Conan the Contrarian: How Late Night Revolutionized Comedy for a Redneck

I got a little choked up watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Friday night, and not because I was moved to tears by Max Weinberg's feral beauty. It was the last show before O'Brien takes over The Tonight Show's 11:30 p.m. EST slot, and he ended the broadcast by expressing thanks to the people who made the show possible.

I grew up in a really rural area of southwest Georgia. We didn’t have cable, my parents were very conservative, and the media my sister and I were exposed to reflected that. (My mother attributes this to hearing me sing "Like a Virgin" at age five. Susie Hatfield was not trying to study that.) The most controversial thing I watched was children hitting their fathers in the testicles with baseballs on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

But when I was in middle school, my mom passed down a black-and-white television so tiny that it fit on my stomach. It was small enough that I could perch it there and watch it until the wee hours, which I did on weekends and every night during the summers.

The landscape of late-night programming—Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live, those psychic infomercials with Billy Dee Williams—was a stark contrast to children's programming rented from the library. This stuff was edgy and absurd, unapologetically weird and wonderful and totally, totally different from anything I had ever been exposed to in South Georgia. Not to sound like a total grandma, but this was before the Internet, kids—the only access I had to a world outside of hay rides and church was my subscription to Nintendo Power and a friend who told me about "Weird Al" Yankovic. Watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien was maybe the first cool thing I ever did.

The first episode I ever saw was when Conan taped a remote in Houston, where the show didn't air until 2:40 a.m. (This was in the mid-'90s, when the show was relatively new; ratings were terrible and critics were almost universally unkind.) The bit consisted of Conan wandering around Houston in the wee hours asking people why they weren't watching. He was nearly attacked by a hirsute man named Buffalo. It doesn't sound all that funny, but it was, and I developed a real faux-kinship with this weird universe which occasionally made non-sequiturs sublime. (A robot imbued with the spirit of a '70s pimp! Abraham Lincoln boning sidekick Andy Richter’s mom during a staring contest! The masturbating bear!)

Not to get all saccharine, but Late Night with Conan O'Brien was probably the cornerstone in what eventually became my sense of humor, and self, I suppose. Bits like "In the Year 2000," "Embryonic Rockabilly Polka-dotted Fighter Pilots," fake boy band Dudez-A-Plenti and plenty of others that were pretty bad, all-told, instilled in me a real reverence for silly, smart, bizarre comedy. Robert Smigel’s Bob Dole impression alone got me through ninth grade. In fact, I blame his impression for my ninth-grade obsession with Dole, which culminated in me dressing as a Dole/Sporty Spice hybrid I called "Doley Spice" for Halloween in 1996. I wore dress pants, a bathing suit top and a suit jacket, accentuated by funky hair and make-up, and a pen in my left hand. (You will notice I did not list "dignity," which was wholly absent from the ensemble.)

I haven’t watched the show as much as recent years (maybe because Conan, Andy and the gang were so ahead of their time, and now it’s not as hard to find comedy of their ilk on the airwaves), but it remains a real source of warm fuzzies. I’m sad to see it leave New York City, and the later-and-therefore-weirder 12:30 a.m. slot. I like to imagine that Conan really moved to be closer to Andy Richter, who was told to relocate to California's warm climate by some doctor from the 1890s.

Maybe they can fight in a fountain or something. Ah, memories.

Watch Conan O'Brien pick apples with Mr. T: