Once in Love with Amy
I’m certain that many people know this. I didn’t. But I was watching the video podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and his guest was Amy Poehler. And what I never was aware of, is that back when he had his 12:30 AM show on NBC, there was a recuring bit when Amy Poehler (at the very start of her career, before even SNL) would play ‘Stacy,’ the teenage younger sister of Conan’s sidekick Andy Richter and who has a massive crush on Conan.
During the podcast, Conan mentioned how the writing for the sketches were funny, maybe around a B or B+ -- but that every time, “Amy turned them into an A+++++++.” (He wasn’t saying this only because she was there as the guest – I later found another video of him as a guest on a talk show discussing those sketches, and he said the same thing. And besides, there are over a half-dozen of the sketches on YouTube, so clearly the show loved to have her on, doing them.)
Poehler began at Second City in Chicago, where she first began working with Tina Fey. Later, joined another Chicago improv group, Upright Citizens Brigade (whose members included Matt Walsh of Veep, Adam McKay – the writer-director partner of Will Ferrell, Horatio Sanz of SNL, and Neil Flynn who played ‘Janitor’ on Scrubs, among others), which subsequently moved to New York City, and that’s when she got hired for the sketches on Conan O’Brien’s show, around 1997. This was four years before she joined Saturday Night Live.
I don’t think this is the first one, but it’s one of the first that I can find. Conan is right, the sketches are well-written, about a B – but she is indeed an A+++++++.
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