Conan O’Brien Audience Story

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• March 14, 2026

Conan O’Brien is one of my idols and top comedic influences. He’s a legend and one of the best to ever do it. I grew up worshiping Conan, as he is a master of walking the line between smart and silly, which he makes look easy and it really is not an easy thing to pull off. When I started doing stand up, I more or less was impersonating Conan’s late night monologue style. It’s the reason I’m a joke teller and not a story teller on stage.

Long before I even considered pursuing comedy as a career, I consumed endless hours of Conan’s comedy. Every comedy fan has their favorite late night host, and usually it’s somewhat generational, but my late night guy will always be Conan O’Brien.

Back when I was a teenager, before NBC screwed him over, and he’d move to California for the TBS show, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” was filmed in New York City. Growing up on Long Island, I was no stranger to trips to the greatest city in the world. Desperately, I wanted to attend a taping of Conan but you had to be at least seventeen years old to go.

As soon as I turned 17, I started emailing whatever email the audience department was to win tickets to a taping (all late night show tapings are free and are some sort of lottery system). This was more exciting to me than getting my drivers license (what a nerd!). The comedy gods smiled upon me and I won four tickets to a taping. Rejoice!

The year before, I started going into the city with friends to see Broadway shows without adult supervision. Because my Dad worked for the Long Island Rail Road, I had a family pass and could ride the train for free. Initially, my Dad forbade me and my friends to go to the city without an adult, but when we forced him to come with us to show him what we were doing (we would go to the Broadway lottery lines which at the time were in person to win discounted tickets to Broadway shows. We saw a ton of shows this way, often in the front row for $20-$30), my Dad realized Times Square wasn’t a prostitute filled place like the 80s, but rather very Disney-ish and safe for us. It should be noted I was also a responsible kid with good grades, so my parents trusted me to make good decisions.

With the four tickets, my friends Jimmy, Brendan and Joey joined me. Late Night shows are filmed in the afternoon and we cut out of school. Again, my parents knew I was cutting school and they didn’t care. Because I was a good student, we would cut school sometimes to go to Six Flags or go to the beach.

All of us were big fans, but I was giddy with excitement to see one of the funniest people to ever walk the planet. If you’ve never been to a live taping, they do kind of treat the audience like cattle. First, you wait on a long line outside. You are repeatedly warned that if you leave to go the bathroom during the taping, you will not be let back in. They encourage you to dehydrate yourself. From the outside line, you are moved to the inside line (30 Rock). We kept our eyes peeled for other celebrity sightings as we were also huge SNL fans. This whole process is like two hours long and it’s before smart phones, so we just had each other to be entertained.

As they start letting us into the studio to be seated, we are pulled from the line by a producer who berates us for being rude and knocking on the doors of people’s offices at 30 Rock. All four of us were thoroughly confused because we didn’t do that. My heart sank. We were being thrown out. We came all this way. And we were getting kicked out of 30 Rock. The other audience members starting going in. We were so close. I was on the verge of tears. I didn’t understand what was happening. I had never been kicked out of anything my whole life.

Luckily for us, some other audience members from the line came to our defense. They said, “hey, it wasn’t these guys, it was THOSE guys,” pointing to another group of young people, but not as young as us (probably like 20 years old). The producer had been told that a group of young people were being rude and disruptive (knocking on doors and being assholes) and since we were the youngest people on the line, the producer assumed it was us. Someone else confirmed our innocence, and then the producer apologized to us, escorted us into the studio himself and sat us in the third row. The rude college kids were thrown out of 30 Rock.

Smiles returned to our faces. Catastrophe averted! To this day I’m so grateful for those strangers who spoke up and stood up for us.

Before the taping, Conan comes out and talks to the audience for a few minutes. There was some odd thing happening where they were changing a light bulb on set. Conan proceeded to lick the dead light bulb and give it to the guy sitting in front of me. Never in my life would I think I’d be jealous of a non working licked light bulb, but I was.

Rachel Weisz was the guest on the show, and as expected it was a hilariously great time. I still have the wristband on the cork board above my desk that says, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”

My friends and I laughed all the way back to Penn Station. About the show. About how we almost got kicked out. And we got on the train to Jamaica where we were supposed to transfer to the Babylon train. Because we were distracted and also dumb teenagers (even smart teenagers are dumb), we weren’t paying attention on the transfer and ended up on the train to Hempstead. For anyone that doesn’t know Long Island, Hempstead is not a good area and the train station was rather dangerous.

By the time we realized our error, it’s too late. There’s no way to get on the Babylon line besides going back to Jamaica. The station is sketchy as hell and we’re all a bit scared. We decide to get a cab to Babylon instead of going back to Jamaica because it would take hours to get home and it’s getting later and later. The four of us squeezed in the back of a cab because the cab driver had a friend in the front seat. If that wasn’t weird enough, the cab driver was asking us for directions to Babylon station.

Again, this is before smart phones, so we’re not even really sure. Our advice is to get to the southern rail line and follow it east. The thrill of seeing Conan felt further away from our homes. I was not unconvinced we were going to die that night, in that cab. Either purposefully or by accident. We quietly listened to the cab driver and his buddy’s insane conversation. The only thing I remember exactly is passing a strip club and the driver going, “what do they do there?” And the other guy going, “they shake booty there.”

They wanted like a hundred dollars from us, which we didn’t have (and an insane price). I think we had like $70 between us and we forked it over though I was still terrified they were going to shake us down. Turns out, they were just incompetent taxi drivers, not nefarious. When we got in Brendan’s car at Babylon station, we all had a sigh of relief and then laughed again at the adventure. Since we were all home later than expected, we had to explain the ordeal to our parents.

Years later, I’d start doing stand up comedy and two of my biggest dreams was to do stand up on late night television and/or write for Conan O’Brien. Neither dream came true, though I did write for late night for a few years, though my boss couldn’t hold a candle to Conan in humor nor kindness.

To this day, I am obsessed with Conan. He’s brought so much light to my life and countless others. Team Coco, forever.