FAST COMPANY: How do you deliver difficult news?
CONAN O'BRIEN: You know what's a funny thing to do, which works every time, is if I'm on a show that's been cancelled or business that's failed, what I do is a hire one of those strip-o-gram people to show up. And they start doing a dance and taking off their clothes and everyone gets excited and maybe it's someone's birthday and this person's going to get naked and just before they take their clothes off they say, "This business is over, you're all fired, and leave your rolodexes where they are, and you'll be escorted to the parking lot by an armed guard." And I'm always making sure that I'm watching it on a video camera from my mansion and eating pudding and watching it happen.
How do you deliver difficult news?
Conan O'Brien, Host, Conan+
Conan Christopher O'Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer and performer. He is currently the host of Conan, a late-night talk show that airs on the American cable television station TBS.
O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and raised in an Irish Catholic family. He landed his first comedy job as a writer for the sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News, after first serving as president of the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote for several comedy shows, and later moved to New York City to work on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, and later for The Simpsons. O'Brien went on to serve as host of Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 2009, before going on to host the short-lived The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien for seven months. He is the only personality to ever serve as host for both the NBC Late Night and Tonight Show franchises.
On April 12, 2010, it was announced that O'Brien would begin hosting a new late-night talk show on cable TV network TBS. Conan premiered on November 8, 2010.