TL;DR
7/10. Conan O’Brien’s assistant of thirteen years explains how to nap at work, watch television at your desk, and become impossible to fire. A comedy bit stretched to book length, and there is more underneath it than the premise suggests.
Movsesian and O’Brien have a long-running routine in which she plays the lazy incompetent and he plays the oppressive boss, developed across the television show and then the podcast where she is co-host. The book is an extension of it.
How-to chapters on napping and on memorising your boss’s social security number. Tips for becoming untouchable. Illustrations, graphs, and thirteen years of stories from the job.
O’Brien wrote the foreword, which tells you the affection is real and that the shtick is a shtick. It was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Is she really a bad assistant?
Yes and no, and the book is smarter about this than it lets on.
She does describe genuine dereliction. Binge-watching Friends at her desk. Crosswords on the clock. The corporate card. The napping, which has its own chapter with instructions.
She also kept a job for over a decade with somebody notoriously demanding, traveled with him, ran his life, and became a fixture of the operation. Whatever the bit says, somebody who is genuinely useless does not last thirteen years in that role.
What she is describing is a person who declined to perform diligence while doing the parts that mattered, which is a different thing and is the actual argument of the book.
What is the serious argument underneath?
A takedown of grind culture that arrives as a joke and stays as an argument.
Her position, stated flatly when she stops performing, is that you should serve your own needs at work and try to work with people who are good and funny. That is not a joke. It is a considered position about employment held by somebody who has watched an industry chew through assistants.
The assistant memoir has a genre convention, which is the tyrant boss and the suffering employee who endures and is vindicated. This book refuses it. There is no tyrant, no suffering, and no vindication, and the refusal is the point.
The second argument is about the relationship. The New York Times review put it well: this is about a boss accepting an employee for how she works, and an employee accepting her boss for everything he is. That is a more interesting book than the title promises, and it is the reason the book survives its own premise.
What can a comic writer learn from The World’s Worst Assistant?
The structural problem is visible and the solutions are worth studying.
A running joke that works in three-minute segments has to survive three hundred pages. The bit is thin by design, because bits are thin, and stretching one across a book kills it in almost every case where somebody has tried.
Movsesian solves it by alternating. Bit, then real story, then bit. The sincere material recharges the joke, and the joke keeps the sincere material from becoming a standard celebrity memoir. Neither register runs long enough to exhaust itself.
She also includes a chapter that announces itself as filler, which is either the joke working perfectly or the joke admitting defeat, and I genuinely cannot tell which. Both readings are instructive.
What does The World’s Worst Assistant do that celebrity memoirs usually cannot?
It is specific about her own failings without asking to be admired for them.
The standard move in this category is the humble brag, meaning a confessed flaw that is secretly a virtue: I work too hard, I care too much. Movsesian confesses to laziness and then does not redeem it. There is no chapter where she learns her lesson and becomes diligent.
That refusal is rarer than it sounds and it is what makes the book likeable. The reader is not being managed toward a conclusion about her character.
Verdict
Light, quick, and better than it needs to be. Read it if you like Conan, and read it anyway if you write comic nonfiction, because the alternation between bit and sincerity is a solved problem here and it is not an easy one.
The grind-culture argument underneath is worth more than the jokes on top, and she never announces it, which is why it works.
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