There are rally beards, and strike beards and holiday beards.
And the beard grown by Conan O’Brien, the lanky talk show host with the cascading pompadour, was one that first marked his ugly parting from NBC.
“I grew a beard because I hate shaving,” he told visiting reporters on the set of his TBS show. “I stopped shaving after the last ‘Tonight Show.’ I shaved that morning, and then I didn’t shave.
“And I grew a beard because that’s, that’s what you do when you go through something and especially when you go in broadcasting and you need to shave every day.
“It’s a feeling of liberation: ‘I’m just going to let my beard go.’ And everybody does it who loses a job or goes through something traumatic.”
Losing the “Tonight Show” was certainly traumatic for O’Brien, and he kept the beard as he started planning the TBS show. Eventually, he said, executive producer Jeff Ross asked him point blank: “ ‘The beard, is it going to stay, or is it going to go? It’s going to have to.’
“And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And the next thing you know, we were taking publicity photos with the beard. And the next thing you know, we kept the beard.”
But a bearded Conan won’t forever differentiate him from the clean-shaven network Conan.
“It could go tomorrow,” O’Brien says of the beard. “I’m taking this thing a day at a time. Or it might just fall off, a lack of testosterone.”