Name: Conan Body Shames George Washington | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend
Uploaded: 2026-03-28T16:38:12.000Z
Duration: 8 min 6 s
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One of the things I've always loved about history is that it constantly reminds me we've been here before.

Uh, we like to say history repeats itself.

Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, said, "What has been will be again.

There's nothing new under the sum." Which means human nature doesn't change.

And so that human nature is going to superimpose itself over the seemingly random chaos of events, and

we're going to see themes and recurring echoes and what Mark Twain called rhymes.

I have never worked on a film, whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or jazz music or whatever, that isn't rhyming constantly in the present.

And I used to have a stump speech going off for whatever film it was.

I said, "What if I told you, uh, that I've been working for years about a film about a single-issue political campaign that metastasized with horrible, unintended consequences, that it was about the demonization of recent immigrant groups to the United States, that it was about a presidential election cycle with unbelievable violence and kind of— Ranker.

Ranker and, and, and sort of muckraking and stuff, and

that it, it, it also represented a whole group of people who felt they had lost control of their country and wanted to take it back.

You'd say, "Wow, you're talking about the Tea Party or the this and that." I said, "These are only four themes of my film on Prohibition." And they go, "But what about the flappers and the gangsters?" I said, "They're—" but the more interesting thing is this underlying resonance.

The thing you have to do as a filmmaker, though, in order for the thing to speak more directly is to, is to be disciplined, like Odysseus tied to the lash to the mast where you, where you can see, hear that, those, those echoes, but

you don't go, "Oh, isn't this so much like today?" I mean, the Revolution has a failed invasion of Canada.

It has a standing army that precipitates this war in Boston.

It has a big continent-wide epidemic or epidemics, plural, uh, that kills more people than the Revolution and also, uh, engenders a huge debate on the part of Washington about inoculating the army.

And finally he decides which many historians think is the best military decision he made.

So, you know, Plusachange as the French who came to our aid and without whose help we don't have a country, we'd say.

Yeah, well, the, uh, again, watching it and as you said, smallpox, there's a, there's a, uh, a terrible scourge that looks like it's going to cost us the war.

And they're making decisions about inoculation that we're struggling with today, which is a little mind-blowing to me as the son of a, a scientist and physician.

But, um, you know, I—so many people will say to me, "Oh, but, you know, now we have the internet." And I think, "Yeah, that's true, but

They had, they had their version of the internet.

They had people saying irresponsible, inflammatory things all the time, and

everybody's reading it." Sam, Sam Adams is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector, uh, but

he's really good as a propagandist who says, "My job is to keep my fellow citizens alive to their grievances." Yes.

They're people today within whose interest it is to keep up the divisions between people rather than show the fact that these divisions, which accounts for your and my 51, 52%, are a mile wide but a kind of an inch thick.

And that what you want, the ability to transcend the dialectic of yes and no, one and zero, red state, blue state, is to tell a good story.

'Cause it has a kind of benign Trojan horse effect.

It kind of says, "Oh yeah, this is who we were.

This is who we are." It's very, very similar.

Same, same degree of virtue and venality, same degree of generosity and greed, same degree of, you know, make up your own alliteration.

I think, you know, when I grew up, there used to be this kind of hagiography about the American Revolution, and

we would get these textbooks, you know, George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and I cannot tell a lie.

And, you know, these people were represented as the—represented to us as these marble men who were infallible.

And then what I've loved about my lifelong obsession with history is you see, um, you know, George Washington is a very impressive man in a lot of ways.

We, we always have to accept that both sides of the story.

And I like my, you know, these humans to be human beings.

And I think that's the only way we can actually take a measure of inspiration from them.

If they're just the gods, then they don't do something.

The Greeks were trying to talk about it as something that was a war within people, between warring factions, you know, some, you know, that Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths, and

that what they're setting up are stories, good stories that remind us that we are all likewise, um, divided within ourselves.

And we have chances to sort of tilt towards that virtue or tilt towards that venality.

And so I think with the Revolution, it's understandable why we've made it bloodless and gallant.

You know, we, we got some big ideas in Philadelphia.

We don't want them to be diminished, which we think if we admit this is a bloody civil war, a bloody revolution, and

a bloody world war, the fourth or fifth over the prize of North America, and

that George Washington, the man without whom we don't have a country, and

there's very few times in world history where we can say it's literally one person that holds them together.

Deeply flawed, as you point out, rash, rides out on the battlefield risking his life, which means the entire cause, uh, makes a couple of really bad tactical mistakes.

Really screws up in New York and at Brandywine and a couple of other places where just the luck doesn't fall.

But he's able to inspire people to fight in the dead of night, pick subordinate talent without any worry about whether they're better generals than him.

Now you're going to say, talk about, you're going to say, "Oh, this is insane." Oh my God.

I've made sure everyone here is inoculated against smallpox.

Um, I, I pick, um, looking around for the people I've picked who I think are good.

Okay, well, this isn't a good example, this room.

No, but I think I'm, I'm very much like Washington.

Um, 'cause his other, his biggest and most important thing besides convincing people that they were not Georgians or New Hampshireites but Americans and deferring to Congress is that he gave up his power twice.

So these people, we're going to really be so proud of you when you just walk away.

Well, I don't like the way this has gone.

Um, I do want to say one thing about Washington that's long, uh, interested me.

He was kind of wide in the hips, wasn't he?