Good laughs: Conan O’Brien’s, um, inspiring speeches and some musings on comedy

Stuyvesant HS commencement speech PART I.

While I was googling the text for Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech to the Harvard graduating class of 2000, I found this new speech he recently gave to the Stuyvesant High School graduating class of 2006. While the amateur video’s a little shakey and the audio’s understandably not broadcast quality, it’s a fairly decent recording. And besides, any chance to watch Conan in action is great entertainment… So bear with it and plug in good speakers.

I’ve always been a fan of comedy–specifically stand-up, but then I have an appetite for good comedy writing in general, so I’m hooked on everything from satire websites to these newer trends of sitcoms. And hence, my own short-lived career as a stand-up comedian (mind you, not the slapstick variety popular in the Philippines). That ended really abruptly with my realization that, one, I wasn’t funny, and two, that I lived in the Philippines.

Anyway, YouTube wasn’t in existence in 2000, so all I can find of Conan’s 2000 commencement speech at Harvard was the printed text, which makes for a hilarious read. There are a lot of sites that carry it on the next, such as this one at February 7. Here’s an excerpt from the text:

“The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of ‘85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of “Dynasty.” My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds. Recently, I had some structural engineers run those numbers into a computer model and, according to the computer, I collapsed in 1987, killing hundreds in Taiwan.”

Go read it already if you haven’t. Oh, for the second half of the Stuy speech, it’s here on YouTube. By the way, just like most people who love Conan, I really enjoy watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And before that, of course, I got my crazier satirical fixes from The Onion.

Oh, gotta love Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, too.