Recent Stories with tag conan obrien

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter at McCaw Hall

There were a couple things I knew going in to the Conan O'Brien show Sunday night. It was at McCaw Hall, Conan would be there, and...that's about it. (Sunday also just happened to be Conan's birthday!) Not a lot was said about the show, and no one knew who the guests would be. Would he set it up like a talk show? Would he ride a unicycle for 90 minutes?

It turned out to be an interesting mix, more like a variety act than a comedy tour. There's been some positive and negative talk about the tour, but if you're a huge fan of his talk show, then you probably would have had a fantastic time. The show's opening act, Reggie Watts (formerly of Seattle and currently of Maktub), did a great job of working up the crowd and getting them ready for 90 minutes of hot Coco action. He brought on a lot of laughs with his great mix of electronic music, dirty jokes, and wacky lyrics. The Seattle-specific call-outs really perked up the audience as well as his dazzling voice. 

And then on came Conan with a bang, kicking off with a two-minute standing ovation by the awaiting audience. He started with a pretty typical introduction, talking about the tour and its purpose, with quite a bit of the complaints that we've gotten used to hearing from the ex-NBC host over the last three months. The Seattle crowd ate it up, and it must have felt good to have that many people behind him. Guests that joined the comedian onstage included his sidekick Andy Richter, one of his writers, Deon Cole, who did a short stand-up routine, La Bamba and his "Big Band," and that night's special music guest Dave Matthews....

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Only 14,528 came out last night to watch the Mariners paste the Orioles. On the bright side, that's nearly 12,000 more than Conan O'Brien drew at the 2,800-seat Paramount the 2,900-seat McCaw Hall. On the dark side, Conan didn't play to any empty seats. The M's had 32,000 of them. It was their worst-attended Safeco Field game ever.

The local sports community is confused. Why aren't people showing? "The M's ... had an incredibly productive off-season and were pre-season contenders for the AL West crown," writes ESPN 710's Mike Salk. "They are not a bad team."

Well, you've answered your own question, Mike: While diehard sports fans may care about productive off-seasons and pre-season predictions, the casual fan--the one who does most of the ticket-buying--decidedly does not.

When you're someone who follows sports closely, it's easy to forget how few of the things you care about on a daily basis--M's Sign Ramon Vazquez to a Minor League Contract!--make it into the consciousness of the average person. Just like what's news to politics diehards couldn't matter less to me. For instance: Over on Publicola, something called "O'Brien Will Vote No on Panhandling Ordinance" is marked "Exclusive!" Who? What? Ping me when someone takes a bribe....

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Looks like Conan O'Brien has found something to do with his free time, as today he announced a thirty-city live performance tour.  Dubbed "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour," his live show promises "a night of music, comedy, hugging, and the occasional awkward silence."  That sounds like the Conan we all know and love.

Kicking off in Eugene, Oregon on April 12th, the tour will take place over two months, making stops in twenty states and three Canadian provinces, as well as a special appearance at Bonnaroo.  Locally, Conan will perform at McCaw Hall on April 18th and April 19th--looks like this second show was just added!  Prices start at $39.50 (but this is Ticketmaster, so let's just say $50) all the way up to $695 for the drool-worthy special VIP meet-and-greet package. 

Full list of tour dates as of right now--ticket sales are strong, so second shows keep getting added--after the jump....

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Steve Broback of the Parnassus Group, at 140TC: Seattle. Photo by Brian Westbrook.

"It fulfills a prediction I've had since graduating college about the power of hypertext," Twitter co-founder and author Dom Sagolla told me over the phone, about the near-ubiquity of the social media portal he helped conceive. "But it's also humbling, because we designed for such a basic use-case, and it's taken on an incredible range of possibilities. So to see how people have adopted it and used it and made it their own has amazed me."

This was Monday early afternoon, and Sagolla and I were making up for not having been able to connect face-to-face earlier in the day, while I was down at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66 for 140: The Twitter Conference, a commerce-meets-culture confab digging into nitty-gritty of how to maximize whatever benefit you're trying to get from your 140-characters-at-a-time online presence.

While the audience was decidedly business-y, and most of the presentations oriented towards marketing and branding opportunities via Twitter, the subjects of politics, pop culture, philanthropy, and privacy kept popping up. On the last subject in that list, Ben Parr of Mashable pretty much summed up the prevailing philosophy when he explained: "Privacy is dead." So there's that....

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