Triston Casas Refuses to Quit
He’s a maniac of the best kind.
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Jimmy Fallon is a terrible late night host, but he’s good at his job. The problem for us, and windfall for him, is that the leader of The Tonight Show does not need to be funny, per se, and is largely better off avoiding the charge entirely. This is a show that actively avoided hiring David Letterman, setting this whole analogy in motion. It is not for the bold. It is for the meek. It is for those of us at the end of the day, or our ropes. It has money behind it and a rotating cast of pretty people. It is hard to do well, and easy to do well enough.
Rather than delve into the details, let’s just note that Conan O’Brien was briefly the host of The Tonight Show, largely because NBC brass was worried about losing Letterman a second time, understandably. It was his dream job and he lasted for six months before NBC put Leno — the living definition of “well enough” — back in charge. It was cruel and public and life-altering but it didn’t make him any less Conan O’Brien — talented, manic and absolutely dying for attention. It just took away his outlet, and it wasn’t until he dreamed up a cross-country tour of in-person appearances, away from TV cameras due to the legal ins and outs of his NBC departure, that he began to feel once again kind of, maybe a little, like himself.
The subsequent documentary about the tour, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, showed a beloved but frantic, bitter man adjusting to a reality that had given him precisely what he wanted in life, only to wrest it away. In setting up the tour and embarking upon it, O’Brien, contra his nice-guy image, is sort of a dick to his staffers, constantly drowning them in insults in the ostensible vein of comedy, and while it bothers them sometimes you can tell that they know it’s just a function of his recovery: This was who he’s always been, but in his lowest moment he was like that, just far moreso.
I thought about all this as I was watching Red Sox/Yankees on ESPN on Sunday night and the good folks at the Worldwide Leader handed their broadcast over to Triston Casas. Sidelined with an injury, he was finally back in the saddle, not unlike Conan on tour, and goddamn did he perform like a guy whose teammates once rebelled at his pregame sunbathing routine and who inspired the MassLive headline “Red Sox’s Triston Casas explains tweets: ‘I feel like (lizards) have gotten more athletic.’”
The first thing to note is that it was Father’s Day, and ESPN had interviewed Casas on Mother’s Day, with Ravech asking him about his mother, who died when Casas was 9. It was awkward. This time, as soon as Casas was introduced, he started talking and did not stop. Could not stop. This is how, on Father’s Day, Casas told a meandering story on national television that was ultimately about his father being arrested at a Little League game for literally kicking him, the young Casas, onto the field. I cannot adequately describe how weird it was, so here is the video:
Triston Casas with one of the most interesting Father’s Day stories you’ve ever heard.
This could be a Saturday Night Live skit in itself, but it was merely his opening material. He was just getting warmed up. He meandered for so long that Kenley Jansen had Brayan Bello, who was wearing his jersey backward, tell Casas, live on air, to knock it off.
Kenley Janson sent Brayan Bello out to tell Triston Casas to give up the microphone cause he’s talking way too much
If only it were that easy. Like Conan, Triston cannot stop, and when separated from his main stage, the field, will only get loonier. The energy is always going to go somewhere, and the further afield from public gaze they get, the larger the crazy required to refocus the attention on themselves. To their everlasting credit, when the attention is on them, they have no problem whatsover clearing the bar. Like, when the premise of a wildly successful and thoroughly entertaining talk show is “A small amount of these hot sauces will make people sob,” what do you do when the guest chugs the hottest bottle? What is left?
Like Conan, Casas needs to dominate a room. Like Conan, he is charming and talented enough to pull it off and gets the people around him to like him. It’s not a secret, it’s just incredibly hard to pull off. He might not chug a bottle of radioactive hot sauce, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Everything is on the table, because it always has been. I’m just happy to be sitting at it… even if I can’t get a word in. The floor is his. The ceiling is for all of us.
