By Rob N. LeDonne

Since 1997, Brian Stack has been a writer on NBC’s popular after-hours staple “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” In that time frame he has written and acted in numerous bits on the show, for which him and his fellow writers are consistently nominated for Emmys. Stack has also written for the Emmys when O’Brien hosted in 2001 and 2006 and has appeared on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock.”

Chronicle: How did you get the job in the first place?

Brian Stack: The way I got the job was kind of strange. I was working at Second City in Chicago at the time, and one day I got a call from “Conan” writer Brian McCann, who’s an old friend of mine from Chicago improv groups. He said that one of the other “Conan” writers, Tommy Blacha, another former Chicagoan, had broken his leg really badly and they needed someone to fill in for a few months until Tommy came back. I wasn’t in any way expecting to actually get the job, but luckily I did. My wife Miriam, who had been working with me at Second City, moved with me to New York and we assumed we’d be moving back to Chicago in three months, but Conan and Jon Groff liked the work I was doing and they convinced NBC to keep me on even after Tommy came back. I’ll always be grateful to them for that, and I’ve always loved working here.

C: If you portray a character on the show, is it usually your own creation?

BS: It varies quite a bit. Some of the characters were created by other people, some were created by me, and some were created collaboratively between me and other writers. For example, Brian McCann had originally asked me to play Frankenstein, probably because I rarely bend my knees.

C: Explain the Slipnutz

BS: That was kind of a weird accident. One night, we were here very late, trying to come up with some kind of sketch for the next night’s show. The intense metal band Slipknot was booked on that show, and we just started bouncing around the idea of some wacky, horrible comedy group called The SlipNutz being booked accidentally on the same show as Slipknot. Then after doing it on the show for awhile, w thought it would be particularly silly and ridiculous if we got some really great musicians to do some kind of “tribute” album to the SlipNutz. We were very fortunate to get Steve Winwood, Patti Smith, Los Lobos, Coldplay, and John Mayer to participate. We shot their versions over the course of a year or so. I loved all of the versions, and it was a thrill meeting those artists, even for a minute or two. They were all really nice and easy to work with. I was surprised how sweet and shy Patti Smith turned out to be, given her street-tough image, and it was another nice surprise when John Mayer brought up some old favorite bits of his from our show that we had almost forgotten about ourselves.

C: What is the process like writing for the Emmy awards?

BS: We spend a lot of time during the two months preceding the awards just kicking around ideas for jokes and bits, and then gradually narrowing the list down to things that we might actually be able to do. Then, a few weeks before the awards, some of us flew out to shoot some bits in advance, like the big opening montage from last year’s Emmys which was shot on the sets of various other TV shows like “The Office”, “Lost”, and “House”. The hugeness of the event and the media attention involved made it surreal.

C: Do you ever get star struck walking around NBC?

BS: I sometimes do, yeah. It’s hard not to be star-struck when someone I’ve admired for many years like Neil Young or Bill Murray is in the hallway. Oftentimes, though, the people that leave me the most star struck aren’t necessarily the people that most people would feel star struck around. For example, when Paul Westerberg, former leader of my all-time favorite band, The Replacements, was on the show, I bet many people in our audience didn’t even know who he was, but it was a big thrill for me. I felt the same way with one of my current favorite singer-songwriters, Neko Case, or when Michael Palin from Monty Python was on. I guess everyone feels the most star struck around people who’ve inspired them the most.