Michele and Rob Reiner were killed by their son shortly after attending Conan O’Brien‘s holiday party last December. In a new interview with the New Yorker, the comedian opened up about their deaths for the first time.
“I knew Rob and Michele, and then increasingly got closer and closer to them, and I was seeing them a lot. My wife and I were seeing them a lot, and they were so—they were just such lovely people. And to have that experience of saying good night to somebody and having them leave and then find out the next day that they’re gone. . . . I think I was in shock for quite a while afterward,” he said. “There’s no other word for it. It’s just very—it’s so awful. It’s just so awful.”
O’Brien, who is gearing up for a second year of hosting the Oscars, took a moment to reflect on Rob Reiner’s astounding run of classic movies.
“I think it’s seven movies that Rob Reiner made, in quick succession, that are classics. Now, if you can make one great movie, that’s impressive. It’s an almost impossible feat. To make two means that you’re one of the greats. To make seven—in, like, a nine-year, ten-year, eleven-year period—is insanity,” he said. ” With “Spinal Tap” alone, if that’d been the only thing he ever did, he influenced my generation enormously… It was like a splitting-the-atom moment.”
O’Brien also noted the hole left by Reiner’s death when it came to celebrity political activism, saying “to have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend.” A vocal progressive, Reiner was not lauded so profusely by Donald Trump. The president repeatedly disparaged the late director on social media. O’Brien said he found the outrageousness of the Trump administration hard to mine for comedy.
“When I was at Harvard and working on the Lampoon, we would try and think of magazines we could do a parody of. And there was one magazine we always knew we couldn’t parody, which was the National Enquirer. If a magazine has, as its cover, ‘Elvis Still Alive, Marries Alien and They Have a Baby That’s a Three-Speed Blender’—if that’s what the real magazine’s coming out with, you can’t do a comedic take on that,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s so bombastic and so outrageous and so unprecedented that how do you—’Oh, I’ve got a great Trump impression, and I have him saying this.’ Well, that’s not crazier than what really happened yesterday. So I don’t know how this is funny.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, O’Brien reflected on the death of another comedic giant. He called the loss of Catherine O’Hara “incomprehensible.”
“That’s someone who was perfection. And we’ve all had that feeling where someone’s being eulogized and we’re thinking, ‘They were good, but this person’s kind of laying it on thick.’ Catherine is just—who’s a funnier performer than Catherine O’Hara?” he said. “And what people didn’t get to experience personally was, she is—she was, I’m still saying ‘is’—she’s possibly the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
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