About 20 years ago, Conan O'Brien a young comedian looking to launch a career in television joked with his friends about the ridiculous possibility of a brilliant scientist being afraid of the skeleton hanging in his laboratory. A few years after graduating from Harvard University, O'Brien moved to New York to begin working for Saturday Night Live, the hit comedy show, on which the fearful scientist and his lab skeleton became O'Brien's first sketch.
O'Brien, who was Dartmouth's 2011 Commencement speaker, shared the laboratory sketch and career advice in a talk he gave to about 20 Dartmouth students involved in comedy groups on campus on June 11.
"It's all about failing," he said while encouraging the students to persevere in their pursuits.
Despite his success in comedy, O'Brien said that even today his jokes do not always spark laughter from his audiences. He said he found that the best way to confront such awkward moments is to make another joke about how the first joke "really didn't work."
O'Brien also described comedy as a "very musical" performance.
"It's all about timing, the feeling in the room," he said. "You're building up tension and letting it go."
O'Brien said it has never been his style to "be shocking for shocking's sake," and that in certain kinds of comedy it can be difficult to balance being humorous and "overly crude." In today's media climate, one joke that goes too far can quickly attract a lot of unwanted attention, he said.
"The media needs seven controversies a day they'll make it if it's not there," he said.
He advised young people interested in careers in comedy to send in work tailored to the producers' show such as sample material for a potential next episode so it is easier for the producers to view aspiring comedians as possible staff writers.
O'Brien encouraged students to submit work to several different shows and to expect only a small percentage of offers.
"You have to launch all these missiles and you don't know which one's going to hit," he said.
After he graduated from college, O'Brien said he made an effort to pursue jobs including serving drinks and fetching coffee that brought him closer to potential employers.
He added that there were only certain types of comedy he enjoyed that also suited his talents, so he tried to focus his efforts on shows like Saturday Night Live and Late Night rather than sitcoms.
He described a "catch-22" of comedy that makes launching a career especially difficult needing an agent to get a job and needing a job to get an agent.
O'Brien also commented on how much comedy has changed since he first launched his career. Humor has become much more subtle and naturalistic, he said, noting the contrast between shows like NBC's "The Office" and the sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s with a studio audience telling people when to laugh.
The internet has changed the humor industry in several important ways, O'Brien said.
"The internet makes [the industry] a lot more democratic but it also makes a lot more noise," he said.
Producers in the humor industry are still searching for more ways to profit from new forms of media on the internet and the mechanisms they use will change dramatically over the next five years, O'Brien said.
Comedians, however, always find ways to adapt to changing media, he said.
"If Mark Twain were alive today, I think he'd be being funny on the internet," he said.
