Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop
- Genre: Documentary
- Director: Rodman Flender
- Stars: Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter, Stephen Colbert
- Rate: ***
Where others might have speed-dialed the suicide-prevention hotline following the late-night lunacy of early 2010, Conan O’Brien instead called his travel agent. Humbled by his abrupt exit from The Tonight Show, and blocked from immediate TV work, the ginger-haired funnyman exorcised his demons in public.
His resulting 33-city touring song-and-joke variety show, captured by the documentary lens of Rodman Flender for Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, is combination therapy and screw-you retribution. It’s also entertaining.
Flender doesn’t belabour the events that led up to O’Brien’s rise, fall and subsequent rise again (he has a new show on TBS) in the late-night wars. He rightly assumes that anyone who likes O’Brien enough to watch a doc about him already knows most of the back story.
But neither does Flender deliver a big sloppy valentine to O’Brien, who comes across as affable yet prickly during his coast-to-coast trek, which was dubbed “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.”
Coco loses patience at times with his staff, his fans and even loyal sidekick Andy Richter, and doesn’t care if people know it.
His mobile therapy seems to have worked. Just imagine how much he saved himself in psychiatric fees.
