Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend - Tina Fey

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Writer, comedian, and actress Tina Fey feels good about being Conan O’Brien’s friend; it tracks.Tina and Conan sit down to discuss SNL-induced OCD, bringing Mean Girls to Broadway, husband Jeff Richmond’s mysterious recurring Conan role, getting over the “chipple,” and improvising like a writer. Plus, Conan responds to a voicemail about which president he’d like to eat.Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: [phone].

Hello, my name is Tina Fey, and I feel good about being Conan O'Brien's friend. I feel like it tracks. Hello and welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, my podcast, a second season. I'm really enjoying it, having a blast. Joined as always by my trusty companion and sometimes assistant, Sonam of Sessian. Sometimes assistant. Well, there are times where you sort of drop out for periods. You know what? I do.

Yeah, that's okay. You do the best you can, and it's good enough. I don't even do that. I'm just phoning it in most of the time. But I love you. You're great. Oh, that's nice. I love you too. We're friends. Yeah. We're basically family. You're the second older brother I never wanted.

And I'm also joined. I don't think you've earned the love yet. No. Gourly. You have for me, Matt. Thanks, and same to you. Matt, I see you as a, you know, you've sort of a younger sibling. I'm not sure about you yet. I've tried, like my other younger siblings, I've tried to kill you several times.

Yeah, I can vouch for that in so many ways. I tried to push you into a 1960s fan blade that doesn't have the protective cage. But you always get away. Yes, that's right. You're quite... I'm still here. You're still here with giant, you do have giant fan blades sticking to your face, rusty vintage fan blades, but still, I have to, I've been constantly being

prodded by our podcast overlord, Adam Sacks, who's always saying, more, more, do more. He is insisting that I put out a call to action that you please rate this podcast. I said, well, haven't we, I mean, it's been rated and it's doing really well. And he's like, more, more, I must have more, more stars, more. That's how he talks. He's always petting a white cat. Anyway, go to Apple podcasts and give us a rating. And if you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just do a five? Give us five. That's what I do when I take a ride on a lift or something.

I always give them the most number of stars. And think of me as your driver that you ordered, and I did a pretty good job. I got you here safely. I didn't talk too much. I was nice. Give me five stars. And if not for him, for Sona and me. Yeah. Yeah. Very excited. We can't waste time today. We can't because I'm thrilled about our guest. Guest today is just an absolutely hilarious comedian, writer, actor, and producer

behind such cultural hits as Mean Girls, 30 Rock. She was the first woman to be named head writer of Sona Live. And she's won nine Emmy awards and two Golden Globes. I admire her immensely, her talent, her work ethic, and I'm just absolutely thrilled to be talking to her today. Tina Fey, thank you for being here. I have a little bit of a complaint with you, which is that when I don't be afraid, it's really not that bad. It's to your credit and it shames me,

which is that when I walk through life many times, I've had people come up to me, get excited, and say, you're just so great on 30 Rock. And now look, I've done some other shit in my life, but you and I both know that if you added all the time that I've been in 30 Rock, it comes to about, I think, a total of three and a half minutes. At most. At most, yeah. And maybe one of it, one of those minutes is good. But you're like the Judy Dench of TV. You can win an Oscar for those three and a half minutes. But I swear to God, I don't know. I want to say to them at that moment, they're clearly huge fans of the show and rightly so, but I want to say to them, you realize I had

nothing to do. I don't even know why I was included in that show. I honestly don't know why you put me in the show. And then I think you had me on, you had me on an episode very early on. I think I was referenced a few times. Well, I think there's a, one of the season one episodes is called Tracy does Conan. Yes. And it's an episode where I felt like the show clicked into its tone. Or jump the shark. Well, that was first, we needed to jump the shark immediately. We became basically a SeaWorld show about how many sharks one could jump. But, and so I think that was an important episode in the show. And, and then I think also,

is that the episode where we established that the character Liz Lemon used to date Conan O'Brien? Yeah. This was some sublimated fantasy of yours. Also, who's in the building? Who else works for Lauren and has to say yes. No, but that did also, it did. I think it was me and Al Roker. It was you and Roker, Roker past. Yeah. No, it just also just tracked in that way of like, well, she's a comedy writer. Right. Who would she have known 15 years ago? Yep. Yeah. Five years ago then. Right. So I'm really not in the show, but I remember shooting

a scene with Alec Baldwin, where our faces are right up against each other and walking away from that and thinking, I'm not an actor. Every day of my seven years. No, no. She'd be like, oh, that's good. No, that's something that you, here's something I think we could talk about that interests me, which is that you and I both came from this world of wanting to be funny, write jokes. I do feel like you worked harder and obviously did a lot better job at becoming an actor than I ever could have. I took a serious acting class early on in my life. I was like 22 and I remembered someone saying, yeah, you're, I was doing improv at the time

and someone said, you need to take a serious acting class. So I did, and I had a scene where I had to tell a woman, another scene partner that I loved her and really mean it. And I said, I cannot do this. I can do it if it's funny, but I can't show real emotion. And the acting teacher literally said, you need to go. Good acting teacher. Yeah. Didn't just want to keep taking the check. No, no, no, no, no, no. Just really very upfront with me. You need to go. Where was this in Chicago, Boston? This was in New York actually. This was in New York and I was in New York briefly. I think it was when I was working at Sound Out Live and I cannot do it. Did you take any? Well, I secretly have a degree in drama. I mean,

not secretly, but no one cares. So I did, I studied drama at the University of Virginia in a very small little program and between, and also I think because I came up from old school improv training, the second city, the kind of Martin DeMotte, not just UCB, which is cooler and more, I wanted to say cutthroat, but I don't know. But it's much more like just find the gameplay. The old school second city training was so much of sitting and doing machines and mirror work. You push past how deeply corny and embarrassing it is to be like, there's just so much eye contact. The amount of eye contact, we're both hating this right now, how much eye contact I'm giving you, right? It's horrible. I'm falling in love.

I don't know what your problem is. You just see a BDI is looking at you. It's all about like pushing past how incredibly corny it is to allow yourself to try to care, to be vulnerable and stuff. And because, I guess because I had done that, I didn't mind returning to it. I think acting, you know, Amy said that she wanted to call her book movies are boring and acting is embarrassing or something like that because it is just so embarrassing. And so I don't mind, I'm very limited as an actor. Like I feel like I have a salieri like clarity on my limits as a performer, it's torture, but I don't mind, I don't mind like trying. And some comedy people do. For me, the boundary is the one thing I can't

do is like I would never be able to believe me no one's asking, but like I won't do like a sex scene. Like that's the one thing. And I think is also the comedy person, pardon me, can remember an early enough time and improv, like an older generation of improv where people would sometimes try to pimp you into something like that on stage just to be a jerk. And so I have the like, nope, you're not going to trick me. So that for me, that's the boundary. Like I'm not going to simulate intercourse in a movie, no matter how many people call. I always say, if my wife and I are watching a movie and there's a very explicit sex scene, I always say out loud, being an actor is so embarrassing. I say that, I say that out loud because I think about these people

that they're in front of 50 people and they're people holding booms and people want to go to lunch. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, I feel like you managed, I saw you do improv and you just had this real clarity and focus up there. And you, I think you were helping direct scenes and make things happen. Maybe. Yeah. No, I was very, I was very, I remembered thinking, oh, she's fantastic. She's great. And, and shouting that out a few times. Then being asked to leave. I was asked to leave. Yes. I had been drinking. She's really good. And I, I, one of the things that I noticed about your work is the quality and pure volume of good jokes, whether it's in 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, they're incessant and they're a very high quality. And I thought, and then this was

later born out and your book comes out and all these other great things happen for you. But I always look at you as someone who does the work. I do think that isn't discussed enough out there that hard work, you are an extremely hard worker. And I think you have a very high bar. Thank you. I, I will allow it. I agree. We, especially during 30 Rock Times, we work very hard. And I think that, you know, I wrote that pilot on my own, but every episode thereafter was, was me working with Robert Carlock, my old friend from SNL. And so I think we bring that out in each other. He is a great joke writer. And I think, I think the two of us together is a very strong combination. And we did Kimmy Schmidt together also. Yeah. Yeah. But those are, there's

a lot of times I've seen those episodes. And I feel like, no, I need to watch that again, because the jokes are coming so fast. And I don't know where that comes from. Does that come from, I feel like you just have to have that work ethic. I'm guessing you were like that when you were younger coming up. Yeah. I think it was hard, a good work ethic in school. I think a good work ethic at SNL. Yes. Yeah. And then wanting to make the, when we started making the thing that was really ours, just the mania of like, we're going to make this thing that's ours. No one's paying attention to us really, because everyone's paying attention to Studio 60. So we can just keep putting too many jokes in a five pound bag. That's right. Studio 60 came out at the exact same time.

And there were two shows, one, and initially it seemed like, well, who's... Well, we're doomed. What's going to work here? The one that's packed with, it's Aaron Sorkin. Aaron Sorkin and a bunch of huge stars. Thank God we had Alec. If we had, if we didn't have Alec, it would have just been like, we're not even picking up this pilot. Right. But I think, like I said, in some ways, Robert and I bring out the worst in each other in that way that we'll want everything to be perfect and we'll look at each other like, should it be, you know, people who worked on 30 Rock all moved away as fast as they could when it was over. Because I think we broke them. I think we broke a lot of people. Yeah. And there was a lot of, it was a loving staff and there was a lot of

pride and we did a lot of good work. But I think a lot of people never want to see us again. I think that's a sign that you've done your job. We've done our job. If you can break people. Yeah. Jack McBrayer is the one that I probably know the best of that cast. And I realize the other day I've never had a real interaction with him. I only improv with him. I have never once said, Hey, how are you? Yes. Anytime I see him, I become the cruel over the top. You go into your bit. I go into my bit. He's so good at going into the hang dog. Being hang dog sad. Being hang dog sad. And then it culminated in me documentary of this tour I did and Jack came backstage and I had my guitar and I started to play, do the same thing with him.

And I'm doing it. I started to play doing, you know, the song from Deliverance, you know, and he started to dance against his will. A critic for the New York Times said, a low point was when Conan O'Brien cruelly forced. How can you make somebody dance against their will? Oh, thank God for the times. How would we find all our low points and mistakes if it weren't for the times? They know comedy. They know comedy. They love comedy. No, Jack McBrayer is a trained clogger. Happy for an opportunity to clog. But it is true that Jack McBrayer, again, back to the Venn diagram of people and ethnicities were allowed to torture. It's just, McBrayer is the only one left. There's no other cultural kind of game you could play with any living person. Right.

That would be politically correct in this era. There come so and so. But you're allowed to go after Jack McBrayer for being hill people. And that's something that I feel really good about. No, I was, you know, Sound Out Live is a place where I felt like I learned to take my ambition and my work ethic and hook it up to this machine that knew no limit. Like you can't work too hard at Sound Out Live because it will always ask for more. I don't know about you. You had crazy success there. I have some dark memories of SNL, mostly the writing night, Tuesday night. People always say to me, oh my God, working at SNL must have been fantastic. And I think, yes, it was. It was beautiful and fantastic and changed my life in so many ways. Tuesday night, staying up all night,

writing, I have PTSD from that to this day. Yeah. A lot of people do. Also, you know, it's a schedule designed around cocaine. And then the 70s end and people, as far as I know, well, I got there was the 90s. As far as I know, cocaine was gone. But we were still staying up all night. Yeah. A lot of people, I think it brings out OCD and people who never had OCD before. Like I remember going from Tuesday night and I'm not making light of OCD, whatever, but behaviors. I'll do that later. Behavior. I remember, you know, and tell me if you were the same, we go, okay, stay up all night. And then you're going into Wednesday writing night. And I would say things to my brain like, I got to get off the train on the same side. And I have to go

around this pillar or my sketch is going to tank. And I have to go up these and I have no, no behavior like that in any other part of my life. You were forced into it. I would have crazy thoughts like that. Yes. Sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is no joke. It is, I was reading, I think it was a Malcolm Gladwell book recently and they talk about how the most effective torture still is sleep deprivation. And it's why fraternities do it. It's, it's just, it works. Deprive someone of sleep is, and they will break. And you know, starting out live, there was this crazy thing of almost, you're not allowed to write a sketch ahead of time and, and keep it. You can't quietly write it on a Saturday afternoon. There's no

reason why you can't. No, no, no, there isn't any reason. But no one does. But no one does. And so what happens is no one even writes them on Mondays. The host comes in and we all sit on the floor like children and the host is sitting there and we, you know, say, I'm just, you know, who's a random host, Brett Kavanaugh, when he was on, he was great. He was great. I had a weird thing with there. There's no time for that. No, but you say to Matthew Maudine or whoever the guest is, he's my go to Matthew, Katie Holmes, Katie Holmes, you say to Katie Holmes, you make up an idea that you don't even intend to do. And mine always involved a blimp, like a, there's a restaurant on a blimp. And I would say it to every single, and they would go like, huh, okay, maybe. And Lauren

would go like, you know, possibly, you know, but why didn't I have a sketch ready to go on Monday? There's no reason, but none of us did it. And then we all stayed out. I would say, I was a nerd. I tried to have real pitches on Monday. And I did. And they oftentimes weren't, but I used to try. I used to get up on Monday and have tea. I didn't even drink coffee then have a tea at the corner of the place by my house and try to, and I would write out the host's name and I would do a whole chart of like, okay, this is with type against type. And what could I think of for the host? And I would try to go in because I did, I just think that was only a few people could get away with the fake pitch every week. J.B. Smoove was in the writing staff when I was there. And he used to

pitch the same fake pitch every week and kill every week with the same fake pitch was a, it's a all day cigarette. It's a, it was this long, you smoke it all day. And it's just like he would indicate like a foot long cigarette. And it's good because you could just ash out the window in a terrible J.B. Smoove impression. But I also got racially nervous about attempting a J.B. Smoove impression. In private, I do an amazing J.B. Smoove. And you would kill every week, but I couldn't get away with that. So I would try to have stuff. You know what's weird? Now I've been there a last couple of times where I've happened to be around on a Monday for some other reason over there. Everybody leaves and doesn't, like we would, we would sweat through

pitch and then you go and start writing Monday night and try something. Yes. They're gone. That's strange. I've heard that. I've heard, now this, now I sound like the old man who says, you know, you know, I'm embracing it, I'm embracing it, but I do think we worked harder. I've offered many times to go in and yell at people like, would it be helpful if women just come and yell at people? Yeah. Yes. Lawrence turned it down every time. I'm 49. I love to yell at people. Man, I, the staying up all night and then into Wednesday. And I remember there being kind of a macho, because I'm in my 20s and I loved like, I just urinated blood. You know, I, I've been up, I'm going to push this so hard that I hallucinate and, and that I get sick. Yeah. And it's

going to, and then I'm going to take the L back to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and I'm going to get shot by someone dealing crack. That's how much I care about comedy with a capital C, man. We're not screwing around here. And then when you hear about today, it can sometimes sound like they all went to a salad bar and they, I think everyone has a better, I think they have better lives than we did at that time. Remember the thing that I used to hate, they'd come around and say like, they'd make a list of, do you want to talk to the host? I was like, never. I never want to talk to the host. Did you, would you accept the offer to talk to the host? What I remember is hosts wandering in and I have a really strong, those are some of my strongest memories is me sitting at

my desk. It's one o'clock in the morning and staying walks in and sits on the edge of my desk. Yeah. I remembered Melanie Griffith wearing really tight leather pantsuit coming in. I'm a nerd to the 10th degree and I'm at my desk trying to think of his sketch and she came in sort of like Marilyn Monroe and that Marilyn Monroe voice and she had just done working girl. This would be like 1988, 89 and she sat on my desk and she was like, so what are you working on? Oh, you seem like you'd be a good, right? And it was, I was, I was like, oh. And those are my memories of just people that would come in like Andy McDowell bringing me a birthday cake because she heard it was my birthday and or a slice of a cake. I don't,

I probably expanded it in my mind. Maybe it was just a piece of pie. I don't know. I remember the, like I think my first show or first or second show that, what my first year was Sylvester Stallone. And I remember thinking that when you go into that pitch meeting and you see the person on the chair in Lawrence office and like, oh, that's a movie star. Like mostly, they almost always looked significantly different and better than us. You know, that you like just the teeth and the, I remember just thinking like that was, he had just probably like a $400,000 watch on or something. I'm like, oh, that's a straight up movie star. And it pretty much always held. I guess maybe because they're coming from,

I don't know if they're take their host photo that day too, but the women always just like done to the nines. And we just like crawl in, like we just came out of a swamp. Yeah. I actually, one of the things I like the most about the podcast, which has just been a total lark that we started doing. And then I realized I really loved it. And one of the things I like the most about it is I get to dress like a comedy writer. There's no makeup. There's no, we just slump in and we start talking. And I love not having makeup is the one thing that I, I'm still, and it's probably why I'm, I'm just not meant ultimately probably to be in front of the camera because I despise makeup. Well, I think you and I are actually similar in that.

And I think of myself as a comedy writer first and, and lady makeup takes, I'm going to guess about four times as long. No, I get lady makeup. Oh, you get lady makeup. You get a full row of lashes. I'm a very attractive woman. Like I did a movie with Steve Carell once. I was like, oh, I just have to come in an hour earlier than him every day. Cause it just, it's just lady being a lady. Yeah. I feel like, why can't that just be, can a computer do that later now? Yes, that's what I think. 2019. Just f stop seven on some computer. Is that wrong? I don't know much about, I don't know much about computers. Isn't that f stop seven? Something that we could do. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back.

All right. We're back. Was that creepy? The way you said that? Yeah. Okay. We're back. The second one was, yeah. Okay. First one. I'll go with the first one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry about that. I saw mean girls yesterday and I really loved it. Oh, thank you for going. I loved it. And I thought like this cast is spectacular. And I was also very impressed that I know the movie. Well, I was just really impressed with how it's much more than the movie. I mean, the movie stands on its own, but it's a whole other entity. Thank you. Yeah. We tried to, you know, for people who like the movie, they'll, it'll scratch that itch, but yeah,

there's no point in coming to a new thing if it's not also a new thing. When you look at how much work goes into a good Broadway musical and the precision and just, I know it took you years to get this thing onto Broadway. It's great. It's really impressive. It's really fantastic. And I will say that my wife and my daughter saw it a few weeks before I did. And they hated it. No, just absolutely walked out. They walked out. No, my, it's such a great thing for my daughter to see and she loved it. She absolutely loved it. It's a great, the word empowering is overused. I'm going to overuse it even more, but it's just terrific. There's a kid in the show right now. And I say kid because she's 19,

Skrull Renee, who plays Regina, Regina George is 19 years old. She's 19. She's 19. Yeah. She graduated high school. She's the winner of a thing that I think you would really enjoy called the Jimmy Awards, which is the national high school theater awards. So it's like the Tonys for high school theater. Yes. I feel like I would like to watch that with you. That's so in my wheelhouse. Right? You just sit down and watch that. But she is so talented. And because she is a real teen, absolutely terrifying on stage because no one can really terrify you like an actual teenage girl. Yeah. That's the other thing I noticed is that there, you had to cast for people that could, they all dance. They all sing insanely well and they're

funny. Now that's the thing. If you can find someone who's funny, that would be almost to the exclusion of everything else. One would think, but they also had to, I was like, but they're funny. So we had to really work hard to find them. And we have, and now we've had to find two sets of them because you're going on this national tour. National tour started last week, or I don't know when this airs. This will never air. Oh, never air. Okay. So no, this is my, for my private collection. It's never green. This is for my private collection. They call it a never green. I'm a real creep. I just, I have a real court case. I have her room I go into and just listen. And people say, you know, Tina Fey is a pretty big deal. You should, no, no, no,

this one's just for me. This one's for Papa. This one's for Papa. And then a steel door closes and I'm in there for an hour. No, I was, I don't know where it mean girls. The musical stands in your sort of hierarchy of things that you're proud of, but I love old time show business. And I know that to have a show on Broadway, I would love all the cliches like pacing outside in a tuxedo, waiting for the reviews to come in, you know, everything, you know, coming out the stage door, going in and saying, people, people, one, the three, one, two, you know, all this stuff that we've seen depicted. Yeah, I grew up, you know, watching the movie fame and a lot of old movies, too. But yeah, like being in the rehearsal room with them for a month was so thrilling.

Except the one thing is that that's, you know, it's mirrors everywhere. And when it's like a bunch of 20 year old dancers and you in the wall of mirrors, like, Oh, God, save me from these wall of mirrors. But the one funny thing was because they're all like gorgeous 22 year old dancers, there's a moment in the show within this number called, where do you belong? Where it's like in the movie where Damien's showing like all the groups in the cafeteria. And they're like, you know, here's the sexually active band geeks, trying to explain to gorgeous dancers how to be sexually awkward. It's we have to keep checking on it on the show. We have to keep going back because they're so beautiful and good at sex, I assume that like, no, just be more like, just

like, just be more dry humpy. And they're like, Oh, I never had to do that. No, never went through that phase. Yeah. So into constantly, the choreographers that come back and keep readjusting them to awkward, right? Because they're beautiful. This is you're actually ashamed of your body. Right. You don't know how to do it. You don't know how to do it. You're afraid the other person's going to let you do it. Going to judge your naked body. I don't know what you're saying. Okay, I'll dig deep on this. I don't really understand it. Yeah, I think to me, I don't know if you missed it when you were doing Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock, but I love an audience. I also really enjoy this. I love they're not being an audience because I think you can have

a different kind of a conversation, but I love anything that smells of show. I just always want to be in showbiz. Yeah, old school showbiz. Soundnet Live is very, you know, five, four, three, two. I mean, and then the crowd and the elation. And then of course, the sketch doesn't go great. And just the crash and the highs, the lows, I just wanted to be around that. Yeah. SNL is the maybe the last truly old school showbiz thing there is where, you know, it's just it is, it's stars show up and live music. It's so thrilling to be there. The few times you can count on your hand probably that you or one hand that you felt like you actually killed on air in that room, there's no beating it, you know, this one thing to sit in

an edit room and lock an episode of 30 Rock and be like, I feel like that's a good one. But to be in the room at SNL and be a part of anything that goes really well. And then we used to spend so much time on 30 Rock 2 because it was for broadcast TV. It had to be exactly 21 minutes and 15 seconds long, which is really short. And then we would cut to that. And then sometimes I would check, I remember I would check on like NBC.com or iTunes after the show came on and be like, huh, it's a little shorter on iTunes or whatever. And that we found out that sometimes they would varice speed the show, they would take the show was already too fast and too stuffed and speed it up a little bit to get one more promo for animal hospital or

whatever the fuck it was. That's first on my course. I was trying not to curse. But thinking back about NBC promos made me cry. And so they would actually sometimes speed it up without our knowledge after we spent so much time. That's a real thing. They speed it up slightly. They would take a part where no one was talking, it would be just like Jack McBrayer stepping into an elevator and it would be like, they would get like a half a second here and half a second. Did you stop it? Did you get involved? We complained. I don't know if it stopped.

You showed them. We showed them. I lodged a complaint. We lodged a complaint to Rick Ludwin. God bless Rick Ludwin. He's a good man. Do you, you know, I wanted to ask you quickly why you're a very talented husband, Jeff Richman, who did the music for Mean Girls, a very talented guy. For many years, he would do bits on the

show. This is the thing. In a diaper office. Yes. And I, this was not intentional, but we would, for some reason, Jeff consistently in every single bit that we did was dressed in some. Like a cherub. A cherub or, you know, covered in some kind of goo or, and in some way, and I thought, this is just accidental, but it looks intentional. It looks like I was trying to destroy your marriage. It really, it really does look like, okay, Conan loves Tina. He's trying to humiliate her fiance. He wants to, he wants to emasculate her fiance on his show so that she falls in love with him.

And I tried and tried and tried. And it actually is like a great, someone should use that as a plot for a movie. It's a found horror movie. Yeah. It's, yeah. It's used together from. Yeah. Today he plays the toilet seat. Wait, just get a toilet seat. No, get Jeff Richman. But I actually, I was, I was, I looked up, I was curious and I looked up Jeff on his, on like Wikipedia and one, it says all the great things that he's done and accomplished, but one of the

early things it says is appeared, appeared on Conan O'Brien several times as Russian hat guy. I don't know who Russian hat guy is. That's why that's our, that's like our Netflix password. And I never know why that's like, with, with some numbers that you can't figure out. One, two, three. I never knew why that was his, but I don't, but I Hulu password. I don't know why he's rushed. I don't remember. He may have blocked it out.

Yeah. No, he clearly, I guess Russian. Hey, probably wore some kind of Russian hat. Here's the thing about Jeff is he's very handsome, but he's also very adorable. And he also is a site gag. Like he, as a, he's a director. He, he's about five. He says five, two. I don't think so. And so he, he, as a comedy director, he knows his own value as a site gag. And I respect that a lot. Like he knows that, he knows that standing next to you is super funny because it always, it always worked. Yeah. He fly him out. He'll do it again. He'll still do it for $400 for $400. He'll take the loss.

He'll dress as a cherub and a diaper and, and then be dunked in caramel. If you're listening to this, you know, just Google him right now, Jeff Richmond, like the city. And you'll see he's adorable. He's a very good looking man, very nice guy, very talented musician. But I, I feel like I marred his early career and I apologize for that. I have a very strong memory of you. I was doing the late night show. We used to do our rehearsals. Yes, we rehearsed that shit. You guys worked very hard too. I don't think you should make it seem like you didn't work.

No, no, we worked really hard, but we were in rehearsal and my daughter had been born a few months before Nev. And it was the first time I brought her to work briefly. And suddenly, I guess the, my rehearsal feed went throughout the whole building, but the double doors in 6A flew open and you came running in and you tried to steal your baby. You grab, grab my daughter and you just were lit. You just lit up and it was a cute baby. Well, but I also think it was, uh, there was just this moment where I thought, oh, this lady was going to have a baby. Someone's going to be having a baby soon, I think, because someone just really wants to grab my daughter and run away.

I think you sank your teeth into her at one point. Like she was a freshly baked loaf of bread. She was a delicious baby. Yeah. And so she's, so she's, how old now? She's in her late 40s. She's late 40s now, as am I. No, my daughter's turning 16. So yeah, so my oldest daughter's 14. So it still took a while, I guess. I held it off for a while. Yeah. I served comedy a little longer. That's right. You never did any good work after you gave birth. That is the curse for all women. Once they've, I think Jerry Lewis told me this, once they've, once they have children, they can never be funny again. Yeah. They're even less funny than before.

If that's possible, said Jerry Lewis. I'm going to ask a question and you can take this out if it's something you don't talk about. Cause the one thing that I remember so much from being our proximity to, to your show when you were in 6A was a invention of the word Chippell. Yeah. And how useful it is. No, I'll talk about Chippell. Sure. So, so Chippell is a super, super useful word in any workplace, I believe. Yeah. Do you want to explain Chippell? Yeah. And I'll say this. Robert Smigel was my original head writer. He was a brilliant writer at Serenite Live. He's a genius. Yeah. He's a genius. And most people know him as,

as Triumph, the insult comic dog. But he, he did so many things on my show. TV fun house. TV fun house. And he's just, just a brilliant guy and a lovely guy. And one of the things about working with someone who's that brilliant is that he was also, he could be very uncompromising. He could break producers because producers would, you know, he would insist that it has to be a real llama and we need it here in 10 minutes. And, and, and producers would, would break down crying. And it was, Robert is one of those people that when you're in, you, you need to accept, there's, I'm getting the genius, but I'm also going to get the guy who insists we need a llama

here in 10 minutes. Right. Oh, and this thing's going to be 20 minutes too long. Yes. Then it's going to, you know, but then we're going to edit it and it's going to be amazing, but we have to go through the, you know, and, and, and so what I used to get really tired of is people would say they would want to make some complaint because Robert had asked them to do something really impossible. And so they would say, okay, Robert's a genius and he's fantastic and he's the most prolific comedy writer I've ever encountered and he's, and they would go on for five minutes and they would say, but the studio's on fire, but the studio's on fire and, and two people are dead because he insisted on using real fire for the sketch. And, and I would always say,

do we have to do the whole preamble because it takes time and we all do it. So I said, let's not do that. Let's just say, I'm going to make up a word, Chippell. And you can condense. I love Robert. That means I love Robert. He's the best. He's a genius. We all know he's a genius. He's the best comedy writer anyone ever saw, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you can just say Chippell and everyone's understood and then you move on. Right. So you can come in and be like, Chippell, but I'm going to fucking kill some Michael. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Chippell, but the police are here and they're looking for Robert. So useful. I recommend people using it. And by the way, before this airs, you should trademark this word like Paris Hilton. You

need this because this is going to take off because every workplace has a guy that like, listen, Terry's super nice. And I know that, you know, his wife has no feet and whatever, and whatever, but blah, blah, blah, blah, Chippell. And I think, I think it got out because I think they did a oral history of Sonnet Live. And I think I said, I think I said Chippell in that or explained it without even thinking about it. And then everyone started coming up to me and saying, oh my God, Chippell. It's already out. No, no. Well, among, I think among comedy people, comedy aficionados, this goes to a very different audience. These are people that despise comedy. People in elder care. They want to hear my voice. They don't want to see my face. This is an ASMR.

But I, yeah, Chippell, that's one of those behind the scenes things. And Robert, if you're out there, I do love you. We all love you, Robert. But Chippell. You get it. But Chippell. Yeah, Chippell. I wanted to ask you quickly about improvisation. It's something that I've struggled with, meaning I love improv as a tool, but, and I've always thought maybe Tina is a like-minded spirit, which is I've always loved so much about it. But then there are elements of improv that run counter to my controlling, wanting to get something. Let's get it right. Let's make it as good as it can be. And there's sort of a raw, raw spirit sometimes to improv. Like, there's a lame line that ends the sketch, but everyone goes, yay, anyway. And I, I don't know.

I always, Lisa Kudrow used to tell me when I was at the groundlings, and I would sit and I would watch rehearsal. When improv wasn't going well, I would put my head in my hands in the audience. And she would say, you know, people can fucking see you. Yeah. You look like a dick. And it'd be like, I would be so overwrought with like, oh, this makes me, I'm really so embarrassing. I don't like improv when it's not going well. I get too upset. And I would put my head in my hands and she'd say, don't do that. Right. You do stop it. Yeah. I think she's more eloquent than that. But but I just, I don't know if you've had that. Yeah. Pure improv is a living thing. It's kind of a fun thing between the people and the audience who are there. And it doesn't usually hold up.

It's about being there and knowing that, oh, that was the best we could do in the moment. How about, oh, that surprised us in the moment. But that's why I think if you, you know, if you try to film an ass cat or whatever, it will be, if people know that you're filming it, it's usually, I think it tightens up in a way that is just not useful. And when people try to improvise on film, especially, I think there's a lot of actors who, who think they're improvising in movies, but they're just repeating their lines with a slightly different inflection. What are you doing? What are you doing? What do you want to do that over here? Let's do that. What are you doing? I'm improvising. Please stop. Okay, that was De Niro. No, I wasn't thinking of De Niro.

Yeah. And I, the tenets of improv, the yes and of it all, I think are really helpful in a writer's room. I think writer, improvisation is great, a great tool in a writer's room. Then you take the best of it and shape it. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and also I think I was an improviser. I, you know, I started, I tried to be a pure improviser. Again, all our mirror work and stuff. And I could kind of do it. And a lot of times the real pure second city stuff, like you don't get that much truly funny stuff out of it because it would be cheating to like throw a premise in there. But UCB, especially, yeah, improv Olympic, and especially UCB, like you do an ass cat with Ian Roberts, he's entering with a premise. They're just, they're just super fast writers. Yeah.

And they're piling up on each other, but they are writing as they go. And I think I always improvised like a writer. I think Matt Besser told me that once when he was my teacher. He's like, okay, you're writing good, Matt. You know, why, why try Matt Besser? For who? And it is, I feel like there's a handful of people that I know and more that I don't know. People who are like purely gifted, true improvisers is like Scott Adson, Dave Pesquazy, Kevin Dorf, Stack, Brian Stack. Let's have a shout out to Brian Stack. Brian Stack, another 30 rock guest. Brian Stack was on my show for most of its time and did, came up with some of the greatest left brain ideas of all time. And no one's face falls when their sketch is cut.

Like Brian Stacks. More than Brian Stack. Yeah. Just when, you know, when it was like, yeah, I'm not sure that works. He'd come back and go like, you know, we could try it again. Yeah. Okay. They're gone, Brian. Well, we could do it for these squirrels that are here. That's okay, Brian. I could get more squirrels. No, Brian, we're not going to perform this for squirrels, but he's, he's a brilliant guy and he works for Colbert now. So. Oh, right. Oh, they're out here. That's nice. I got to find them. You don't care. I do care. Yeah. These are all Chicago peeps. Sure. But I'm trying to think of the other, the pure improvisers, Polar, Jenna Gialovitz, the real, the old, the old original gangsters from Chicago. Yeah. Have you ever

done a really embarrassing bid or been in a really dumb outfit? And you go, well, that's what they're going to show at the Emmys when I die. I think about, I think about that a lot. Yeah. I think about my death a lot. Yeah. Because I'm sure it's going to be violent. It's just how I'm going to go. It's going to be violent and animal related. That's all the psychic said. Yeah. But I, I live in California now and I really would, I've said this many times, I would not mind if my death was at the hands of a bear or coyote or some kind of a, I could take a coyote. They're just, they're like dogs. They don't even, and there's, I could take it, but like a bobcat. I would like that to be the way I went because I

think people would, that would be cool. People would say. That would be, that would be cool. He was torn to shreds by a grizzly. That'd be cool. But it just, anyone can find anything and look at it and go, that man wasted his life. This got sad at the end. I've taken up a lot of your time, which I don't want to do because I know you're really busy. But this is, we've done, I don't know, I think we did last season, we did about 36 of these. And whenever people would say to me, but who do you really, really, really want to talk to? I would say I'm hard pressed to think of someone I respect more than Tina Fey. That's very nice. And it's just always, I just, a massive admirer of yours and continue to be. So I'm really glad you were able to do this. Thank you, Conan.

It's a pleasure to do it. I, I, I respect you and admire you very much. Also, get that gun further away from me. I know. I was going to say, you sound like a prisoner of war. I'm blanking. Ho Chi Minh has a great idea. No, it's great to, I feel like, I feel like what we could call the, the hard comedy soldiers, the people who believe in jokes being in things. So we have to, we have to stick together. We will soldier on. We will soldier on. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Okay, let's do some voicemails. Check in with the people here. Devin, number seven, please. Hello, Conan O'Brien. My name is Max. I have a fun question for you. If you were stranded on an island with every former U.S. president in American history,

which president would you eat first to force to cannibalize any former U.S. president? Who would it be? It's a fun podcast. Thank you. All right. Goodbye. Okay. Let me first of all say something, Max. Never preface things by, here's a really fun question. And if you do, don't do it in the voice of someone who's planted a bomb. Okay? That's what you just did. Hey, Conan, this is Max. I've got a really fun question for you. Sorry, Max. I mean, your fun sounds, you've weaponized the word fun. I'm just being honest. That was terrifying. That was absolutely terrifying. So I hope you like that. And then you said it again. I hope you like that fun question. Well, wait a minute, Max. We'll decide if it's fun. And why are you making this call

from a late seventies New York telephone booth and then running away so that you're not near the explosion? So those are things I'm just going to lay out. First of all, now let's get to your question. The answer is Taft. Taft was a big fat man. And there's a rumor that he got stuck. Don't get away from the microphone when you're laughing. Some of these laughs are gold. You're pulling away. Why can't you handle that we had a president who was a big fat fucking fuck? And I'm not fat shaming him or anything because he was absolutely. I am not. I am not because he was told. First of all, legend has it that he got stuck in the White House bathtub and they couldn't get him out. And I am not. I understand. I'm very sensitive to weight issues and I don't

want to get a lot of calls about this or anything. Taft took great pleasure in his heaviness. Taft was not someone who tried to go on the late 19th, early 20th century version of Weight Watchers. He didn't try and do anything. He used to say to people, I'll pass that amendment, but first I'll eat this entire turkey. And they'd say, whatever. And then they would say, Hey, we need to ask you about the Panama Canal. And he said, just one minute, I'll get to your question about the Panama Canal. But first, I'm going to deep fry an entire pig and eat it like a popsicle. So I think there's just good eat in there. I really do. So it's not because of his politics. It's because there's just so much meat. I don't ever think about politics has anything to do with. I think Democrats and

Republicans probably taste about the same. You know, so I'm not going to get into that. This is not supposed to be, there's too much divisive hate speech in this country. And I'm sick of that. I just want to get back to, Taft was a big fat fucking president. And I don't like hate speech and division. But that man was proud of his weight. He used to rub his, I mean, literally just rub himself, used to walk into cabinet meetings without a shirt and rub himself and say, look how much of me there is. Behold Taft. That's a true fact about Taft. He said, imagine eating this on a desert island. Yeah. He said, oh, I see you over there, Secretary of the Interior. We should get a look at my

interior. I just ate 850 eggs. Hey, Secretary of the Treasury, you should treasure this. And then he would drop his pants and show his massive buttocks and say six lambs could sleep in these buttocks. Behold. So that's just good eating. You had that answer ready to go. You thought about this. Yeah. Yeah. Guess what? This is to Max's credit. I was thinking about that on the way in today. I often think about which president would I eat on a desert island. And you go through all kinds of possibilities. You know, look, let's bring on a Trump. There'd be some good chomp in there. I mean, that's a man of, it's not a thin man. No. You want a president who's going to last a while. But he's like veal. Like there's no, no rigidity to the meat or anything. No, no. You know what?

Taft, well marbled. Yeah. Well marbled. Right. Tons of beef there. Yeah. You'd probably find all kinds of stuff. You know, I mean, just you'd forget. You'd think you had eaten all of Taft. Here's the thing. You'd be on the island and six months would have gone by. And you would think I, I, I just got to be, I wonder if there's any Taft left. And then you'd walk over to the other side of the island and you'd just walk, oh my God, look at that calf muscle. That thing's the size of a canoe. And it's just loaded with pure, just sweet Taft fat. And again, I do not want this podcast to be divisive. But what a fat fuck. How did he die? He just rolled away. They couldn't find him. He couldn't find him. Yeah. He just like grew into the landscape and

grass growled over him. No, I think the, he plunged to the center of the earth. The crust could not support the mantle. The could not support him. And he was probably now at the center of the earth, slowly burning. Which is why sometimes, sometimes in winter, you can smell cooking Taft if you're near a vent in the earth. This is probably our last podcast. This busted everything. Yeah, let's get out of here. Let's go get a burger. Conan O'Brien needs a friend with Sonam of Sessian and Conan O'Brien as himself, produced by me, Matt Gorely, executive produced by Adam Sacks and Jeff Ross at Team Coco, and Colin Anderson and Chris Bannon at Ear Wolf, theme song by the White Stripes,

incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair, and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples. The show is engineered by Will Beckton. You can rate and review this show on Apple podcasts, and you might find your review featured on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 323-451-2821 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. This has been a Team Coco production, in association with Ear Wolf.