R.I.P.: Thomas and Ruth O'Brien, Parents of The TV Host

The O'Briens

The parents of Conan O’Brien, the longtime late-night television host and a star in the comedy world, died this week within days of one another, The NY Times is reporting.

Thomas Francis O’Brien, 95, an epidemiologist, and Ruth Reardon O’Brien, 92, a lawyer who made strides for women in the legal field, both died at their home in Brookline, Mass., according to the Bell O’Dea Funeral Home. Dr. O’Brien died on Monday, and Ms. O’Brien, died on Thursday.

Happy families are not exactly a common topic in comedy. The parents of Conan O’Brien, 61, were not only celebrated in their respective fields but by the most well-known of their six children.

Conan O'Brien

Conan O’Brien credited his father with introducing him to comedy and described him in an interview this week in The Boston Globe as “the funniest guy in the room.” He added that his father had a “voracious appetite for ideas and people and the crazy variety and irony of life.”

Thomas O’Brien spent most of his career at what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he was the first director of the infectious diseases division, and was on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He also was a co-founder of the Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance for the World Health Organization. He became known for his work around antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Ms. O’Brien was one of only four women in her law school class at Yale and, in 1978, became the second woman to be named partner at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, where she was a real estate attorney.

Over the years, when the comedian spoke of his parents on air, he often joked that they did not know what he was really up to — namely, writing sketch comedy and bawdy jokes for late-night television — but instead thought that he was in law school, or working in real estate.