv or eat at a molecular gastronomy restaurant or try a Ferris Bueller reference or…yeah, I don't know anything else about Chicago.
Hello, job? Television job? The Conan Can't Stop trailer dropped this weekend, and even if you didn't want to see the Conan O'Brien documentary before, watching your favorite manic showman almost break down on stage during his "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour" is like a punch right in your tender, comedy-loving gut. "I'm really angry at times. Sometimes I'm so mad I can't breathe," O'Brien admits, before laughing, "I walked away from the greatest franchise in history because I refused to to go on at midnight. Here I am, going on at midnight." The fact he's going on at all in such a state [...]
Sick of his boss hogging all of the attention, Andy Ritcher got his own sidekick in Jimmy Pardo last night. "I'm like you. I need to be validated by someone else when I say something funny," Andy explained to Conan. The addition of Conan's warm-up comedian and champion podium jockey revealed the true nature of the sidekick roll: banter stooge and meat-based laugh track. Plus the location of Pardo's desk makes him look about two feet tall. If only Jimmy also had a small sidekick, thus beginning an infinite stream of increasingly tiny Jimmy Pardos. It's just Jimmy Pardos all the way down.
Over the course of the epic Late Night debacle, we got a glimpse of an angrier, more cynical Conan O'Brien than we'd ever suspected could live inside that jovial exterior and those puppet-string hips. Luckily for us, the trajectory of Conan's rage was recorded for posterity in Rodman Flender's Conan Can't Stop documentary, debuting at South by Southwest on Sunday. Filmed over the course of his 32-stop Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour, be prepared to see Conan snap at his wife, serenade Jack McBrayer with little ditty called "You Stupid Hick," and yes, compare himself only half-jokingly to Anne Frank. "I certainly won’t go through [...]
