Conan O’Brien’s old timey baseball bit is a great example of why his comedy still works
Conan O’Brien’s old timey baseball bit is a great example of why his comedy still works
Conan stuck to silly, non-topical jokes - and still does. Today, there are enough Late Night bits to fill a whole SiriusXM show.
In the early 2000s, Conan O’Brien invaded a recreation of an 1864 baseball game at a New York museum.
By the time I saw the clip of this bit, it was already two years old. It remains funny to me today, nearly 20 years after it first aired June 25, 2004. It’s also still funny to others. It’s been viewed 4.2 million times since it posted to Conan’s YouTube …. in 2019.
I don’t need to explain why the baseball bit worked (the clip is below), but it’s why it’s still funny that should give us confidence to create.
The old-timey baseball sketch makes a case for creating timeless stuff and should give us permission to get to work doing that. Topical writing, comedy, television, what-have-you remains important to mark a place in time and pays off immediately, but the long play is in originality and sticking to universal themes that hit decades later.
Here’s proof: Conan sold his podcast network to SiriusXM for a reported $150 million. The deal gave him his own channel with a show that features audio clips from his nearly 30-year run on late night. That means there are enough old-yet-still-relevant Conan clips to fill a whole show today.
“One of the things that just was a lucky accident is that I was never aggressively topical in my comedy,” Conan said on On With Kara Swisher. “We would do some topicality, but I think as late-night hosts go, I was more absurdist. And I just like the silly and that stuff — it turns out there are pieces that I can watch that we did in 1997 or 2007 or 2017 that make people laugh now, because they’re working off universal themes.”
Conan didn’t create this, of course. Plenty of movies and TV shows play off timeless themes around self-discovery, family, love and the hero’s journey to name just a few. But his example offers a chance to think hard about our own stuff: Is it playing off any of these themes or needling in on what people are talking about right now? Could a person a year from now feel the same about this thing as a person tomorrow?
I actually don’t think there are right answers to these questions. The purpose of going deep on these questions is to help us understand why something works. We determine whether that why works for us.