By Jonathan Tully It would’ve been very easy for Conan O’Brien to end up cynical after all of what’s happened in the last month. Easy and, as we learned about O’Brien on his final Tonight Show , the last thing he’d be. “I hate cynicism,” he said in a closing monologue. “It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.” Instead, O’Brien’s final show was mostly full of fun and great moments — he continued his “crazy expensive” sketches, using what appear to be massively costly items and sticking NBC with the tab. On Friday, O’Brien brought out what he said was the skeleton of a “giant ground sloth” borrowed from the Smithsonian, which sprayed “beluga caviar” on a “Picasso.” Cost to NBC: $65 million. (Then, nice guy that he is, O’Brien admitted the whole thing was fake. Again, it’d have been so easy to do that for real, but then the lawsuits… etc.) Steve Carell showed up to give Conan his exit interview, Tom Hanks arrived with “scotch” in hand (really creme

soda) and longtime sidekick Andy Richter threatened to wheel his podium home. But the best guest, to me, was Neil Young — whom O’Brien said was “the first guy to call me” after what happened. Young played a solo version of “Long May You Run”, then mentioned to O’Brien that “You are the guy I look to for new music!” (And this is where Neil and I agree. Of all the late-night hosts, no one had a better track record with up-and-coming artists than Conan. The White Stripes thought so highly of him that he appears in the video “The Denial Twist”. David Letterman, Craig Ferguson and Jimmy Kimmel deserve mention for being good in this area, but Conan was consistently better.) And even after his emotional closing, where he thanked his fans and audience for their loyalty, O’Brien left things on neither a maudlin nor cynical note. Instead, he invited Will Ferrell, Ben Harper, Beck and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons to join him and the Max Weinberg 7 for a closing, over-the-top version of “Freebird”. Good luck, Conan. Long may you run.

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O’Brien refuses to be cynical as he ends ‘Tonight Show’ run