The sidekick

Andy Richter, who is 29, has a small office overlooking Sixth Avenue. A fish tank sits against one wall, a couch against another. He opens the only window and lights a cigarette.

Late Night taped two hours ago, but, at 8:30, his night is far from over. Richter and Jonathan Groff, the show's head writer, will probably not leave NBC until past midnight. They've got a desk bit to work on for a show later in the week.

"As much as this is a really fun place to work, it still, at times, is really work," Richter says. "We get to dress how we want, and we sort of get to break down walls and throw things down stairwells -- and we're sort of expected to do that. But it's still like coming to an office building."

Three years ago, Richter had just finished playing a deck hand in Chris Elliot's movie Cabin Boy when he met O'Brien at a Los Angeles deli.

"Immediately, I thought, `I don't know how to use this guy, but we've got to hire him. He makes me laugh,' " O'Brien later told the Orange County Register.

O'Brien hired Richter as a writer and, after a few weeks, put him in front of the camera. His limitations, at first, seemed to stem from the public's perception of the sidekick role. Richter wasn't a lump on the couch like Ed or a line-a-nighter like Paul Shaffer. From the start, he showed he would be a prominent player.

In the opening weeks, Time magazine called him "a superfluous appendage." Tom Shales of the Washington Post referred to him as the "nitwit sidekick."

"I get asked a lot, `How did you deal with the criticism?' " Richter says. "It's like, criticism? I'm on fucking TV. It's absurd that I should be on TV, so criticism doesn't mean anything because it's all a big joke, it's all a big silliness that I should ever be there."

Richter studied journalism at the University of Illinois and film at Columbia College in Chicago (but he didn't graduate). Before Late Night and Cabin Boy, he played Mike Brady on stage in The Real Live Brady Bunch, as well as a variety of roles in Chicago-based improv groups.

It took some time, but as soon as the audience got to know Richter, to understand he wasn't going to be a traditional sidekick (the host's bitch), the relationship developed.

"My favorite thing," says Nick Bakay, the sidekick on Dennis Miller's Fox show, "is when you see a guest from a different generation -- I saw Larry King do this -- where they immediately start picking on Andy, like `Ah, here's the dumb sidekick.' And they're so out of line with anybody who watches the show, and the audience just turns on them."

On Late Night, Richter plays a slightly more sensitive version of himself, fast with a comeback but relaxed, a Midwestern foil to O'Brien's East Coast jive. Off camera, Richter is genuine, funny without necessarily being "on." He mentions, in passing, that he's been trying to get in shape, and somehow that's where the conversation stays. At 6-2, two inches shorter than O'Brien, Richter weighs 250 pounds, down from a high of 275.

"Having too much weight on you is an invitation for people to say really boring things to you," Richter says. "Every time there's an article written about me, it's `cherubic' or `chubby' or `portly' or `stocky.' When they write about Kevin Costner, they don't say `the medium-build Caucasian Kevin Costner.' "

-- GE