Do you feel like you're settled in on The Tonight Show now? Do you feel like you've broken in the show and feel comfortable?

Somewhat. Not really. It does take a while.

It feels comfortable, but I do have to remind myself that it's only been since June. It is fairly new. But it's also, it's so strange, and there's such upheaval, especially with the network being sold or not sold or who knows. It's a little bit hard to just feel like, "Here we are on The Tonight Show."

It does feel like we're living in the midst of a low-level earthquake that could increase at any time. But we just keep making shows and just keep trying to do them funny.

That's, I think, always been Conan's strength is to keep his eye on the ball, as it were.




Does it feel at all like Late Night, when you first started with Conan years ago?

Only slightly, in that, we know what we're doing now and we certainly didn't then. So it's a lot easier. There's a structure in place. There were trained professionals around us before, but they didn't know what the show was.

Now everybody kind of has a good idea what the show was and what their job is. It's a fairly well-oiled machine. It still has weird creaks and wheezes, but it's still a machine.




Do you pay attention to the ratings?

No, not really.

I mean, I hear about them kind of incidentally or I overhear people talking about them, but I don't really focus on them. It doesn't do me any good. There's nothing I can do about it.




Yeah, it seems as though if somebody came back and told you that you were winning 18-34, but not doing well with 34-65 or whatever, you couldn't start throwing more Matlock references in or something.

That's the other thing. Anytime you try and let the cart lead the horse, you're asking for trouble.




Is there a sort of friendly rivalry with Letterman, do you think? Or is that not something you think about?

I don't know that anybody has a lot of contact with anybody from his show. He is and always will be a big influence of mine and I think a big influence of Conan's, but he is now the competition.

I think it's a collegial kind of relationship between the two shows. But there's direct competition, so it's not exactly chummy.




How about the relationship with Leno? I know that's probably a strange subject to talk about, since it's the same network.

It's pretty good. He's had his struggles, and he's kind of in the midst of some great television experiment. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, I don't know who's running things.

But we all certainly have a vested interest in his success, considering he's handing an audience off to us, indirectly.




There are also all of these stories that come up about how he said he'd take back the Tonight Show if they asked him to.

That was weird. That was a weird answer.

Because nobody actually asked him if it was offered, the question was just sort of like, would you like to be back on? And he was the one who went on to say, "If they asked me, would I take it?" That's certainly not the classy answer to that question.

The classy answer is, "Oh, well that's a silly question to ask because somebody already has that job." That's what you say. If you're classy.




Do you think people make too much of Leno taking over the ten o'clock slot and taking guests and sabotaging The Tonight Show?

Oh, number one, it's not an issue of sabotaging The Tonight Show, but it certainly is a big deal that they've made this major experiment, and it's a bold move. It's got a lot riding on it.

But I don't think it's in any way sabotaging us or sabotaging anything. It's an experiment that they were trying and I think it remains to be seen whether or not it will work.




What made you come back to work with Conan for The Tonight Show?

Conan asked me. He asked me and it sounded like an exciting proposition. And I found myself, especially when the end of the Late Night show started to creep up on me, it felt really weird, and I started to kind of, with them all coming here, it was fun to be asked back to the party.

And quite frankly, everything aligned pretty nicely because I was getting really tired of trying to put comedy on television by myself. Because it's a really hard time to get any comedy on television and many networks seem to have just admitted defeat, and admit that they don't know how to do comedy anymore.

So I was happy to have a place to come where I am respected and respect other people and have fun and get to just make comedy and put it on TV and go home and come back the next day and do the same thing again.




Would you go back into a sitcom if you could, or would you want to stay with The Tonight Show?

Not now. Not now.

I mean, I've tried that and done that, and it's not much fun. This is a lot more fun. Honestly. It's not fun. Depending on how much control you have over the show, a lot of times, the shows are really dumb, and it's not very rewarding material, and you get bored easily. And you never feel any sense of security or anything.

The whole idea I think networks think is to sort of keep people on their toes by making them think they could get canceled at any time. I've never really found that to be an effective motivator for creative, funny types. But that's the way it's done.

I am very happy to be here with all of my writer nerds, and my big, red-haired writer nerd, and do a silly little comedy show five days a week. It's great.

http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/11/23/andy-richter-the-tv-squad-interview/