O'Brien offers coast-to-coast humor in his 'Tonight Show' debut

It was a nice bit, and also a metaphor, as O'Brien clearly knew. As the fifth host of "The Tonight Show," he was taking his New York shtick and barging into someone else's territory. His fish-out-of-water status will clearly be a theme in the first weeks of his show; last night, he joked about getting nosebleed seats at a Lakers game, commandeering a Universal Studios tram through the streets of Los Angeles, and driving his 1992 Taurus through car-obsessed territory as women swooned (and one instantly became pregnant as he passed).

It was vintage Conan stuff, proof that his absurdist sense of humor won't change much on the West Coast. And yet last night also contained some grand nods to O'Brien's fancy new home. Silvery curtains parted when he made his grand entrance. His new set is far more lush than the little studio at 30 Rock. His cowlick, primped by the makeup crew, seemed unusually high, even for his standards. And his old friend Andy Richter, who once sat in a chair beside O'Brien's desk, now stood behind a podium as announcer - and laughed a little too loudly at times, sounding uncomfortably like Ed McMahon.

The Brookline-bred comic faces a delicate task: how to helm an 11:35 institution and still maintain his 12:35 a.m. zaniness. In a conversation with reporters last week, he downplayed the time shift - "I do think that sometimes people act like there's a tear in the fabric of time and space that separates 11:30 and 12:30," he said - but also pledged that he wouldn't simply transplant his old show to a new studio.

Having a new playground, in Los Angeles and the Universal backlot, will clearly help him come up with new material. And O'Brien can always fall back on his trademark wit. Last night, trying to quiet the applause when he first took the stage, he finally said, "It's coming across as angry now, all right?"

O'Brien seemed to want to tamp down expectations, too, and to prove that the pedigreed job isn't getting to his head. Early on in the show, he gave a shout-out to his predecessor, Jay Leno, who "took very good care of this franchise," and then joked that Leno would be back on the air in two days. (Leno will launch a five-night-a-week primetime comedy show this fall.)

And his guests, steeped in La-La land, might well make O'Brien look low-key. That was Will Ferrell's intent: He entered the studio like an Egyptian pharaoh, carried on a chair by four shirtless men. O'Brien just watched and laughed.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.