Conan Christopher O'Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an American television presenter best known as host of NBC's late-night talk/variety show Late Night with Conan O'Brien. O'Brien is scheduled to take over for Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show in 2009. As of October 2006, O'Brien's successor for Late Night is still unknown.

Early life

Conan O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He is the third of six children in an Irish American family, one of four boys. His father, Dr. Thomas O'Brien, was a research physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, specializing in infectious diseases. His mother, Ruth Reardon O'Brien, is a former partner of the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray.[1] His sister Jane is a comedy writer and producer.

After graduating as the valedictorian from Brookline High School, O'Brien entered Harvard University and, in his three upper-class years, lived in Mather House. Throughout his college career, he was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. During his sophomore and junior years, O'Brien served as the Lampoon's president, making him only the second person ever to serve as president twice, and the first person to have done it in 85 years. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in

Television career

O'Brien moved to Los Angeles upon graduating from Harvard to join the writing staff of HBO's Not Necessarily the News. He spent two years with that show, and performed regularly with improvisational groups like The Groundlings. He also acted in corporate infomercials to earn money during this period.

After Not Necessarily the News, O'Brien partnered with Harvard classmate Greg Daniels (who went on to be the executive producer of King of The Hill and The Office) as staff writers on the short-lived Wilton North Report for Fox Broadcasting. He also occasionally served as the show's live audience warm-up person. Wilton North, with former Letterman producer Barry Sand as executive producer, lasted only 4 weeks, and is noteworthy mostly as the show that bumped the Arsenio Hall-hosted Late Show off the air.

In January 1988, Saturday Night Live's executive producer Lorne Michaels hired O'Brien as a writer. During his 3½ years on SNL he wrote such recurring sketches as "Mr. Short-Term Memory" and "The Girl Watchers," the latter of which was first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz. O'Brien also wrote the sketch "Nude Beach", which became infamous due to the fact that the word penis appeared in it no fewer than 42 times, much of it in the form of song [2]. In 1989, he and the other SNL writers were awarded an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series. O'Brien, like many SNL writers, occasionally appeared as an extra in sketches; uncommonly in a speaking role. One of his most visible appearances was a sketch in which Tom Hanks was inducted into the SNL "Five Timers Club" for hosting his fifth episode. O'Brien played the doorman who takes Hanks's coat. Years later, when Hanks was a guest on Late Night, O'Brien showed the clip and jokingly claimed their appearance together was the source of all of Hanks's subsequent success.

While on a writers' strike from Saturday Night Live following the 1987-1988 season, O'Brien put on an improvisational comedy revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel called Happy Happy Good Show.


In the spring of 1991, O'Brien left SNL to write and produce a pilot for the television show Lookwell, starring Adam West. It was broadcast on NBC in July but was not picked up as a series. That fall, O'Brien signed on as a writer and producer for the Fox series The Simpsons, where he also became a supervising producer. In a speech he gave at Harvard on Class Day in 2000, O'Brien credited The Simpsons with "saving" him, a reference to the career slump he was experiencing prior to his hiring for that show [3].

During his time as a writer for The Simpsons, he created the character of Captain Horatio McCallister (the Sea Captain) and he named Patty and Selma Bouvier's iguana Jub-Jub (something Conan would say during awkward silences while writing). Of all the episodes he wrote while writing for The Simpsons, he considers "Marge vs. the Monorail" to be his favorite.

On April 26, 1993, Lorne Michaels chose O'Brien to be David Letterman's successor as host of Late Night; Andy Richter signed on as his sidekick. Late Night with Conan O'Brien received generally unfavorable critical reviews for the first 2-3 years after its debut. The show was reportedly cancelled by network executives, but was allowed to remain on a week-to-week basis when it was realized there was no programming available to replace it. By 1996-97, O'Brien's writing and comedic style was thought to have improved, and he began to develop a growing fan base, especially with high school and college students, as well as the respect of critics and his peers.

Since then, O'Brien and the Late Night writing team have consistently been nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series, though they have not won as of 2006. In 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004 he and the Late Night writing staff won the Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Comedy/Variety Series.

In 2001, he formed his own television production company, Conaco, which has subsequently shared in the production credits for Late Night.

In the 2003-04 television season, Late Night with Conan O'Brien averaged 2.5 million viewers each week, easily beating every other show in its time slot.


Other work

In 2005, O'Brien appeared in The White Stripes' music video, "The Denial Twist". The band had previously been a week-long musical guest on Late Night when they were promoting their 2003 album, Elephant.

He has appeared on another late-night talk show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast (SGC2C), in Episode 77: Fire Ant, in which he and Space Ghost argue between themselves about a number of things, including whether or not anyone actually watches SGC2C. Space Ghost later quips, "Well, that's very stupid, and you won't make it in television," an obvious parody of early reviews of O'Brien's show. After a while, Space Ghost ignores the interview entirely to follow a fire ant that bit him (for about 11 straight minutes). As Space Ghost is crawling out of the studio, O'Brien gripes that "[f]or all these people know, my show is...a...cop...show...on Fox...or something," to which Space Ghost replies, "...Isn't it?"

O'Brien had a brief guest spot on an episode of Robot Chicken, in a quick, SNL-esque sketch called "Randy, the Oblivious Pizza Delivery Guy."

On March 7, 2006, NBC announced that it had ordered a pilot episode for Andy Barker P.I., a new comedy executively produced by O'Brien, who will also co-write the pilot. The show will star O'Brien's former sidekick Andy Richter.


On September 27, 2004, NBC announced the planned 2009 retirement of Tonight Show host Jay Leno. O'Brien was named Leno's successor.[4]

Conan also hosted the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards on August 27, 2006, to widespread critical acclaim.[5][6] He had previously hosted the Primetime Emmys in 2002.


^ Ruth Reardon O'Brien, from a Stanford University website
^ Transcript from "Nude Beach" SNL sketch written by O'Brien
^ Text of O'Brien's 2000 commencement speech at Harvard from Everything2
^ Conan To Replace Leno In 2009, a September 2004 CBS News article
^ "O'Brien...gave one of the best awards show hosting performances of the last decade." Sepinwall, Alan (2006-08-28). A sorry sight. New Jersey Star-Ledger. Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
^ "A valiant, near-heroic effort by Conan O'Brien..." Adalian, Josef (2006-08-27). The 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Daily Variety. Retrieved on 2006-09-03.
^ http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-17-2002-9405.asp
^ http://www.fcb.com/
^ NBC Universal: Birth Notice from Late Night with Conan O'Brien
^ Biography for Conan O'Brien on IMDb
^ http://media.putfile.com/Conan-SHO

                       

Courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_O'Brien