Conan O’Brien is a very popular comedian, and a man I regard as seriously and naturally funny. I knew very little about him until a couple of years ago when I tuned into an interview he did with Mel Brooks. I did so for Brooks, not O’Brien, but found Conan to be engaging and funny. He is also known to be nice to his employees and kind to people in general. I have learned since discovering him for myself that he does not speak ill of anyone when on air, and probably not in private either.
O’Brien comes from a family of six, raised in Brookline, MA, a suburb of Boston. He graduated from Harvard and to do so wrote an unreadable historical thesis. While at Harvard, he one day with a friend visited the Harvard Lampoon, and found his home. He became a comedy writer, never imagining that anyone would actually pay him to write like that. After graduating, he wrote for a show called Not Necessarily the News. I remember that show and watched it whenever it was on in my younger years when entertainment was not everywhere around us. Hosted by Rich Hall, it became highly regarded for its “Sniglets, or funny and satirical one-liners. One I remember clearly was labeling the square in the upper right of an envelope that said “Affix stamp here” as the “idiot box”. I have a hunch O’Brien wrote that. His observational humor is timeless. (He avoids topical humor – look elsewhere for Biden/Trump jokes.)

Note to readers, 12/16/2023: I am re-posting this piece written in 2020. Ab at Fakeologist ran a 