Ideas / Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend: The Friend Test
Werner Herzog
Conan O'Brien with Werner Herzog
Herzog brings ecstatic truth, enormous walks, impossible filmmaking, and Honey Boo Boo; Conan recognizes usable comedy in all of it.
Herzog and Conan are almost comically well matched. One describes existence as an ordeal involving ecstatic truth, heroic walks, hostile chickens, and moving a ship over a mountain. The other hears a complete comedy vocabulary waiting to be borrowed.
The result is not quite an interview and not quite a duel. It is two forms of seriousness discovering that they share a border.