In NBC's studio 6a, the former Mayor of New York City is crouching down between several tall stalks of plastic corn, awaiting his cue. Wearing denim overalls, a blue flannel shirt and a broad grin dominated by a blackened front tooth, Edward I. Koch suddenly pops up and begins to tell an intentionally bad joke as the cameras roll.
"What do you give a pig with a rash?" he asks, reading his lines in a faux Southern accent that barely masks his familiar nasal twang. "Oink-ment!" he answers, before dropping down out of view again.
It's just another day on the set of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," where Mr. Koch has joined Mr. O'Brien and several cast members to tape a spoof of "Hee Haw" that will be dropped into a future episode.
"Hee Haw," of course, has been a mainstay in syndication for years, but Mr. O'Brien -- if one believed the speculation preceding his debut on Sept. 13, 1993 -- should have been off the air by now. A lanky comedy writer with scant experience in front of a camera, Mr. O'Brien was stepping into the very large loafers of David Letterman, who decamped to CBS.
But a year later, Mr. O'Brien is still here, continuing to occupy the 12:35 A.M. slot on NBC five nights a week. How has he defied the odds thus far? A good share of the credit goes to his young, overworked writing staff, which dreams up three or four offbeat comedy sketches like the "Hee Haw" parody each day. It is, as even Mr. Letterman has remarked, the writers who have set Mr. O'Brien's show apart from the parade of other talk shows that clog the dial.
"The more I watch the show, I realize you guys do an incredible amount of comedy, and stuff that is produced, that is very high level," Mr. Letterman told a beaming Mr. O'Brien in February during a guest appearance on "Late Night." "And the volume and quality of the stuff just knocks me out."
To be sure, other forces have conspired to keep the 31-year-old Mr. O'Brien on the air. Up until now, he has had little real competition in his time slot. That will change dramatically this winter, when Tom Snyder returns to late-night television with a one-hour talk show following Mr. Letterman's wildly popular "Late Show."
Still, if Mr. O'Brien has proved anything over the last year, it is that his appeal should not be underestimated. Fidgety and visibly uncomfortable during his initial outings last September, he has begun to settle into a more confident, self-deprecating persona that is equal parts silly and quick-witted. And although they have a way to go, Mr. O'Brien and his sidekick, Andy Richter, 27, have begun to develop a dry, buddy-buddy banter that at least some viewers seem to be warming to.
"Late Night" 's ratings have shown noticeable improvement. In July and August, the show averaged a respectable 2.0 rating, up about 11 percent from the 1.8 average rating in its first six months on the air. (Each ratings point represents 942,000 households.) Many of Mr. O'Brien's viewers are college students, who spike up the ratings significantly when they are home on vacation, since Nielsen ratings do not measure viewership in college dorms.
"If Letterman is doing over 5, a 2 is not bad, considering when Conan is on," said one high-ranking advertising agency executive who insisted on anonymity. "I think he is a guy who will continue to grow."
Still, not all the clouds over the show have parted. This month KPRC, the NBC affiliate in Houston, dropped the show in favor of the entertainment-news show "Extra" and repeats of the "Jenny Jones" talk show. Meanwhile, many television critics continue to disdain Mr. O'Brien.
Jeff Jarvis of TV Guide initially found Mr. O'Brien "a twitching frat boy who thinks he's much cuter and funnier than he actually is." In June, Mr. Jarvis amended his opinion: "I have mellowed on the guy. These days he merely bores me."
As for NBC, it still seems wary of Mr. O'Brien's prospects. The network announced in August that it was renewing "Late Night." But in a clear sign that the host remains on a short leash, the network did not specify a time commitment for the renewal, saying only that it was "committed to the success of this show" as long as it demonstrated "ratings improvement and creative growth."
Although Mr. O'Brien maintains that it will be business as usual for him when Mr. Snyder's show starts in December, a renewed responsibility will no doubt fall on the shoulders of the 13-member "Late Night" writing staff to keep cranking out the zany -- sometimes downright bizarre -- bits that are sandwiched between Mr. O'Brien's mostly standard celebrity interviews.
Here are some examples of the material that the writers, a group that includes Mr. O'Brien himself, have developed over the past year:
*A paunchy "streaker" who occasionally dashes through the audience wearing a skin-tone body suit.
*Filmed highlights from a mock baseball game in which a team of 80-year-old men brawled with a team of 8-year-old boys.
*An episode of "Cute Animal Theater," in which a cat and a dog bedecked in Nazi regalia played the roles of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.
Just who is creating this stuff?
The stable of writers assembled by Mr. O'Brien and his head writer, Robert Smigel, 34, an eight-year veteran of "Saturday Night Live," is all male, all white and all between the ages of 26 and 34. Mr. Smigel, a soft-spoken man, defends the homogeneity of his staff, saying they were hired to represent "a singular point of view" -- Mr. O'Brien's. Almost all have stand-up comedy experience and graduated from college, although only Mr. O'Brien and one other writer, Michael Gordon, are from Harvard.
While the workday dress is mostly T-shirts and jeans, the mood is less casual within the writers' cluttered beige offices on the ninth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Some on the staff routinely put in days that stretch from 11 A.M., through the show's 5:30 P.M. taping, until far into the night. Generally the sketches are generated by a writer working alone at his Macintosh computer or by the entire ensemble gathered around a conference table. Ultimately, Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Smigel, who offer frequent suggestions throughout the writing process, determine whether a piece will make it to the air.
On one August morning, Marsh McCall, a 30-year-old former newspaper reporter, slipped into Mr. O'Brien's cramped corner office to pitch two ideas. Standing and clutching a bottle of Evian water, Mr. McCall first described a scenario in which Mr. O'Brien would suddenly break from the show's format to call out "intermission," at which point the house lights would come up on the audience members and they would begin milling about as if at a Broadway show.
"I like it," Mr. O'Brien said immediately. "Maybe it's a piece we pre-tape. We could hold an audience and do it after a show."
Buoyed, Mr. McCall offered his second idea, eagerly describing "the pumpkin censor," a character clad in a pumpkin costume who would sternly caution Mr. O'Brien against making jokes that are insensitive to pumpkins. After a brief pause, Mr. McCall observed, "I sense you don't like that as much."
"That's one I can't tell about," Mr. O'Brien confirmed. "I need to think about it."
With the huge volume of material required to fill five hours a week, Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Smigel rarely shoot down an idea out of hand, falling back on a strategy of virtually "anything goes," the writers said. This should not come as a complete surprise to regular viewers.
One writer, Louis Szekely (pronounced See-kay), 26, remembered how a gag that had drawn howls in the office one day -- he opened his desk drawer for an unsuspecting colleague, only to have a live cat jump out and startle everyone -- fell flat on the air. In a piece written by Mr. Szekely and performed on the show by Mr. O'Brien, the host tells Mr. Richter that he has discovered a cure for cancer and has written it down, only to find, when he goes to retrieve his formula, that the same cat has got into the box and eaten the results.
"It was like the worst idea I ever had," said Mr. Szekely, a sometime creator of short films, smiling ruefully. "I've been a stand-up comedian for eight years, so bombing isn't something that scares me."
The part of the show that has changed the most is Mr. O'Brien's opening monologue, which, in the early episodes, consisted of one joke told in three or four successive parts, almost like a story. That didn't seem to work, so in recent months the monologue has become a standard collection of jokes that play off the day's headlines.
Writing the monologue is the responsibility of a troika of stand-up comedians -- Chuck Sklar, 31; Brian Kiley, 32, and Tom Agna, 34 -- who hole up in a tiny office, watching "CNN Headline News" as much as five hours a day to gather material. (They watch so much, in fact, that they have developed something of a crush on a "Headline News" afternoon anchor, Lynn Vaughn.)
For the monologue of Aug. 25, for example, the writers provided Mr. O'Brien with a choice of two jokes that began with the same premise: "Tom and Roseanne are back in the news. They're postponing their divorce proceeding." In one version, the joke continued, "They're not having second thoughts -- they're just both in the middle of a long lunch." The second joke opened with the same set-up, but with this punch line: "I guess they believe if Michael Jackson can make a marriage work, anyone can." (Mr. O'Brien chose the second version, which drew enthusiastic applause from the audience.)
For all the pressure he is under, Mr. O'Brien seems to be genuinely enjoying himself both on and off camera. After riding the exercise bicycle in his dressing room to loosen up before that same show, Mr. O'Brien entertained a writer and cue-card holder by staging a dramatic "mini-stroke" that would see him slide his 6-foot-4-inch frame along a wall in mock pain. Soon after, he warmed up the audience by running up the aisles to sing an out-of-breath rendition of the Elvis Presley song "Burning Love," backed by his house band, the Max Weinberg Seven.
"This is the essence of why I love this job," he had whispered to a visitor several hours earlier, smiling broadly as Mr. Koch sprang out of the artificial field to tell yet another cornball joke. "It doesn't get better than this. I get paid to do this."
