Comedian Conan O’Brien is not impressed with comedians who have chosen “anger” over being funny.
O’Brien, 62, shared his deep distaste for comedians who are “lulled” into saying “F Trump all the time.”
“You’ve been lulled into just saying ‘F Trump. F Trump. F Trump. Screw this guy,’ but you’ve now put down your best weapon, which is being funny,” O’Brien said at an event with the Oxford Union, “and you’ve exchanged it for anger.”
“If you’re a comedian, you always need to be funny. You just have to find a way to channel that anger, because good art will always be a perfect weapon against power, but if you’re just screaming and you’re just angry, you’ve lost your best tool in the toolbox,” O’Brien continued.
Though O’Brien said many non-comedians would assume an administration filled with social media rants, absurd Greenland annexation declarations, and opulent multi-million dollar ballroom constructions must be great for comedy, the truth is the opposite. For O’Brien, it is difficult to parody a reality that itself seems outlandish.
“Comedy needs a straight line to go off of, and we don’t have a straight line right now,” O’Brien said. “We have a very bendy, rubbery line. We have a slinky. We have a fire hose that’s whipping around spewing water at 100 mph.”
Even in late-night talk shows, which so often direct their monologues towards Trump’s farce of the day, O’Brien argued that satire can be a difficult task.
“It’s easy for someone to lose their way if they’re really trying to make a point,” O’Brien noted. “It might go very badly, and you may lose your efficacy. It may not be a good way for you to get your point across. So it’s tricky.”
On O’Brien’s own TBS show, a popular sketch involved animated lips on political figures like Bill Clinton and Bob Dole to parody their real-world talking points. “We would do a lot of political comedy, but we would do it in a cartoony way, and we would make fun of both sides,” O’Brien recalled.
The former late-night host continued to argue that the talk show format that had defined nearly 30 years of his career was doomed.
O’Brien said that despite his deep affection for late-night shows, their place in the entertainment landscape is dwindling. “There’s not an American right to these shows,” he said. “These shows I do think will probably atrophy and go, but the voices won’t.”
In 2021, after 28 years as a talk show host, O’Brien left his own show, Conan on TBS, to focus on his popular podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
In his Mark Twain Prize acceptance speech last year at the Kennedy Center, O’Brien reiterated his belief in comedy’s power as a weapon against power.
“Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance,” O’Brien said that night. “Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America, but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.’ Some of you might think, ‘What does this have to do with comedy?’ It has everything to do with comedy. Everything.”
