Paul Noth is co-creator of the cartoon series “Pale Force,” which stars Conan O’Brien and Jim Gaffigan. Initially a one-off joke on O’Brien’s “Late Night,” “Pale Force ” has been transformed into a series of “webisodes” at nbc.com. When he’s not working on “Pale Force,” Noth is a graphic novelist and a regular cartoonist for The New Yorker. I sat down with Paul at a local cafe, where I was typing emails back and forth with him wherever it was that he was.
How did you get involved with the series?
Watching Jim on “Late Night” got me thinking about how both he and Conan had a lot of self-deprecating pale jokes. I came up with the idea for “Pale Force,” wrote a script, and emailed it to Jim. He and I had collaborated on several other writing projects, one of which included my first attempt at animation. Jim liked the idea and brought me along the next time he did “Late Night” to pitch it to the head writer, Mike Sweeney. Mike liked it too, but it was almost a year before it got the greenlight. They don’t usually use guest writers.
This series sort of started as a gag for Gaffigan on Conan… how did it become a proper series?
After they taped Jim’s first Pale Force appearance, one of the producers came up to us and said, “Get to work on the next one.” Before that moment I didn’t think it would be more than a one-time thing. Jim and I wrote the origin story, “Pale Force Begins.” After it taped the executive producer Jeff Ross approached us about doing a series of twenty. We were thrilled. We had had a lot of fun with “Pale Force Begins.” It had set up this world where an anthropomorphic State of Utah can hang out with Santa and Larry Bird. These are stories that need to be told.
Did you go to NBC to make this an on-demand web 2.0 interweb mobisode, or did you pitch it as such?
No, I never thought this would become anything like… whatever it is it’s become. I still can’t believe they’re letting us do twenty. My favorite part is working with my brother Patrick on the songs. Unlike me, he has musical talent. I’ll sing him something terrible, stupid and off-key, and he’ll turn it into an actual song. I never thought I’d get to do musical numbers.
How do you make 20 episodes of this, and how does it work without the setup of Gaffigan springing it on Conan? Did you have to expand your idea of what it was and could be?
At first the idea of doing twenty was kind of daunting. But we were encouraged by the first two episodes, “Sidekicks 1 and 2,” which don’t contain any pale jokes at all. I think we were trying to prove to ourselves that these can be about anything, as long as the small group of people who work on them all think that they’re funny.
Hopefully people will watch the episodes from the show first. But even if they just stumble upon a later one out of context, I don’t think it’s very difficult to infer the set up (that these cartoons are Jim’s delusional fantasies, which humiliate Conan) perhaps from the opening sequence alone. That’s not to say that any of the online episodes wouldn’t benefit enormously from having the real life Jim and Conan there to react to them. But there are other things that we’re willing to do online that we wouldn’t risk during a show, for fear that the studio audience wouldn’t laugh.
You can see some of Paul Noth’s work on his website, and watch “Pale Force” here.