John Mulaney, John Mayer, Jimmy Carr, Jim Gaffigan, and Jim Downey Walk Into Conan's Podcast

The bit starts before the episode does. John Mulaney introduces himself as feeling ‘litigious’ about being Conan O’Brien’s friend, and within thirty seconds the two of them are designing a fake lawsuit so complicated and protracted that they would have to refer to each other as Mr. Mulaney and Mr. O’Brien in depositions. They want it in the trades. They want nobody to understand what it’s about. They want to write one song together called ‘We Will Always Be Friends’ and then fight over the rights until they bury each other in legal costs. This is the first two minutes. The episode has four more guests after this. Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is a very strange television show that is not a television show.

What makes this episode work, and what makes the podcast work in general if you’ve been paying attention, is that Conan has genuinely stopped performing and started talking. He admits it himself to John Mayer, who shows up midway through radiating the particular energy of someone who just discovered he enjoys listening more than speaking. Mayer describes the feeling of becoming curious about other people after decades of being curious only about himself, and Conan meets him there without irony. ‘I want to open up the top of his head and let’s play,’ Conan says, and you believe him. The late-night version of this conversation would have had a comedy bit prepared in advance and a plug for a movie. Instead you get two men in their fifties talking about what it feels like to stop needing the room.

I’ve heard every fucking thought I have. I’ve heard every thought. I’m way more interested in getting someone else to a place they didn’t know that they were going to get to.

The Carr Rule and the One-Liner Gospel

Jimmy Carr arrives contractually obliged, which is the bit, and he commits to it with the particular poker face that has made him rich. Carr’s theory of comedy is that stand-up is friendship at scale, that when you walk onstage and say things with no filter you are acting like a best friend to two thousand strangers. It sounds like a TED talk but he delivers it fast and then moves on, which is the Carr method in miniature. He does 300 jokes an hour, he says. One-liners. He wanted to be a storyteller because five ideas fill an hour much more cost effectively, but your sense of humor chooses you. He’s right about that. You cannot watch Carr work and imagine him building toward anything. He is all arrival, no journey.

It’s easier to build from Lego than marble.

Jim Gaffigan comes in warm and slightly exhausted, which is his natural register, and he and Conan end up on the most unexpectedly honest stretch of the episode. They talk about food as love language, about the Irish and Midwestern cultures where you showed affection by cooking enormous quantities of ham rather than saying anything out loud. Conan says his family didn’t drink, couldn’t talk about sex, so eating was what was left. ‘We’re going to cook a giant meal and I’ll eat it together,’ he says, ‘which is we’re going to eat tons of ham and potato.’ Gaffigan’s new special is called The Skinny, it’s about Ozempic and teenagers, and he’s clearly still working out what it means to have the food material taken away from him. He says he views the weight loss as temporary. Probably wisely.

Jim Downey Opens on Jeffrey Epstein and It Only Gets Better

Jim Downey’s entrance is the funniest three minutes of the episode and possibly the most daring thing anyone has done on a comedy podcast in recent memory. He introduces himself as unapologetic about being Conan’s friend and then immediately pivots to a riff about how society fails to criticize figures who contribute enormously to culture, citing, without blinking, Jeffrey Epstein. He maintains the bit with total commitment while Conan tries to interrupt, insisting he had not heard about any negative coverage of his friend Jeff, that if Jeff Epstein were deceased he was pretty sure he would know about it, and that perhaps they should just call Ghislaine. Conan, who has known Downey since 1988, sounds genuinely delighted and slightly terrified in equal measure.

If Jeff Epstein were deceased, I’m pretty sure I would know about it. Now, I admit I’ve not probably since the pandemic, I have not talked to him.

Downey is here because he was there at the start, 1976, sharing an office with Bill Murray while Chevy Chase was finishing his last two weeks. He watched the Blues Brothers begin as a warm-up sketch to entertain studio audiences before the 11:30 taping and become the number one selling album in the country. He was a kid of 22 on his first day of work and he will tell you Robert Smigel is brilliant and also a piece of work and that Conan could have been the greatest comedy writer ever if he weren’t so lazy. The show is about to turn 50 and Downey was there for the 15th anniversary too, which was held in 1989 because Lorne counted differently. Some things never change.

John Mulaney’s Tim Walz story, buried near the end after an hour of everything else, is worth the wait. He was in England doing an acting job when his manager called to say they had told SNL that Mulaney had been sending in videos doing Tim Walz impressions. He had not. So he went back to his hotel room and spent an hour taking off jackets, putting on jackets, doing an impression of his brother Mitch from Indiana, a very sincere and enthusiastic Midwestern man with a golly-gee quality, and sent the videos off. They hired him. The lesson, if there is one, is that you can’t campaign for SNL, you either get the call or you don’t, and also that sometimes your manager lies on your behalf and it works out fine.