Posted at 8:00 a.m.
Yes, of course: “the worst assistant in the world”, a character crystallized by many nonsensical segments aired in Conan O’Brien’s defunct show on TBS, is first and foremost a caricature of the real Sona Movsesian. Case in point: In 2009, when the gossip press reported that Robert De Niro was suing his own assistant for watching 55 episodes of Friends in four days, Sona undertook to beat this honorable mark. She will manage to watch 58 episodes in four days. Cheer.
Sona nevertheless considered this book with a certain seriousness, as a counterweight to the archetype, ubiquitous in fiction, of the good-natured and obedient assistant, to which she opposes the confessions of an assistant who, even if she got her dream job, refuses to suffer the worst insults or make the rug, under the pretext that she is in the service of someone powerful.
Counterweight also to the allegations that have emanated in recent years about several television figures who have built empires on their cleverly feigned kindness, while behaving, behind the scenes, with the humility of Louis XIV.
I thought, why don’t I tell a different kind of story, my own, about an assistant taking naps at work and talking back to her boss, with whom she has a healthy but dysfunctional relationship?
Sona Movsesian
How does she explain that the proverbial little staff, in the not-so-wonderful world of showbiztoo often accepts being flouted, as if it were an unavoidable rite of passage?
“Excuse the disgusting image, but I compare this way of thinking to the film The Human Centipede : it’s like we all defecate in each other’s mouths when we behave towards people who want to start in this environment as people who absolutely have to be mistreated, just to measure how much they really want to do this work”, regrets Sona, from her residence in California.
Why can’t we just be nice and tell them they’ll have to work really hard, instead of throwing printers at them, putting them down and calling them at 3:00 in the morning? Especially since it doesn’t really separate those who have what it takes from the others: it just creates post-traumatic stress.
Sona Movsesian
A friendship atypical
Despite this salutary subtext, The World’s Worst Assistant unfolds for the most part like a string of wacky anecdotes, whether it’s a dinner with a journalist from the HollywoodReporter which Sona participated in after ingesting a certain green plant, or a call from David Letterman’s assistant who wanted to let her counterpart know that her boss had Conan delivered a horse (!) as a thank you gift .
This ode to laziness, prodigal in self-mockery, also traces in hollow, with great tenderness, the portrait of an atypical friendship between a girl from an Armenian family, who loved television to the point of a day in high school to offer an oral presentation on the history of the remote control, and one of the icons of the small screen of the 1990s.
“I was already a fan of Conan when I started working for him and I was afraid to learn that he is evil, recalls Sona. But I quickly noticed that if so many collaborators remained faithful to him, it is because he is the best boss. He is still somehow the middle child of a family of six. »
When you meet Conan, you understand that being successful is not an excuse to be unpleasant.
Sona Movsesian
PHOTO PROVIDED BY PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Conan and Sona, in their Sunday clothes
Launched in November 2018, the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friendco-hosted by Sona in the role of the most grouchy of stooges, will have breathed new life into the humor of the lanky redhead, more on this microphone than at the helm of his TBS talk show, which he disconnected by the way in June 2021.
“There is something very framed in a talk show TV, observes Sona, while when we record the podcast, we have no idea what we are going to talk about. And I think it suits the comedic spirit of Conan perfectly to launch into these long digressions. It is as if the animal had been left out of its cage. A very pale and very red animal. »
So Sona isn’t exactly the worst assistant in the world? “It’s true that I often forget tasks and I’m not good with details, but what I’m better at than any assistant is that every time I slip up, Conan can turn it into comic material. It means more to him than if I did my job properly. »
The World’s Worst Assistant
Sona Movsesian
Feather
272 pages