Conan O’Brien Is a “53 Percent Optimist” About the Future of Comedy

Conan O’Brien doesn’t know what the future of comedy, and comedy writing for television, will look like — only that it will be different than the environment in which he started his career.

“The days of writers rooms running from August through May and everyone being paid very handsomely in their 20s and ordering food [on a network’s tab] … are not coming back,” O’Brien said Wednesday evening at Bloomberg‘s Screentime conference. “It will change. But creative people will find ways to be creative and congregate and make great things.”

(Incidentally, the ellipses in the quote above are for O’Brien telling a story his time hosting Late Night at NBC, when the show was very profitable and the network picked up meals for the writing staff. He said the writers, “like assholes,” would take “order anything you like” at face value and get lobster and champagne.)

Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman also asked O’Brien whether he buys the networks’ line that late night has become bad business, a la CBS claiming it was losing $40 million a year in justifying bringing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to an end. O’Brien didn’t give a yes or no answer but said he noticed big changes over the course of his time hosting shows at NBC and TBS.

“Over my 17 years at NBC, I started to see it really changing. They were asking us to be much more cost-conscious, with good reason,” he said. “[People were watching] HBO and Cinemax, then more networks started doing late night shows. … It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles. Things changed.”

Despite all those changes, O’Brien said he’s a “53 percent optimist” that talented writers and comedians will find new ways to make funny things and get them in front of viewers. He noted that millions of comedy videos get uploaded around the world every day, “and if you do the math, nine of them are going to be the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.”

“It’s going to keep changing, and it’s not going to be what I knew,” he said of his early career as a writer for The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. “I’m glad I got to have that, but it will change and morph, and really talented people will profit from it.”