Writers with beards

David Letterman and Conan O’BrienCreditTOM BACHTELL

Consider the great beards ever: Confucius, Abe Lincoln, Rasputin. The whiskers appear inseparable from the males. However for most guys it is the decision to forgo regular shaving, as a reaction to situation, and never the resultant goatee or Vandyke, that counts. “Beards have always marked changes in men’s everyday lives, ” Allan Peterkin, a prominent pogonologist, states. (He is mcdougal of “One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of hair on your face.”) Thus we get Al Gore after the election (whiskers of grievance and launch), and Ted Kaczynski in the cabin (separation, insanity), and Johnny Damon aided by the Red Sox (superstition)—all iconic beards within their correct context.

Conan O’Brien, today forty-four, expanded their first-ever beard—“a pastime back at my face, ” he called it—only recently, after their late-night program went from the air as a result of the Writers Guild of America attack. Six weeks in, he was just starting to resemble a hockey player in mid-“playoff beard” form, or, while he preferred to put it, a “lone gunman.” “In my line of work there’s no chance to grow a beard, ” O’Brien said, fleetingly before Christmas time. “These shows would be the arranging maxims of your life, as well as the moment they stop you begin to go crazy.” That early morning, a paparazzi picture of O’Brien had appeared in the article, alongside among David Letterman, who was in addition, evidently, developing a strike beard (“LATE GUYS TURN INTO ‘CAVE’ MEN”). “Literally, it’s some thing to-do, ” O’Brien stated. “You can check up on the development of beard.”