It begins with Werner Herzog.
Comedian Conan O’Brien visited India for his series Conan O’Brien Must Go, and the show kicks off with an unmistakable voiceover from the great filmmaker Herzog, speaking about O’Brien’s irritating need to culturally annex the world while being a “clown with dull tiny eyes, the eyes of a crudely painted doll.” (Is this how every episode of this series starts? I couldn’t tell, because while this is the third season of the show, JioHotstar only gives us this episode from this season — as if Indian audiences are not likely to be curious about O’Brien’s other globetrotting misadventures.
The Herzog voiceover illustrates Conan’s lifelong commitment not only to being silly but to constantly turn himself into the punchline. The former talk show host and current podcaster frequently makes fun of his gangliness, his carrot-red hair, his pastiness and his awkwardness. He punches inward more than in any other direction, but whenever O’Brien—a former writer on The Simpsons, responsible for such landmark episodes such as Marge Vs The Monorail—does punch out, he does it with absurdist, anarchistic abandon. I remember a recurring talk show sketch called ‘The Masturbating Bear’, and it was sheer, glorious lunacy.
Incredulity and ignorance seem to be his weapons of choice on this cleverly named series, where he questions the obvious as he hungrily takes in new information. This bodes well for India. When stand-up comedian Aditi Mittal tries to get this gawky Irishman to do the arms-outstretched Shah Rukh Khan pose, he immediately asks “What’s a Shah Rukh Khan?” This is a question Mittal, understandably tickled throughout the interaction, may not have anticipated, and she goes to the standard-issue Indian comparison, declaring that Khan “is bigger than Tom Cruise.” O’Brien is unimpressed by this. “A lot of us are bigger than Tom Cruise,” he says. “The first time I met him, he just sort of wandered onto the palm of my hand.”
He boards a local train, and looks unexpectedly at home wearing cricket whites — even if his outfit does flummox the Mumbai kids with whom he plays street cricket. O’Brien leans so hard into the ridiculousness of his own behaviour that even the usual travel-show schtick feels somehow refreshing. This is a sharper episode, for instance, than the time the Top Gear blokes had come to India and raced against the city’s dabbawalas, and considerably more entertaining than David Letterman’s ill-informed visit from the time he interviewed Shah Rukh Khan, the man O’Brien doesn’t know. Sure, O’Brien is as ill-informed but he takes things in with a wide-eyed wonder. It’s all rather infectious, even when he’s walking the streets I walked on Tuesday.
For instance, not only does he whip his shirt off in Dhobi Ghat—a visually inadvisable decision if ever there was one—but he makes his way out of the labyrinthian laundry using a single-take shot, a clumsy but affectionate one parodying the iconic Copacabana sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
He’s at his best with regular people. He meets a friend he met on the podcast, Rustom Irani, and is amused by Irani’s father’s explanations of sexual intercourse, exhorting Irani’s mum to flee these madmen. He is positively besides himself seeing how that the Irani home contains a beautiful photo-frame which still contains the stock photograph it came with. He is boisterous with a bunch of Bangalore boys who boast of the city’s “insane pub culture” and take him to popular bar Toit which—inexplicably—has a framed poster of Conan O’Brien outside its restrooms.
He starts off a Toit-Toit-Toit chant which is incredible promotion for the bar, but undercuts this with a Cheers style parody song where the words go “Where everybody knows you’re unemployed.” All of this does feel spontaneous and unrehearsed, like when O’Brien walks into a houseful of youngsters watching WWE Raw. Or when he keeps trying to embarrass a Gujarati textile merchant by saying that taking pretty gifts home would make his wife kiss him, something the shopkeeper—visibly conscious of the camera—keeps saying “no no no” to. O’Brien continues the kissy sounds, Mr Joshi the textile merchant keeps telling him nothing will happen. “Why are you cockblocking me with my own wife?” O’Brien asks.
None of this is must-see television, but there really is something about O’Brien’s relentless enthusiasm and his self-deprecating style. He describes himself as “not just a white man but the whitest man in the world,” and his unashamed touristiness is strangely endearing. The world sees India in a very different way from the way we do, and while O’Brien is as bemused by the monkeys and impressed by the Mumbai trains, it was nice to see him in a brewpub instead of playing into some Eat Pray Love cliches. As a man with a handlebar moustache, I must also say that he wore that better than I thought.
For some absurd reason, I cant help but think of John Turturro’s dialogue from the superb 1994 film Quiz Show, where he’d said “If you want to be worshipped, go to India and moo.” Conan O’Brien may have stopped short of actually mooing, but he certainly proved to be a mood.
Streaming Tip Of The Week:
Want to see more funny white men take on the world? Eugene Levy’s The Reluctant Traveler (AppleTV) is a charming series with a strong Schitt's Creek hangover. Jack Whitehall’s Travels With My Father (Netflix) feature not just the posh British comedian but his father Michael, making for delightfully weird bedfellows.
Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.