Raised among rough-edged men, Katherine Markovich found an unlikely male role model in Conan O’Brien.
The only way I can even begin to articulate the feelings I have for Conan O’Brien and his career is by referencing another moment in pop-culture. Please stick with me.
There’s an episode of “Freaks and Geeks” where Bill Haverchuck gets home from school and the house is empty. He makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, slices a piece of chocolate cake, and then sits in front of the television set. Then, food arranged and TV tray ready, he watches “The Dinah Shore Show.” The scene is a minute and a half long, and the only audio is the The Who playing over a montage of Bill eating and laughing.
The first time I watched this scene, I cried. I cried because I knew the scene intimately. I cried because I was alarmed at its accuracy. I cried because I knew how deeply important food and laughter is to a lonely kid. It made me think of all the times—hundreds of times—I sat on the floor of my living room, eating Kix by the handful directly from the cereal box, and watching “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”. The only difference is that I was 10 and I was multi-tasking. While I ate and laughed, I also scribbled notes in a Mead wide-ruled notebook. This is comedy I told myself and you better start practicing now.
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I wrote my first bits of comedy and dialogue in my notebooks—I couldn’t watch “Late Night” without a pen in hand. Everything about the show enchanted me on an aesthetic level (that was the coolest studio ever), and then its host only heightened my experience. I thought Conan O’Brien was the funniest anything I had ever seen in my life and he was instantly my hero. The jokes he told, the style of his sketches, and his guest-to-host relationship made perfect sense to me. Keep in mind I was ten, so I was probably right in thinking it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I really don’t know what I had been watching up until that point. (Probably “Seinfeld”, because it was the 90’s.) My parents did an amazing job of building my comedy education, absolutely no doubt about it, but a lot of my pop-culture sponging had happened via film. “Late Night” felt like something I had discovered all by myself—a gift to me, from me and unlike anything I had ever felt before.
I could write an entire piece about all the kinds of comedy and performance and pop-culture that “Late Night” brought to my attention. For now, I’ll just mention one. Ten years ago, I saw Zach Galifianakis perform stand-up on “Late Night”. It was when his act was exclusively soothing one-liners spoken into a microphone while he played piano. He was the third and final guest of the night. Zach said, after a very long pause, “At what point do you tell highway it’s adopted?” I laughed so hard (still makes me laugh) and then I immediately wrote the joke on the inside of my green trapper, as I had since moved on from Mead spirals. Conan was always intent on giving alternative comics a space for trying out material and being as weird as they wanted—something I continue to respect and appreciate about him. I think he likes watching others succeed on his stage, and he cares whether they do or not. I wanted to be a part of it and I still do.
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I’m not here to show preference or romanticize any kind of adult male role-model figure over another. I have, I think, been exposed to a wealth of man-types in my life, and for that, I’m grateful. I’m not just grateful—I’m lucky. I’m lucky that all the people—men and women—who were responsible for turning me into a Person did so in a way that didn’t leave me feeling slighted, hurt, or misinformed. With that being said, I had never ever before been exposed to a man quite like Conan O’Brien.
For ten solid years, the only kind of men I knew were my dad and other men like him. I think that’s pretty typical for 10-year-olds, the more I think about it. Up until that point, I only knew manifestations of masculinity to be what my dad did. I understood a “Man” to be the following: works outside, probably on top of roofs or on scaffolding with siding in hand; wears boots with steel toes and Carhartt jackets and worn jeans; drinks impressive amounts of beer; listens to country music exclusively. Conan is not (as far as I know) any of those things, or at least his TV persona does not suggest it. I mean it when I say I had no idea that gender-performance existed outside of what your parents portrayed. Presently, I think that sounds archaic and strange, but when you’re a kid, your social resources are slightly limited. Watching Conan dance around like a fool and talk in crazy voices—all while wearing great suits—turned out to be an important step in my personal definition of Man.
I remember my parents turning on various late-night acts over the years, but I didn’t love any of them. Conan was just different. He was inviting me into his world. He wanted me to be a part of his conversation and he wanted me to laugh with him, not merely at him. When the clock hit 12:35 and The Max Weinberg 7 started to play the intro music, I immediately felt safe and surrounded by something that cared about me.
Childhood brings about a weird smattering of situations we don’t understand. We’re probably not meant to understand them, really. But in the moments when I was most confused about my environment, or I was intensely repressing things I didn’t want to think about, or I was just being a weird little kid, I knew that at 12:35, I had a friend.
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When Conan was ousted from “The Tonight Show”, I didn’t really take it well. I was upset because of the politics that had surrounded the situation, but I was also very upset for myself. I started to panic: If I can’t find Conan on TV…then what do I do? At that point, I’d spent 11 good years being pretty dependent on the same entity to bolster me creatively and soothe me emotionally. On the night of his final show, I sat in the middle of a room full of people and I cried really ugly tears for a very long time. Remember how I mentioned childhood is weird and sometimes it’s sad and you do things to make yourself feel better like watching “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”? Right, so certain repressed feelings were surfacing while I watched Conan address his audience for the last time from “The Tonight Show” desk. I was freaking out. I heard people around me asking in hushed voices if someone had died. I had friends on the phone saying, “I don’t know what to do with her.” There were people rubbing the top of my heaving head because I was clearly heartbroken. And even now that the network wars are over and the late night hierarchy is more or less stable, and so much time has passed since I began this relationship with television, I still find that turning on Conan is enough to remind me to breathe and to never stop writing stuff down.
You might think this sounds a little dramatic, too emotional, hyperbolic, even. Well, it is. But this happens to be my One Big Thing, so I can over-inflate as much as I want. Here’s the best comparison I can come up with: what makes you feel like you’re Home? Capital H Home? I know people who have lake houses in Wisconsin. I know people who still sleep with stuffed giraffes. I know people who need just one bite of good Lebanese food.
Mine is TV while it’s dark out. It will probably always be that way.
Photo: AP/NBC Paul Drinkwater