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Michael Koman is an American comedian and television writer and producer. His notable credits include writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien for seven years, and serving as co-creator, writer, and executive producer for Nathan for You, which aired for four seasons.
Koman's screenwriting career began with a job submitting sketches for MADtv. This opportunity materialized in 1999 after Koman, who was attending college in Los Angeles and occasionally performing at The Improv there, wrote and produced with his friend and fellow comic Todd Glass a sketch show called "Todd's Coma". Veteran comic actor Fred Willard appeared in the show, staged at the HBO Workspace (now the National Comedy Theatre), and Willard's manager later sent a tape on Koman's behalf to MADtv, whose producers were seeking to hire young writing talent.
During his tenure at Late Night, Koman also occasionally appeared in on-air sketches. In one sketch, he played an accountant for the show who proposed a nonsensical solution to the gay marriage debate. In another sketch, on May 16, 2007, O'Brien confronted Koman at home after the latter had called in sick to work. Koman was ultimately dragged into the studio for the live taping and publicly humiliated (with his obviously willing participation). Koman's future wife Ellie Kemper also worked on the show. Around the time of the release of the first-generation of Apple's iPhone in 2007, Late Night ran a fake advertisement purporting to show how multifunctional the new device was, with Koman and Kemper appearing together in this sketch.
Koman's next original TV series had him reviving his former writing partnership with Weinberg and teaming up with director Jason Woliner. Eagleheart, starring Chris Elliott as an outlandish US Marshal modeled in part on the titular hero of Walker, Texas Ranger, ran on Adult Swim for three seasons (2011–2014) and was backed by O'Brien's production company Conaco.
Toward the end of his direct involvement with Eagleheart, which concluded with his co-writing of its third and final season, Koman turned his attention to work on Nathan for You. Fielder had been solicited by Comedy Central to develop a pilot and had invited Koman to resume their working relationship. The concept for the show eventually coalesced around the pitching of business strategies to small companies; citing Fielder's education in business management, the show would invest heavily in unique and elaborate schemes to improve the popularity or profitability of its star's clients and would document all the consequences of such intervention. Although the show's ideas and the approaches Fielder (or his persona) took in each episode were planned by a team of writers led by Fielder and Koman (and later Carrie Kemper, Koman's sister-in-law), scripted jokes were mostly eschewed (outside of Fielder's intermittent voiceover narration). Fielder called an end to the show after its fourth season, which was broadcast in 2017.
During the run of Nathan for You, Koman helped create and write for The Jack and Triumph Show, starring Jack McBrayer and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet voiced and operated by Robert Smigel. The multi-camera sitcom was inspired by a remote segment filmed at Chicago's The Wieners Circle for the TBS instantiation of O'Brien's late night talk show (called simply Conan). The show comprised seven episodes that all aired in 2015. Koman was also involved in Triumph's Election Watch 2016, produced by Funny or Die.
Following the end of Nathan for You, Koman returned to New York, where he began writing for Saturday Night Live during the summer of 2017. In so doing, he earned his ninth Emmy Award nomination for his contributions to variety show writing ensembles. He previously won the award once, as a member of the Late Night writing team in 2007. He has also won six Writers Guild of America awards throughout his career.
In 2025, Koman co-created and co-wrote 3 episodes of The Paper with Greg Daniels.
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