Sure. Yeah.

Get ready to say everything we ever said

at the monologue meetings.

Cancel time.

"Behind the Nonsense," take two.

(funky music)

Yesterday was daylight savings time

when... (audience cheering)

Yeah.

Daylight savings time when we lose an hour

for no apparent reason.

(audience laughing) Yeah.

By the way, losing an hour for no apparent reason

is also the motto for this show.

(audience laughing) We've always...

(audience cheering) That is...

Hey, Conan O'Brien here, Andy Richter

for another edition of "Behind the Nonsense"

where we look behind the scenes.

Today, we're gonna focus a little bit

on the monologue process.

Specifically, the meetings that we would have

just before the show would tape,

figure out which jokes to do,

and often it was a very chaotic

and hilarious mess, that meeting.

Joining me, Laurie Kilmartin, hilarious comedy writer,

Brian Kiley, occasionally, no, always hilarious.

You know, you're no Kilmartin, but you're good.

I don't know what to say,

but we get into this very small room

and this went on for years and years and years.

And it's your dressing room.

My dressing room.

So it's your space. It's my space.

We're getting ready.

The audience is just on the other side of the wall

sometimes loading in, sometimes the band is playing,

we're getting very close to showtime

and time is of the essence

and we're looking through a big stack of jokes

and then absolute inappropriate foolishness would erupt.

Well, you describe it,

Laurie. Yes.

I think, it's so interesting that to get to the place

where you can tell these really clean jokes on television,

you have to go to a place

where you're just saying unrepeatable things

in the green room, just to get yourself there.

You've just identified what it is.

Laurie and Brian

are both very good, excellent standup comedians.

You guys understand something about this performing process.

I'm pretty stressed out.

I have a ten-year-old son and already at age 10,

we've had multiple discussions on masturbation etiquette.

(audience laughing) At 10 years old.

I was like, "Please do not knock on mom's door

when she's masturbating. (audience cheering)

There is something about needing to stretch it

all the way out here to then pull it back to here.

So the jokes would be, you know,

jokes that you can tell on television

about the president or a celebrity

or what happened in the news today.

You would push me, I would push you,

we would stretch it way out and be doing entire riffs that-

Talk about canceled. (Laurie laughing)

The whole point was that you were going to be really clean

in about five minutes.

And that's what was so hilarious.

But it's also too, I always look at it as like,

we ran an opium den for tourists

and we could only get off on the really hard stuff.

Go ahead and have this weak sauce, but for us,

(imitates squirting)

I gotta put poison right in my veins before I feel anything.

I remember one of the first meetings out here,

Andy was late and you guys got in a fake yelling argument

of, "Where were you?"

"I was around the corner."

"Around the corner fudge is made."

And it became this whole thing

about what was that rhyme and we had to Google.

But 20 minutes of this- We had to Google it.

And then it's like two minutes to do the jokes

because we were discussing

"Milk, Milk, Lemonade" And again, you know,

band playing, every second is precious,

we're supposed to get out there and do this show,

but we would get started-

On "Milk, Milk, Lemonade." Yeah, milk, milk, lemonade,

around the corner.

And Brian, you go back

to '93 or early '94? Early '94, yeah.

Okay, so you're really pretty much a lifer.

You came on the show and you didn't really know

what to expect.

And you thought, "Well, Conan's probably this erudite."

Like, all you knew is that, "Oh, he went to a good college."

Absolutely.

It's like, "Oh, he's this Harvard whatever."

And then it was like, "Oh my God.

This is total insanity." But then we had a meeting

where we were talking about jokes

and I said one thing but then I pretended...

You had a candle there for some reason,

and you lit the candle, and then you had a bottle of scotch

and you pretended to knock the candle over in the scotch

and then you pretended to catch on fire.

And then you're going out the window and somehow,

the curtain wrapped around your neck.

It was like this long- And then I hung myself

as I burned and I acted it all out.

And Brian's sitting there,

this has nothing to do with the show.

And then you got a very different idea of-

It was like my first day and I'm like, "Okay,

this is not what I was expecting.

This is not gonna be Dick Cavett.

(Laurie and Andy laughing)

And I remember also, one of my first days,

we were trying to decide between this joke or that joke.

And you stopped somebody in the hallway said,

"What do you think of this joke on a scale of one to 10,

10 being the funniest, two not being funny,

three being funny again," and then you just went

all the way through it. I made it super complicated.

It was an intern.

The intern was like, "Wait, what's four?"

"No! There is no four!

There's three and then five!

Five is great but four is off limits and three is no good."

And what I love too, is that at the beginning of that,

you really wanted an answer, but then you discovered like,

"Oh no, there's this other thing that I want much more,"

which is to fuck with this kid.

I want to really have a good time.

Your laugh is so fantastic and-

Fantastic. Yeah.

The Kilmartin cackle, we'd call it.

But we would be inappropriate

and then you would like push us much farther sometimes.

I remember that very clearly. Yes, for sure.

We were always grateful when, someone was saying earlier,

Gavin Polone would stop in,

because he also had a great laugh,

such as we knew the mono wasn't like our best effort.

And it's like, "Please, God, let Gavin be there today

and save some of the jokes." Gavin's my manager

and he would come by always wearing a track suit,

a full track suit, head to toe.

Matching, yeah. Matching track suit,

but he's got a really good sense of humor and he'd sit there

and he would laugh really hard

and the rest of us get so jaded,

like there's not a lot of laughter in that room.

And then Gavin would come in

and then he would usually try and think

of some money-making scheme.

He would say, you know, "You can take that joke

and you can try and make it a sitcom

and then I could produce it."

And we're like, "Shut up!"

After a while working on our show like this,

there is a lot of like,

"Oh yeah, that's really funny," you know?

You don't laugh at things, but you're like,

"Oh yeah, yeah. That's really funny."

Gavin and Sona often save jokes.

Well, Sona, my assistant, God love her,

she was a good laugher but she really liked jokes

that had weed in them.

Dick jokes.

Dick jokes. Yeah, she liked dick jokes.

And she'd be like, "Ha!"

And I'd be like, "No, I'm not gonna..."

And you guys would say like, "See,

it's worth doing it. (all laughing)

See, the guy had too much weed and then his dick got big."

I'm like, "That's not a joke."

And she'd be like, "Ha, ha, ha! Weed and dick!"

And then of course, my manager would be like,

"You know, actually what we could do

is you can market something- (Laurie laughing)

We could market something

that makes your penis larger using marijuana."

Our jokes could never compete with the riffs.

That was a problem. In the room,

the foolishness in the room You'd do blue Kiley

or something and kill, and then we'd go to the jokes

and I was like... I would spend 20 minutes

doing an impression of Brian Kiley.

We always called my grandfather Poppy

'cause of his opium addiction.

(audience laughing)

I can impersonate Brian Kiley

doing his jokes in his mannerisms and it's very...

I would do this routine where it's Kiley in a club

going incredibly blue, filthy blue,

I can't even say it right here,

but just imagine- The dirtiest thing

you've ever heard. The dirtiest thing

that Red Fox ever said times 10

and it's Kiley doing that and killing

and then riding home in his tiny, little, conservative car

and then reading a Truman biography in his bed

and then getting called to go back to the club.

"So I'm, uh, I'm with my old lady and I told her

'You've gotta, you've gotta wash that ass.

(all laughing) You gotta wash the ass.

If I'm going to go down there and, uh, you know,

service you in that area,

you need to clean that fucking ass, you see.'"

I dunno why, that stuff would just...

We would do it, we'd be crying, and then I was like,

"All right, let's go do this TV show."

There's a new trend where people watch television

that they despise and it's called hate watching.

(audience laughing) Hate watching. Yeah.

Speaking of hate watching,

hi mom. (audience laughing)

(funky music)

All right.

Well, you get an idea of what we were talking about.

I never want to see either of you again.

(Laurie and Brian laugh)