This Is the Religious Icon Conan O’Brien Is Named After
No, Conan O’Brien isn’t named after the famous Barbarian.
But what about the notorious bacteria"> trying to validate that particular theory. “I love you guys so much,” they wrote. “Have you heard about Conan the Bacterium? This is a real bacterium that can survive radiation.”
“What if that’s what you’re named after?” wondered podcast cohost Sona Movsesian. “Because your dad’s a microbiologist.”
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Nope, that’s not how the whole naming thing went down, according to O’Brien. In real life, he actually went without a name for a short while as his parents couldn’t land on the perfect monicker. “They want the name right away,” O’Brien said. “And my dad said he wanted to go to the medical school library and look. He didn’t have the name yet, and he looked up names — he thought it should be interesting.”
O’Brien’s father had very specific ideas about how first names should work with last names. The name should be simple and not easily reduced to a nickname. (His own name, Thomas, was often shortened to Tom, which he hated.)
Tom O’Brien (sorry, dude) did find “Conan,” but it wasn’t in the medical school library. “It’s one of the early religious figures,” O’Brien revealed. “There’s a very famous thing called the Bayou Tapestry, which is this, like, cartoon that describes the battle in 1066 and all the things that happened when England was invaded by the Normans. And there’s one that shows a guy fleeing, and underneath his name — he’s a cowardly person — it says CONAN.”
The next in the tapestry, said O’Brien, depicts Conan surrendering the keys to the city by dangling them off a long pole, too frightened to do a face-to-face hand off with the bad guys. Years later, his parents went to a gift shop and purchased the two s as a gift — the first in which cowardly Conan flees, the second in which he carefully surrenders the keys. “It’s hilarious,” O’Brien itted.
His siblings have relatively common names, making “Conan” an even more interesting choice. O’Brien likened his childhood to the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue,” in which a kid with a peculiar name endures a youth full of bullying. The father reveals that he named his son Sue because it made him a tougher guy. Growing up with the name Conan “was a little bit like that at times,” O’Brien explained.
Sona wondered if the name actually made O’Brien more rough and tumble.
“It can go one of two ways,” Conan replied. “Either it makes you tougher or it makes you immediately surrender at the Battle of Hastings.”
