Conan O’Brien’s path from Brookline High School kid with a typewriter to Oscar-night ringmaster is a straight line of unlikely risks, relentless writing, and one very specific Boston-bred sense of humor. On Sunday, March 15, he will host the Academy Awards for a second consecutive year.
From Brookline High to Harvard Yard
O’Brien grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, with five siblings. His mother was an attorney and partner at at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray, and his father was a physician and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, specializing in epidemiology. Conan attended Brookline High School. Brookline High is right off the Green Line and will debut a new modern facade with glossy windows and a more angular shape. During his time at the public high school, O’Brien quickly gravitated to words and jokes, showcasing an affinity for interviews from an early age.
He became managing editor of the school newspaper, interned for Massachusetts congressmen, and won a national writing contest for his short story “To Bury the Living.” By the time he graduated as valedictorian in 1981, he already looked less like a class clown and more like a working writer in training. At Harvard, he majored in history and literature, graduated magna cum laude, and led The Harvard Lampoon, sharpening the satirical voice that would later define his TV work.
A bicoastal journey to late night TV
After Harvard, O’Brien headed west to Los Angeles, cutting his teeth on “Not Necessarily the News,” improv with the Groundlings, and Emmy-winning writing at Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before NBC yanked him back east to New York to host Late Night. Years later, The Tonight Show promotion pulled him permanently to the West Coast, where the public fallout over his brief tenure led to a reinvention built around a national tour, his TBS show Conan, and new acting-like a stoic and curmudgeon debut in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” for which his co-star, Rose Byrne is nominated for an Oscar as Actress in a leading role.
That bicoastal career—writer in LA, breakthrough host in New York, then elder-statesman comic back in LA—set him up as a trusted awards emcee and, ultimately, as an Oscars host who understands both coasts of the entertainment world, but got his start right by the 617 in Brookline High School. O’Brien shared hosting the Oscars is a thin line between entertainment and reality:
“My job is to always try and hit this very, very thin line, I think, between entertaining people and also acknowledging some of the realities,” he said. “So it is a dance. It’s a dance that goes on up until the show begins.”
O’Brien is also slated to deliver Harvard’s commencement speech this May.
