Tall man, Short temper

Once Conan O’Brien secured his perch as despot of the fraudulently named “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” (which in reality was filmed in the late afternoon), his bouts of rage quickly established an atmosphere of terror on his “talk” show.

“Was he difficult? I don’t know, was Pol Pot difficult?” a visibly trembling former colleague described his experience working with O’Brien. Insisting on anonymity due to fears for his physical safety, this unnamed colleague, who served as a late night show bandleader for many years, described his harrowing tenure under O’Brien’s pale, merciless thumb in unnerving detail.

“One time, Ted Danson came on the show, so we played the ‘Cheers’ theme as he walked on. I knew right away from the icy glare from Conan that we had done something wrong. When we went to commercial, Conan came over and demanded to know why we didn’t play the theme song from ‘Three Men and a Baby.’ I tried to explain how we thought people might enjoy the ‘Cheers’ theme, and that ‘Three Men and a Baby’ didn’t really have a theme song that anyone knew, but by that time he had smashed my snare drum to pieces and gouged my eye with my drumstick.”

O’Brien ran through a series of 23 interns in 2005 alone, with nine of them terminated, eleven resigned, and three missing and presumed dead. “You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet!” O’Brien chuckled mirthlessly, before spitting on his show’s hair stylist for a haircut that O’Brien claimed made him look too “lonely.”