“What had always been more interesting to me was improvisation because I was more interested in being funny with other people, and as it turns out, when you’re doing a volume business like the Late Night show, there’s such a large amount of it that’s improvisational, and that was huge for me. Doing all those years of improv really helped, and learning to listen, and learning to react, and learning to let things happen. I don’t pretend that I’ve learned the true craft of improv, but what I did learn is that people respond to something that happened in the moment much more than they will respond to the most brilliant thing that was thought of ahead of time and prepared. There’s something in us, and they’ll find it someday, it’s like a tiny piece of zinc in our cerebral cortex, they’re gonna find out what it is. But when we see something that unfolds naturally and is real, people love it. The biggest laughs I’ve ever had in my life are something going off the rails, something going wrong, something happening that wasn’t supposed to happen. And improv teaches you not to fear those moments; that’s where the gold is.”
-Conan O’Brien
