A few weeks ago, the day I was scheduled to get a Covid booster *and* a flu shot, I woke up feeling a little wobbly. A little achy. Particularly tired.
I didn’t think much of it.
I’m just adjusting to my first cold winter in a few years.
12 hours after the double vaccine, I woke up sweating like Robert Hays in Airplane:
These are just the side effects. Tired. Achey. Feverish. Yup. Pfizer #2 and every ensuing booster also leveled me from about hour 12 to 24. Par for the course!
I then spent the next few days sleeping like a growing teenager, alternating in waking hours between frozen cocoons and impromptu saunas, all while gargling a Dead Sea-volume of hot, salty water. By day four, I took a Covid test.
Which is all to say: I wouldn’t recommend getting your flu shot and Moderna booster while you have Covid.
Which is also to say: we had a good run there as the last person I knew who hadn’t gotten Covid.
Which is all really to say: Will, what did you watch to pass the time? Did you start a new show? Did you finally get around to watching all The Godfathers in one sitting? Did you immerse yourself in Gerry’s romance on The Golden Bachelor?
No, my viewing habits didn’t change. I watched the same show I watch most nights: YouTube clips of my favorite comedians.
In the spirit of the holidays, bounty, and abundance, I’ll run through a buffet of laughs, Feel Goods While Feeling Bad. In the spirit of being sick, the sequencing of these videos often feels like a fever dream montage because, you know, same.
I watched Nathan Fielder do press with Emma Stone for their new, David Lynch-ian, pitch-black comedy on Paramount+ called The Curse about an HGTV couple gone off the deep end (a bizarro Mad Libs sentence of random nouns if I’ve ever read one). I can’t remember laughing so hard watching an interview, specifically from 7:40 to 10:10 when Jimmy Kimmel reads Nathan’s pre-written speech to leave on The New York Times’ answering machine. I also can’t remember laughter ever yielding such productive releases of nose-and-throat boogies,
Emma Stone's commitment to the bit? The smaller brushstrokes of deranged specificity, mentioning his “afternoon banana,” confusing “lesbian” for “thespian?” What I’m feeling, friends, is a contact high.
I then remembered, in my foggy haze, that one time Nathan Fielder was sincere:
Until he wasn’t:
I was then reminded of John Krasinski’s loving ode to Conan. I’d forgotten how Krasinski teared up his first time on Conan. I teared up, again, hearing this, again:
I was reminded of all the Marty Short roasts of Conan. I’d shown them to my dad, weeks before I got Covid, and had never seen him laugh so hard.
(That is, with the possible exception of when I showed him a few Please Don’t Destroy videos. Folded-over, eyes-watering, shake-laugh squealing).
I was reminded of all the Paul Rudd Mac and Me gags on Conan. I watched every single one, a quarter century (!!) of Paul Rudd trolling Conan, a quarter century of Conan delighting in Rudd’s trolling. Or maybe I was just watching the same clip, over and over (Linear time is unclear when 1. Paul Rudd doesn’t age and 2. your Covid brain holds the neuroplasticity of room-temp mac n’ cheese.)
I relistened to “true fan of the podcast,” Norah Jones, say how "it really lit me up [in the pandemic]...hearing you guys laugh." And to Questlove say how "this podcast saved my life during the pandemic." I rewatched the Kevin Nealon “beautiful trainwreck." And Conan Without Borders in Ghana and Japan. And Conan giving a weather report in Greenland. And Conan-written Simpsons episodes. And every Sona office bit. And every Clueless Gamer. And Conan being “a delightful jackass" at the Emmys. And every Marshawn Lynch appearance, an athlete who famously hated talking to the media but loved talking to Conan.
On day 3 of Covid, I took an intermission from a three-hour, under-the-covers, shiver nap to ask myself, “you know what I need right now?” “That’s right. I need to rewatch Bill Hader tell Conan how much his comedy meant to him as a kid, how he used to watch his late-night show during lunch in high school.” I cried. Like, a solid stream. Maybe it was the raging fever. Maybe—definitely—I’m an easy cry. Probably a combo of the two.
I was reminded how much his work has made me laugh over the years. How grateful I am for him and his shows and his team and their whole, inclusive, weird fun house.
I was reminded how Conan’s flavor of self-deprecating wit—Monty Python meets Steve Martin, the sharpest Harvard Lampooner and the most allergic to self-importance—has always lightened my load (what an expression: to lighten someone’s load. Ie. To somehow lessen someone else’s burden or weight Ie. To take on someone else’s figurative toiletries from their figurative carry-on right before metaphorical TSA Ie. To make someone’s day, even just momentarily, lighter, looser, less heavy—”light” as in, yes, not heavy but also as in not dark, also as in visual glow, also as in whimsy. “Fuckin’ hell.”—Roy Kent).
The older I get, the more I appreciate enthusiasm, generosity, and humility. Where those converge looks and sounds a lot like Conan (I can only imagine how many executives would’ve passed on Gary Gulman’s A+, politically-charged, new hour—out tomorrow on HBO Max—in which he skewers the gratuitously wealthy, goes full comedic Bernie Sanders, and tears smug billionaire, Jerry Seinfeld, a new asshole. You know who didn’t pass? Executive producer, Conan O’Brien, reaching back down the ladder.).
For years, I listened to Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend on the T, going to Emerson, very tense before getting workshopped. I often listened coming home, too, needing some silliness after too much time with some too-self-serious writers. I listened in early-pandemic isolation and early-pandemic angst and later-pandemic isolation and later-pandemic angst. I listened in packed, masked airports and alone on LA freeways. I listened to Conan, on The 10, making up fake Taylor Swift song titles (3:58 on), which did the impossible: made me laugh so hard that I forgot—or rather, didn’t care—that I was stuck in smoggy gridlock, missing Boston.
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is,” Kurt Vonnegut reminds us.
A few weeks ago, I sat in my room, curled up on the floor, shivering, sweating, listening to the Please Don’t Destroy goobers on Conan’s podcast. Near the end, John Higgins shifts from goofy to sincere: “Conan, you’re the greatest to ever do it.”
Of course, Conan deflects. Of course, “greatest to ever do it” feels like a stand-in for Most Prolific, Incisive, Brilliant Clown, Who’s Also A Notably Generous Teammate. A synonym might as well be: Comedic Connector. A synonym for Comedic Connector might as well be: If Yes And—Really Listening, Allowing, While Intuitively Responding/Building With Others— Were Your Life’s Mission.
The day I got out of quarantine, where did I go, you ask? How did I make up for lost time? A day at Encore Casino followed by a night of clubbing?
I drove straight to the library. En route, I listened to Birbiglia on Conan. Then I got pizza with Annie Gibbons. (“know thyself, you dweeb.”—Socrates.)
Birbiglia tells Conan, who’s thinking of maybe doing stand-up for the first time in decades, how much he’d love to “pop in for some of those shows.”
“I would love to have you do that.”
“I would love it.”
“You’re saying that now,” Conan says.
“It’d be my dream.”
“Would it?”
“All the jokes aside,” Birbiglia starts.
“Oh no...”
“You have to deal with this all the time—this is the bane of your existence. There’s this generation of comedians who view you as The Buddha Of Comedy.”
Sona jumps in: “yeah, you’re old.”
P.S. A wonderful classmate of mine, Tatiana, has a stunning new book of poems out now:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/nocturne-in-joy-tatiana-johnson-boria/20663433?ean=9781951979492
It’s my favorite kind of art: grappling with emotionally-urgent material through such playful forms. I love this blurb from Kemi Alabi: “Proving the personal is not individual, these poems collapse the distance between private and collective despair, familial and world historical violence, mundane and metaphysical relief. ‘Are these words happy or sad? / Does it matter / If the song / is a rich croon / in the body?” Nocturne In Joy is a survivor song echoing across dimensions.”
P.P.S. Speaking of “weird, inclusive fun house[s],” RIP to ImprovBoston, a delightful place where I did a lot of laughing and theater kid-ing for a few great years. Really sad news.
P.P.P.S. I discovered Conan’s LinkedIn page during all this, and it’s a miracle: