Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a documentary of Conan’s post–Tonight Show tour hitting SXSW, apparently flashes a new side of Mr. O’Brien. As the man himself explained to the Times today:
My staff, they saw this and they said, ‘Oh, we get to see a little bit of Mean Conan.’ And they said, ‘Mean Conan, he’s our favorite, he’s the funniest Conan.’ Which is weird. There’s a way in which, after our meetings sometimes, I’ll talk about the show and I’ll just go on these long riffs, which are over-the-top, sarcastic about everything, and people will be laughing really hard while I’m saying negative things about the show. I’m really hard on myself, I get very dark. I tease people constantly. I physically fight my writers, and they fight me back. And so it’s this gear I have that I’ve used sometimes on television but really hardly at all. There’s all of this stuff there that I think, well, if not now, when? Might as well let people know he exists.
In the flick Mean Conan is “seen snapping at his wife, Liza; his assistant, Sona Movsesian; and the 30 Rock actor Jack McBrayer, whose smiling Southern countenance collapses when Mr. O’Brien serenades him with a piano tune called ‘You Stupid Hick.‘“Also, at one point, he compares his suffering to that of Anne Frank’s. Can’t wait to see this thing!
Conan in the Wilderness [NYT]
A Documentary Reveals the Dark Side of Conan O’Brien [ArtsBeat/NYT]