Conan O’Brien does not want to sing the monorail song. Nor does he want to talk about Jay Leno.
But, in his first Australian show at Sydney’s State Theatre on Wednesday night, the awkward, absurdist paragon of the late-night comedy genre delivered live what his legion of fans have come to expect over more than two decades on US television: a spontaneous, at times chaotic romp which just about struck a balance between success and cacophony.
In town filming an episode of his Netflix travel series Conan Without Borders, O’Brien has spent much of his trip hamming it up for the cameras in predictable American-visits-down-under fashion.
He ran on the beach with lifeguards at Bondi, dressed as Crocodile Dundee while meeting koalas, and larked about at a Sydney Swans training session.
Wednesday’s live act charted much the same course, steering clear of controversy to deliver a show heavy on the kind of kitsch Australian audiences love to pretend not to love; jokes about budgie smugglers, Sydney’s superiority to Melbourne, and the weather – “Slip, slop, slap? Why not a fourth S? Stay the fuck in the house!”
Announcing at the outset that he’d arrived late at the theatre after catching Sydney’s infamously delayed light rail system – “all you people do is talk about the light rail” – O’Brien spent the first half playing up to the local audience with trademark self-deprecating humour.
His (actually bad) Australian accent “sounded like Mayor Quimby”. Australian men “look like me, if I had testosterone”.
O’Brien’s only explicit criticism was aimed at the carefully cultivated image of Australia as a laidback nation of party animals, taking aim at the continued prohibition on marijuana and the New South Wales government’s much-maligned late-night lockout laws.
“The whole impression that is out there about Australia is that you guys like to party,” O’Brien said. “That’s all the advertising. Everything we hear in the United States is if you want to get crazy, if you want to get nuts, go to Australia.
“Then I get here and the first thing I find out is that you’ve outlawed marijuana, it’s illegal here. It’s legal everywhere now, I don’t know if you know that but the United States is the most uptight place in the world and it’s legal there. The Vatican, it’s legal at the Vatican, but not in Australia.
“[And] no shots after midnight? Are you putting up with that? You guys all seem fine with it.
“Leave the bar after 1.30am and you can’t get back in? That’s the one. I saw that and I thought, ‘You leave the bar after 1.30am and you can’t get back in again?’ I’ve been everywhere. That law doesn’t exist any other place.”
For fans of O’Brien, the rest of the set settled into a familiar pattern, including a well-worn anecdote about an awkward run-in with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Los Angeles cafe, and a recycled riff on his fashion sense: like a biology teacher who sells weed on the side.
Much like his career on late-night television, not everything worked. A musical interlude in which he invited fans on the stage to sing AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long and the theme song from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo felt unnecessarily long and laboured.
And a question-and-answer sequence at the end of the show teetered dangerously close to tedium, in part because O’Brien didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the idea. The first question – a request to sing the monorail song he famously wrote for The Simpsons, was politely declined. He also – perhaps fairly – declined two separate invitations to sledge his old late-night nemesis Leno because “no one here cares about that”.
But in his 26-odd years on television O’Brien’s lackadaisical, egoless charm has endeared him to a legion of fans who have stayed loyal despite the ever-expanding field of what Hannah Gadsby called “the Jimmys” – Fallon, Kimmel et al. Judging by the standing ovation on both his entry and exit, Wednesday night’s show won’t have changed that.
