Satan comes in Hawaiian shirts.
My mom took all my action figures away and gave me Ten Commandments figures. I had Moses. Literally a Moses action figure, and he had two tablets in his hand, like the Ten Commandments. I would play with them, like I would play Batman or G.I. Joe. I’d make Moses swing down a pole and get into a Batmobile. I still had the Batmobile, so Moses would drive a Batmobile.
CONAN O’BRIEN
We were hardcore Catholic growing up. Church every Sunday. The whole nine yards. It’s in my bones. I mean, as much as I’ve tried to evolve past it in certain ways, it’s in my bones.
Marc
What are the liabilities of it, carrying it with you in your mind?
Conan
Body shame. I’ve been accused over the years of, “You’re self-deprecating and that’s your act.” You know what? It really comes from finding myself very flawed. I think that’s at the root of Catholicism. We’re all just flawed. There’s nothing we can do about it. I grew up just having a very dark self-view.
Marc
Why? Because you were too tall, or too what?
Conan
Too skinny, too tall, you know, my dick’s too big.
I hate to get that out there as a rumor, but do you know what I mean?
My dick is huge, and it’s got a lot of girth.
Marc
Yeah. Don’t want to hurt people.
Conan
No. The thing is I was so worried for a long time. I actually had doctors say, “You’re going to hurt someone with that.” Then it was only later in life that I found out that this is a great gift. For years I lived with the shame of this, “My penis is too big. I hope no woman ever finds out.” You live with these things, and then you eventually learn to work with them.
I was not a hypochondriac, but I probably feigned illnesses to get my parents’ attention. I didn’t believe I had the illness. When you’re one of six kids, you’ve got to do anything to get some face time, so I was not beyond trying to just have something.
I remember I read Death Be Not Proud, the John Gunther, Jr. story. It’s about a boy who’s fourteen, and he gets a brain tumor. It’s really touching. Everyone is supposed to read it when you’re thirteen, fourteen years old, and you’re supposed to just feel so terrible for the boy. I read it, and I thought, “Man, that guy is getting so much attention.” I remember envying a kid with a brain tumor, and he dies at the end of the book. I remember thinking, “Man, brain tumor. That’s the way to go.”
NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
When I was very young, I was very, very, very shy and very afraid of everything. I mean, people say they’re shy when they were kids, but it was a pathology for me.
This weird thing happened to me when I was young. I don’t know if this means anything. It wasn’t religious or anything, but it transformed me to some degree. I was so fucking afraid of everything, and if I went to a store, I’d have to walk around forever before I could even face a person in the store to buy a pack of gum. I don’t know why the fuck I was like this.
Anyways, when I was nine, we lived in rural Ontario, and there was a blind friend of my dad’s. My dad said, “Take him to the store.” I was like, “What the fuck? I have to take this blind fucker and I’m already shy and shit?” I’m taking him to the store and then the fucker wants me to explain everything, describe everything to him, so I’m like, “There’s some grass over here, and now there’s a lamppost,” and this guy’s all happy. What is it about the lamppost? I mean, it’s just a lamppost. It goes on and on, but something happened to me during this. It sounds bizarre, but something happened to me where I was actually, instead of always looking inward, which I think I’d always done before that one time, I was looking outward. Anyways, while I was talking to him, I suddenly had a sort of hysteria, like I was laughing. I started laughing, and I don’t even know why I’m remembering this, but I started laughing about everything, and everything seemed very, very funny to me.
A couple weeks later, I saw a homeless guy and he started talking to me, and he was talking to me about John D. Rockefeller. He was like, “I was at John D. Rockefeller’s funeral!” and all this shit, and I was laughing at him. And then he started laughing, and I was like, “It’s all fucking crazy shit.”
Now I find everything funny except really serious stuff.
MOLLY SHANNON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
I was raised by my dad from the time I was really little. He was very Catholic so he was repressed in a lot of ways, but he was also really charismatic and fun and would do anything and was real wild. We would do crazy stuff, like we would go to the airport and we would be like, “Let’s take a mystery trip.” We would have no suitcases or anything and it was when they had those airlines where you could pay right on the airplane. Do you remember that? People Express. We would go to the airport, pick a city, and just fly to the city and then borrow clothes when we got there or buy clothes. Like crazy stuff and my dad would call in sick for me to school.
Then I hopped a plane when I was twelve. We told my dad, me and my friend Anna, “We’re going to hop a plane to New York,” and he dared us. We went to the airport and we had ballet outfits on and we put our hair in buns and we wanted to look really innocent and this was again when flying was really easy, you didn’t need your ticket to get through.
Marc
Apparently you didn’t need an adult either.
Molly
We told my dad and we saw there were two flights, we were either going to go to San Francisco or New York and we thought, “Oh let’s go to New York, it’s leaving early,” and so we said to the stewardess, “We just want to say good-bye to my sister, can we go on the plane?” She was like, “Sure.” Then she let us on. It was a really empty flight because it was out of Cleveland, Ohio, and we sat back there and then all of a sudden you just hear “Woosh!” The plane takes off and we had little ballet outfits and buns and I was like, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women.” Then the stewardess who had given us permission to go say good-bye to my sister came by to ask if we wanted snacks or beverages and she was like, “Can I get you ladies something to eat?” She was like, “Oh, motherfucker!” We wondered if we were going to get in trouble, but she ended up not telling anyone and then when we landed in New York City she was like, “Bye, ladies. Have a nice trip.”
Marc
It’s such an exciting story but the irresponsibility of all the adults in this story is somehow undermining my appreciation of it. You were twelve-year-old girls in fucking ballet outfits and everybody’s sort of like, “Have a good time.” What world was that?
Molly