Actually Watching

Conan O’Brien went to Japan with a camera crew and made some travel videos for his late-night show. They’re among the few travel things I’ll actually watch.

I know the background—he wrote for The Simpsons in the era that mattered, did SNL, now runs one of those late-night programs that still pulls an audience. Tall Irish guy with the distinctive hair. He’s been funny for a long time in a way that doesn’t require you to be in on anything.

What he does with the Japan videos is different. He doesn’t set himself up as the observer pointing at the strangeness of it all. He gets in there. Rents a Japanese family for a day. Visits his animated namesake. Tries kaiseki, the formal multi-course dinner thing. He’s not performing discovery or signaling respect. He’s just there, figuring it out in real time, and it’s funny because he’s actually smart about it, not because Japan is somehow weird.

This matters to me because I have a real case of Japan fatigue. Not with Japan itself—that won’t go away. Fatigue with how it gets filmed: drone shots of Shibuya at night, time-lapse subways, everyone climbing Mount Fuji in high definition with lo-fi hip hop underneath. It’s become a format. A safe, beautiful, interchangeable format. You could swap the footage between fifty different travel channels and lose nothing.

Conan’s stuff doesn’t have that sheen. Just him, people, food, moments. The comedy is in what’s happening, not in where it’s happening. And I think that’s why I’ll actually remember these instead of just scrolling past them.