Studio in Repose
Here is Studio 6-A in Rockefeller Center last November.On Friday , Conan O’Brien’s filmed his last episode as host of Late Night in this studio.
A valedictory moment like this reminds me of where O’Brien’s show sits on the evolutionary tree of comedy and how much it influenced the sensibilities, and sometimes behavior, of people I know. On the first point, there are immediate antecedents for O’Brien’s Late Show in Saturday Night Live and the Simpsons (at both O’Brien was a writer); he is also one of the few who acknowledges and draws on the roots of contemporary humor that took hold in vaudeville up until the early 1960s. And you can see how other comic endeavors–Demetri Martin’s work, or even the Flight of the Conchords, for example–later found a place because of the space that O’Brien’s work carved out in the spectrum. On the second, Late Night with Conan O’Brien has managed to be a quintessentially college show. I watched it most as a student, as did most of the people I know, and he managed to make a certain sort of disjunctive (or disjointed) silliness socially acceptable. (I did not mean for this paragraph to turn into a first-year philosophy paper.) Most of us haven’t lost that.
