Conan O'Brien: Ultimately, "We don't matter"

Really? Saith Norm Macdonald: "Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God"

I was never much of a Conan O’Brien fan — until I was exposed to some of his classic work with the late, great stand-up comic Norm Macdonald.

For me, everything came alive after I watched one of the strangest moments in the history of late-night television. I’m talking about the “moth joke” that Macdonald improvised when O’Brien informed him that they needed another six minutes or so of material to fill some empty air time.

Macdonald took a rather silly one-liner and turned it into spun gold.

Now, I want to start with that encounter as a way of backing into some strange, rather haunting, remarks of a Rational Sheep nature by O’Brien in a New York Times story that came out this summer and, well, I have been thinking about it ever since. The headline: “Conan O’Brien Doesn’t Matter*.”

Let’s start with a chunk of the “On Religion” column — “What shaped the mysterious mind of comedian Norm Macdonald?” — that I wrote after his long battle with cancer, a struggle that he kept totally to himself.

The key, as I expressed it in that column, was that Macdonald “openly identified as a Christian, while making it clear that he didn't consider himself a very good one.” Here is some additional background:

Raised vaguely Protestant in Canada, Macdonald didn't discuss the brand-name specifics of his faith, even as he wrestled with his own demons — such as habitual gambling. Yet he could be stunningly specific when addressing criticisms of Christian beliefs. As a judge on NBC's "Last Comic Standing," he quietly shot down a contestant who trashed the Bible, before praising the Harry Potter series.

"I think if you're going to take on an entire religion, you should maybe know what you're talking about," said Macdonald. "J.K. Rowling is a Christian, and J.K. Rowling famously said that if you're familiar with the scriptures, you could easily guess the ending of her book."

The result was a public persona laced with paradoxes, an edgy, courageous comic who often seemed unconcerned if his work pleased the public or his employers. Nevertheless, superstars such as David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Newhart and others hailed him as a deadpan comic genius and mourned his passing, at the age of 61.

"I am absolutely devastated about Norm Macdonald," tweeted Conan O'Brien, who once clashed with network leaders about how often he could feature Macdonald as a guest. "Norm had the most unique comedic voice I have ever encountered, and he was so relentlessly and uncompromisingly funny. I will never laugh that hard again."

Now, since we are going to talk quite a bit about death and dying (sort of, maybe) let’s look at another long passage from that column — which happens to be at the end:

During several interviews with Larry King, the late talk-show giant turned the tables and pushed Macdonald to address years of media chatter about his "religious views."

"I'm a Christian," Macdonald replied. "It's not stylish to say that, now."

King pushed on: "Are you devout? … You believe in the Lord?"

"Yes, I do," Macdonald said.

Unaware that he was interviewing a man with cancer, King on another occasion asked: "You think that you're going somewhere when [life] ends?"

"Well, I don't BELIEVE it," Macdonald replied, saying the word "believe" in a way that added verbal quotation marks. "What people don't understand about faith is that you have to CHOOSE. You know what I mean? They think that you believe it – but you have to choose."

When King said that he simply could not believe, because of the presence of evil in the world, the comedian quipped: "It sounds like you have a God-shaped hole in your heart."

Macdonald was even more concise in a tweet posted on Oct. 17, 2017 – the date of annual "Reformation Day" celebrations observed, alongside All Hallows' Eve, by Lutherans and some other Protestants.

"Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God," wrote Macdonald. "Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is."

Now, what about the “moth joke”?

That classic was, to be blunt, almost impossible to handle in the short, rightly formatted confines of an analysis column produced for local newspapers. However, I did dig into that in a longer podcast and post for GetReligion.org — “Did a religious search help shape Norm Macdonald's haunting humor?”

As it turns out, there is a full transcript of the “moth joke” online. That’s the kind of thing that I could handle at GetReligion.org, but not in an “On Religion” piece.

In other words, what we have here is another long and complicated quote, which is sort of the point of the whole deal. Read this carefully and be on the lookout for some serious references to Russian literature and, maybe, even an allusion to a famous Eastern Orthodox icon.

After a bit of banter, Macdonald launched into the joke, proper:

‘A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office. The podiatrist’s office says: “What’s the problem?” The moth says: “What’s the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long, I work. Honestly, Doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows.

‘He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there…’

‘The podiatrist says: “Oh yeah?” The moth goes: “Yeah … at night I … I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, Doc. I don’t know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexandria, she fell in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us.

‘And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch … I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I … that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror.

“If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and ends this hellish facade once and for all.”’

[Conan then interrupted, joking: ‘How long a drive was this?’ but Macdonald continued, unperturbed.]

‘He says: “Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good.

‘And so the doctor says: “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?”

‘And then the moth said: “Cause the light was on.”’

Silly, right? But look at all of the oh-so-human pains and problems that Macdonald working into that long and winding road of a joke.

If you want even more Macdonald material on death and eternity, check out this second “On Religion” piece that I wrote when Netflix aired the "Nothing Special" Macdonald special, which was built on some videotapes that the comic prepared during the COVID-19 lockdown. He was well aware that he might not live long enough to do the “special” for real.

That Netflix special ended with a roundtable discussion of this finale dose of Macdonald material, featuring an A-list circle of the biggest names in comedy — all of whole had years of ties binding them to their fallen colleague. We’re talking about David Letterman, Adam Sandler, Dave Chappelle, David Spade, Molly Shannon and, of course, O’Brien.

Prepare for more commentary on Macdonald’s Big Questions at the end.

This special was full of "third-rail stuff," noted O'Brien.

Macdonald riffed on his own "degenerate" gambling sins, his fear of airplane crashes ("Ashes to ashes, stuff to stuff, as the scriptures say"), cannibalism, slut-shaming, racism, transgenderism and his fear of dying and discovering that he picked the wrong religion. He also discusses living wills and giving doctors explicit instructions not to yank "that plug in the wall" in the event of a coma.

"This guy was, in a weird way, reconciling his mortality — hilariously — in front of us," said Chappelle.

Obviously, said Shannon, it's important to know that "in the last 13, 14 years … he got really into reading about God and Christianity and really wanting to understand. …"

"Where he was headed?", asked Spade.

"God. Death," said Shannon. "He was thinking about death and really wanting to understand God."

Now, finally, we get to the chatty, first-person Times feature about O’Brien’s efforts to wrestle, at the very least, with the end of his life in old fashioned late-night comedy.

The problem is that O’Brien addresses that subject in language that is much broader than one would expect. And Times writer Jason Zinoman seems to be somewhat tone deaf (correct me if you think I’m wrong) to the faith implications in all of this.

By the way, O’Brien has frequently talked about his Catholic upbringing, while implying that some degree of faith may remain.

Here is example No. 1, as in the overture:

After hosting talk shows for nearly three decades, Conan O’Brien has come to believe that longevity is overrated. The first time he made this point to me was in April at a restaurant in New York, when he proposed that all statues and monuments should be made with durable soap that dissolves in seven years. One month later, in his office in Los Angeles, down the hall from his podcast studio, he went further, declaring himself anti-graveyard.

Asked if this means he wants to be cremated, O’Brien responded: “I want to be left in a ditch and found by a jogger.” Taking up space in a cemetery seems selfish to him. “I say this in a positive way,” he added, leaning forward and shifting to a less jokey tone. “We don’t matter.”

No. 2 arrives a few paragraphs later:

In one of several interviews, I asked him if he was happier now than when he was on television and his response was to question happiness itself. “At best it’s a fleeting moment after a rainstorm when the sun’s coming out,” he said. “Being contented comes in little moments, here and there.”

Now, the Big Idea here is that O’Brien has always been dead serious about his decades of work combining silliness and the intellect. He “agonizes” — variations on this word keep showing up in the Times text — over everything while seeking some kind of mass-media greatness.

Take this crucial moment, which is No. 3 on this list:

His famously unlikely talk-show career, initiated when Lorne Michaels plucked him from obscurity to take over for David Letterman at “Late Night,” began with a joke that seems to hint at his teeth-grinding, hand-clenching personality: a cold open in which he walked through New York carefree while everyone, from girls playing hopscotch to a talking horse, reminds him that he’s under a lot of pressure and that he “better be as good as Letterman.” It’s a comic nightmare of his inner monologue that ends with him considering killing himself.

MANY COMEDIANS SEE a connection between misery and their ability to be funny, often citing humor as a survival mechanism. But after considerable therapy and reflection, O’Brien has changed his mind. He’s come to believe that not only are they not related at all, but so much stress didn’t help him be funnier. With new eyes, he has set about creating a new story.

Might that be the story of his life?

But I kept wanting to ask: If O’Brien “doesn’t matter,” what does? What has he learned (yes, with millions of dollars in the bank) about the meaning of life and, maybe, what comes after that?

It’s clear that O’Brien appreciated Macdonald’s candor on those topics and mourned the loss of his friend. Maybe this has something to do with learning what matters and what doesn’t matter?

So, here is the finale in this “meaning” and “faith” haunted feature.

It’s time to sum things up, you see:

THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT OURSELVES matter even if they don’t fundamentally change us. O’Brien has been mulling his own story recently since, … he’s contemplating a book about his life. In studying the genre, he noticed that in many memoirs, the authors always take credit for their successes or failures. “But what if I didn’t do anything?” he said. “What if they figure out there’s a little piece of zinc in people’s brains that makes us do what we do?”

This goes back to his belief that we do not matter. O’Brien, whose parents are in their 90s and who’s about to send his second of two children to college this fall, has the perspective of age. He has seen peers think fame and success would make them happy, only to be disappointed.

OK, I will ask. What has he learned about joy and happiness? And most of all, what are the elements of a human life that actually “matter,” the parts that “last”?

For millions of Americans, that is religious territory. What about O’Brien? Would it have been appropriate to ask a single question on that front? For example, what did O’Brien think of Macdonald’s imperfect efforts to combine faith, intellect, humor, pathos, repentance and friendship?

Would Norm have asked O’Brien questions about this “We don’t matter” gospel of his?

Just asking.