Conan O’Brien’s parents die 3 days apart

The parents of Conan O’Brien, the longtime late-night television host and a star in the comedy world, died this week within days of each other.

Thomas Francis O’Brien, 95, a public health researcher, and Ruth Reardon O’Brien, 92, a lawyer who made strides for women in the legal field, both died at their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, according to the Bell O’Dea Funeral Home. Thomas O’Brien died Monday, and Ruth O’Brien died Thursday.

Happy families are not exactly a common topic in comedy. The parents of Conan O’Brien, 61, were not only celebrated in their respective fields but by the most well-known of their six children.

Conan O’Brien credited his father with introducing him to comedy and described him in an interview this week in The Boston Globe as “the funniest guy in the room.” He added that his father had a “voracious appetite for ideas and people and the crazy variety and irony of life.”

Thomas O’Brien spent most of his career at what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he was the first director of the infectious diseases division, and was on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He also was a co-founder of the Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance for the World Health Organization. He became known for his work around antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Ruth O’Brien was one of only four women in her law school class at Yale and, in 1978, became the second woman to be named partner at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, where she was a real estate attorney.

Recalling when his mother made partner, Conan O’Brien said, in a video about her career in 2017, that it was “pretty emotional, pretty amazing.”

Over the years, when the comedian spoke of his parents on-air, he often joked that they did not know what he was really up to — namely, writing sketch comedy and bawdy jokes for late-night television — but instead thought that he was in law school, or working in real estate.

He said recently on his podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” that his mother had hoped her children would be the kind welcomed at country clubs, but instead she ended up with “Irish pirates.”

Despite the jokes, the couple appeared to be supportive of their son.

In 1993, when he was tapped to replace David Letterman on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, a huge break in his career, his mother told the Globe, “To have him get this slot — well, it’s lovely, isn’t it? It really is lovely.”

She told the Boston Herald around the same time: “He seems to thrive on interaction with other people.”

Conan O’Brien — the third of the six children — grew up with busy, working parents.

Now common knowledge, so-called superbugs were a novel concept when Thomas O’Brien traveled the world to raise awareness of the issue. He also helped to create databases to allow for a swift response to outbreaks of antibiotic resistance. He retired, at 90, in 2019.

Thomas O’Brien was remembered this week by colleagues, including in the medical publication NEJM Journal Watch, as an expert in antimicrobial resistance and a giant in his field — “literally.” He was about the same height as Conan O’Brien, who is 6 feet, 4 inches.

Ruth O’Brien returned to her law career after having left to raise her first five children, according to the law firm’s website. She was asked to come back to work in the early 1970s after running into a partner at Ropes & Gray while out shopping for Father’s Day gifts, she said in 2017, and retired in 1996, about 25 years later.

The two were born to Irish Catholic families in Worcester, Massachusetts, and were married in 1958. In the video about Ruth O’Brien’s career, they speak of sharing child-rearing duties like carpooling to juggle raising a large family with their high-powered careers.

The couple is also survived by their other three sons, two daughters and nine grandchildren.

Conan O’Brien has spoken affectionately of his childhood home. “There were six kids, two dogs, a cat, my grandmother, a parakeet,” he said in the video about his mother, calling it “lovely madness, but madness still the same.”

He added, of his parents: “I don’t know how they worked it out, but they worked it out pretty well. We’re all here, we’re all alive. I don’t know how they did it.”