Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too.

When Late Night with Conan O’Brien made its debut, in the fall of 1993, I was probably at the peak of my devotion to comedy television that aired around midnight. As a fierce fan of David Letterman, I watched with rooting interest as NBC engaged in the longstanding tradition of botched the transition of Tonight Show hosts. (When Bill Carter’s book on the turbulent situation, The Late Shift, was published the following year, I purchased it as soon as I could and devoured it with vigor.) So I was well aware of the perplexing choice of Letterman’s successor on Late Night (after the future Kennedy Center honoree, denied the post he’d long coveted, jumped to CBS to launch The Late Show), a comedy writer alum of Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons who’d spent barely any time at all on the other side of the camera. Even the commercials promoting the introduction of Conan O’Brien as a late night joked about his amateur status. “He’s new at this,” they sheepishly admitted.

A recent college graduate, I had a lot of spare time on my hands when Late Night with Conan O’Brien was added to the NBC programming grid, and I watched from the beginning. While it wasn’t as bad as the most scathing reviews insisted, it wasn’t exactly good, either. But then, with remarkable speed, it evolved to become something downright fantastic, as innovative in its spirited absurdity and genially serrated satire as Letterman was in his showbiz-deflating irony.

Still toiling away among the tumbleweeds of basic cable, O’Brien was recently termed by The New York Times as “The Most Riveting Host in Late Night (and the Most Overlooked).” Realistically, that assessment could have been fairly applied to him from the moment he first got his sea legs on Late Night. I’m not sure if ever viewer had a comedy bit they could readily identify as the one that fully won them over to O’Brien’s Late Night, but the choice is obvious for me: “Conan Babies.”