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)