Conan O Brien’s Legally Prohibited Tour – April 24-25th – Gibson Amphitheater – Los Angeles, CA
I get over to Universal Studios (where I had never been before) and just walking thru there is like a theme park inside a mall. A really overpriced/over-the-top mall. The Gibson Theater in located way in the back and around the corner so I literally walked through the whole place to get to it. I was flying solo on this one and that was fine, got my ticket and got inside.
I was surprised at how large this place was, it was freaking huge, thought it might hold like 2k and it was more like 6k.
I was glad to be seeing it in L.A. because of all the stops and I’m sure they each were special in their own way, that this was gonna be the one. Several reasons, a) the resources of just the celebrities he can use in his act based on proximity alone , and b) this is where he lost his job in the first place -so you know THATS getting brought up.
Quick back-story, unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard the whole uproar about Conan O Brien losing his Tonight Show slot to some shenanigans and can’t be on TV again for 7 months so he decided to hit the road and do a live show (hence the title Legally Prohibited).
I’ve been to L.A. a million times and I’ve never had the celebrity sighting thing ever like I have this time. The minute I sit down, I realize that I’m sitting behind David Spade and Craig Robinson.
The show starts with a video montage lampooning the events of the last few months that I just briefly covered, and then you see his old sidekick Andy Richter, who announces Conan and the place goes ape-shit.
And yes the first thing he says is :
““This is my first time back to Universal Studios since I lost my job,” We are less than 400 yards away from my old Tonight Show sound-stage. ”Sit back and enjoy an incredibly awkward situation.”
To help anchor the festivities, a bunch of celebrity guests like Jonah Hill, Jon Hamm and Aziz Ansari helped to facilitate an old O’Brien show staple involving outrageous clips from Walker, Texas Ranger (though the bit is now named the Chuck Norris Rural Policeman Handle). Lots of music and variety stuff, including a weird bit about “a girl that looked like Conrad Bain“ that ended with the inflation of a giant harmless looking bat from Meatloaf‘s Bat Out of Hell Tour.
The biggest surprise of the night involved Jim Carrey, who flew thru the air dressed as a masked superhero and no one knew who it was. Conan was dressed in a Superman costume and when he pulled off the mask, the crowd roared! they did a duet of “It’s Not Easy to be Me.” and the crowd gave them a standing ovation.
One other good thing was that we got to see the opener, Reggie Watts, who was fantastic. He kinda looked like an Arabic King Buzzo, with this giant, out of control fro.
He did this masterful improvised set consisted of stream of consciousness stand-up in various shifting personae, mixed with loop pedal-based a cappella compositions, it was crazy! And the dude sounded like he could rap and sing if we wanted to for real.
Conan Obrien Legally Prohibited Tour- SMU Campus – Dallas, TX – May 13th
So if you read the previous entry you know that I caught both nights of the Los Angeles stop of this tour already. I was eager to see how it would change once it was out of LA on the road for a bit, and how it might acclimate to the local atmosphere. I had big night planned as right after this I was driving less than 2 miles to finish up with seeing Talib Kweli with Hi-Tek as Reflection Eternal.
Oddly, in all my years, I’ve never been to a show at Mcfarlin Auditorium on the SMU Campus. I had tickets to a Pearl Jam show here when I was 18, but didn’t go.
I didn’t realize how small it was, thus also making it difficult to find as I got inside, took my seat after the opening film sequence was ending and Conan was about to take the stage.
There was a palpable sense of liberation in O’Brien’s delivery. More than once he mentioned the difference between making comedy “at” someone in front of a TV and doing it live, in an interactive show.
Even if some of his material was a tad predictable – Texas is really big, Texans sure do love their beer – there was no way anyone at the packed house was not going to whoop and clap with abandon.
He involved a lot of local color, too, with a video appearance by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (with neighborhood references dubbed into his highly profane routine), and a three-song set by Jimmy Vaughan, and that was after during the Walker Texas Ranger bit, he brought out Dallas Maverick’ Dirk Nowitzki.
