The comedian’s slide into self-righteousness is anything but funny.

“Welcome to my second annual first show,” said Conan O’Brien in the recent premiere of his new late-night talk show on TBS. Also: “People asked me why I named the show ‘Conan.’ I did it so I’d be harder to replace.” His first episode opened with a video of an unemployed O’Brien being hounded by a haggard wife and 14 kids, then gunned down by Godfather-style NBC hitmen. And, as the weeks progressed, the self-pity has persisted. “I don’t know if you know my story—I worked for a long time in network television,” he said through gritted teeth in a recent sketch.

The show is all about Conan, down to that iconic red coif on the logo. Just over three weeks in, he still peppers his monologue with asides about how “crazy” the last year has been for him. He recently led a roomful of cable technicians in a rowdy cheer: “Who we gonna kill? Network television!” And this fixation on his alleged plight also defined Conan’s act in the months leading up to his TBS debut, following the fracas with NBC that left him—after barely seven months as The Tonight Show’s host—nursing his battered pride and on the market for another gig.

O’Brien’s slide into chronic self-referentiality isn’t new in the comedy world. Most famously, it also plagued comic Lenny Bruce after he was arrested for obscenity at a San Francisco nightclub in 1961. Bruce’s outrage became his only source of material. In his stand-up routines, he quoted at length from his trial transcript. He obsessively detailed the charges against him. His shtick, tinged with real bitterness, was exhausting. And suddenly he wasn’t funny anymore.

Of course, the analogy ends there. Bruce sank further into gloom until he died of a morphine overdose in 1966, while O’Brien walked away with a severance package worth more than $30 million and was promptly handed a new show. In O’Brien’s case, it’s been his rise to pop icon status—and the victim complex he’s nurtured along the way—that has made him decidedly less funny.

Last May, O’Brien made his first post-Tonight Show television appearance in an interview with 60 Minutes. He sounded sullen and angry. His new beard seemed to suggest he was a castaway back from a few rough months on a desert island. “I went through some stuff,” he said. “I got very depressed at times.” Thus emerged the new “Conan” brand, one built on O’Brien’s supposed martyrdom—a patently offensive idea in light of his massive payoff and our nearly 10 percent unemployment rate. “I’m with Coco” T-shirts and Facebook profile photos abounded. O’Brien made YouTube videos answering questions from viewers and racked up almost two million Twitter followers.