Subtitles section Play video
-
You wanna do mono first?
-
Sure. Yeah.
-
Get ready to say everything we ever said
-
at the monologue meetings.
-
Cancel time.
-
"Behind the Nonsense," take two.
-
(funky music)
-
Yesterday was daylight savings time
-
when... (audience cheering)
-
Yeah.
-
Daylight savings time when we lose an hour
-
for no apparent reason.
-
(audience laughing) Yeah.
-
By the way, losing an hour for no apparent reason
-
is also the motto for this show.
-
(audience laughing) We've always...
-
(audience cheering) That is...
-
Hey, Conan O'Brien here, Andy Richter
-
for another edition of "Behind the Nonsense"
-
where we look behind the scenes.
-
Today, we're gonna focus a little bit
-
on the monologue process.
-
Specifically, the meetings that we would have
-
just before the show would tape,
-
figure out which jokes to do,
-
and often it was a very chaotic
-
and hilarious mess, that meeting.
-
Joining me, Laurie Kilmartin, hilarious comedy writer,
-
Brian Kiley, occasionally, no, always hilarious.
-
You know, you're no Kilmartin, but you're good.
-
I don't know what to say,
-
but we get into this very small room
-
and this went on for years and years and years.
-
And it's your dressing room.
-
My dressing room.
-
So it's your space. It's my space.
-
We're getting ready.
-
The audience is just on the other side of the wall
-
sometimes loading in, sometimes the band is playing,
-
we're getting very close to showtime
-
and time is of the essence
-
and we're looking through a big stack of jokes
-
and then absolute inappropriate foolishness would erupt.
-
Well, you describe it,
-
Laurie. Yes.
-
I think, it's so interesting that to get to the place
-
where you can tell these really clean jokes on television,
-
you have to go to a place
-
where you're just saying unrepeatable things
-
in the green room, just to get yourself there.
-
You've just identified what it is.
-
Laurie and Brian
-
are both very good, excellent standup comedians.
-
You guys understand something about this performing process.
-
I'm pretty stressed out.
-
I have a ten-year-old son and already at age 10,
-
we've had multiple discussions on masturbation etiquette.
-
(audience laughing) At 10 years old.
-
I was like, "Please do not knock on mom's door
-
when she's masturbating. (audience cheering)
-
There is something about needing to stretch it
-
all the way out here to then pull it back to here.
-
So the jokes would be, you know,
-
jokes that you can tell on television
-
about the president or a celebrity
-
or what happened in the news today.
-
You would push me, I would push you,
-
we would stretch it way out and be doing entire riffs that-
-
Talk about canceled. (Laurie laughing)
-
The whole point was that you were going to be really clean
-
in about five minutes.
-
And that's what was so hilarious.
-
But it's also too, I always look at it as like,
-
we ran an opium den for tourists
-
and we could only get off on the really hard stuff.
-
Go ahead and have this weak sauce, but for us,
-
(imitates squirting)
-
I gotta put poison right in my veins before I feel anything.
-
I remember one of the first meetings out here,
-
Andy was late and you guys got in a fake yelling argument
-
of, "Where were you?"
-
"I was around the corner."
-
"Around the corner fudge is made."
-
And it became this whole thing
-
about what was that rhyme and we had to Google.
-
But 20 minutes of this- We had to Google it.
-
And then it's like two minutes to do the jokes
-
because we were discussing
-
"Milk, Milk, Lemonade" And again, you know,
-
band playing, every second is precious,
-
we're supposed to get out there and do this show,
-
but we would get started-
-
On "Milk, Milk, Lemonade." Yeah, milk, milk, lemonade,
-
around the corner.
-
And Brian, you go back
-
to '93 or early '94? Early '94, yeah.
-
Okay, so you're really pretty much a lifer.
-
You came on the show and you didn't really know
-
what to expect.
-
And you thought, "Well, Conan's probably this erudite."
-
Like, all you knew is that, "Oh, he went to a good college."
-
Absolutely.
-
It's like, "Oh, he's this Harvard whatever."
-
And then it was like, "Oh my God.
-
This is total insanity." But then we had a meeting
-
where we were talking about jokes
-
and I said one thing but then I pretended...
-
You had a candle there for some reason,
-
and you lit the candle, and then you had a bottle of scotch
-
and you pretended to knock the candle over in the scotch
-
and then you pretended to catch on fire.
-
And then you're going out the window and somehow,
-
the curtain wrapped around your neck.
-
It was like this long- And then I hung myself
-
as I burned and I acted it all out.
-
And Brian's sitting there,
-
this has nothing to do with the show.
-
And then you got a very different idea of-
-
It was like my first day and I'm like, "Okay,
-
this is not what I was expecting.
-
This is not gonna be Dick Cavett.
-
(Laurie and Andy laughing)
-
And I remember also, one of my first days,
-
we were trying to decide between this joke or that joke.
-
And you stopped somebody in the hallway said,
-
"What do you think of this joke on a scale of one to 10,
-
10 being the funniest, two not being funny,
-
three being funny again," and then you just went
-
all the way through it. I made it super complicated.
-
It was an intern.
-
The intern was like, "Wait, what's four?"
-
"No! There is no four!
-
There's three and then five!
-
Five is great but four is off limits and three is no good."
-
And what I love too, is that at the beginning of that,
-
you really wanted an answer, but then you discovered like,
-
"Oh no, there's this other thing that I want much more,"
-
which is to fuck with this kid.
-
I want to really have a good time.
-
Your laugh is so fantastic and-
-
Fantastic. Yeah.
-
The Kilmartin cackle, we'd call it.
-
But we would be inappropriate
-
and then you would like push us much farther sometimes.
-
I remember that very clearly. Yes, for sure.
-
We were always grateful when, someone was saying earlier,
-
Gavin Polone would stop in,
-
because he also had a great laugh,
-
such as we knew the mono wasn't like our best effort.
-
And it's like, "Please, God, let Gavin be there today
-
and save some of the jokes." Gavin's my manager
-
and he would come by always wearing a track suit,
-
a full track suit, head to toe.
-
Matching, yeah. Matching track suit,
-
but he's got a really good sense of humor and he'd sit there
-
and he would laugh really hard
-
and the rest of us get so jaded,
-
like there's not a lot of laughter in that room.
-
And then Gavin would come in
-
and then he would usually try and think
-
of some money-making scheme.
-
He would say, you know, "You can take that joke
-
and you can try and make it a sitcom
-
and then I could produce it."
-
And we're like, "Shut up!"
-
After a while working on our show like this,
-
there is a lot of like,
-
"Oh yeah, that's really funny," you know?
-
You don't laugh at things, but you're like,
-
"Oh yeah, yeah. That's really funny."
-
Gavin and Sona often save jokes.
-
Well, Sona, my assistant, God love her,
-
she was a good laugher but she really liked jokes
-
that had weed in them.
-
Dick jokes.
-
Dick jokes. Yeah, she liked dick jokes.
-
And she'd be like, "Ha!"
-
And I'd be like, "No, I'm not gonna..."
-
And you guys would say like, "See,
-
it's worth doing it. (all laughing)
-
See, the guy had too much weed and then his dick got big."
-
I'm like, "That's not a joke."
-
And she'd be like, "Ha, ha, ha! Weed and dick!"
-
And then of course, my manager would be like,
-
"You know, actually what we could do
-
is you can market something- (Laurie laughing)
-
We could market something
-
that makes your penis larger using marijuana."
-
Our jokes could never compete with the riffs.
-
That was a problem. In the room,
-
the foolishness in the room You'd do blue Kiley
-
or something and kill, and then we'd go to the jokes
-
and I was like... I would spend 20 minutes
-
doing an impression of Brian Kiley.
-
We always called my grandfather Poppy
-
'cause of his opium addiction.
-
(audience laughing)
-
I can impersonate Brian Kiley
-
doing his jokes in his mannerisms and it's very...
-
I would do this routine where it's Kiley in a club
-
going incredibly blue, filthy blue,
-
I can't even say it right here,
-
but just imagine- The dirtiest thing
-
you've ever heard. The dirtiest thing
-
that Red Fox ever said times 10
-
and it's Kiley doing that and killing
-
and then riding home in his tiny, little, conservative car
-
and then reading a Truman biography in his bed
-
and then getting called to go back to the club.
-
"So I'm, uh, I'm with my old lady and I told her
-
'You've gotta, you've gotta wash that ass.
-
(all laughing) You gotta wash the ass.
-
If I'm going to go down there and, uh, you know,
-
service you in that area,
-
you need to clean that fucking ass, you see.'"
-
I dunno why, that stuff would just...
-
We would do it, we'd be crying, and then I was like,
-
"All right, let's go do this TV show."
-
There's a new trend where people watch television
-
that they despise and it's called hate watching.
-
(audience laughing) Hate watching. Yeah.
-
Speaking of hate watching,
-
hi mom. (audience laughing)
-
(funky music)
-
All right.
-
Well, you get an idea of what we were talking about.
-
I never want to see either of you again.
-
(Laurie and Brian laugh)