I missed Conan’s Tonight Show debut on Monday… completely spaced on it. I heard it was a bit of a dud, so maybe that’s OK. But I watched the entire show last night. Tom Hanks was surprisingly crazy, with his somewhat deprecating, totally over-the-top impersonation of Ron Howard directing him in Angels and Demons, and his lengthy testimonial on the wonders of In-N-Out Burger. (Granted, In-N-Out Burger is freakin’ awesome, and is by a wide margin the thing I miss most about living in southern California.)
Green Day was good — and judging by their body language with Conan, Tom Hanks, Andy Richter, and whoever else was milling about on stage at the end of the show, they seem like they’re genuinely nice and courteous guys, which always surprises me about rock musicians — but this was now the third late-night program I’ve seen them perform this song on, and I already own the album, so it’s kind of enough already.
The highlight of the show, for me, was the “Twitter Tracker” sketch, where absurdly “extreme” (pardon me, “X-TREEEEM!!!!!”) voice overs and equally ridiculous motion graphics combined to try, and fail, to make utterly banal “celebrity tweets” seem exciting. A monster truck show, Twitter is not.
