Academy Awards host Conan O’Brien said “common sense” led him to tell scathing jokes about Donald Trump and MAGA on the awards stage, after he’d originally said Trump was “bad for comedy.”
“You have to use your common sense about what feels right,” O’Brien told Variety after the show on Sunday. “If you completely ignore it, you look like you’re living in a bubble, and I wouldn’t want to do that. You gotta reflect what people at home are thinking about, but also they want to be entertained. So, you need to thread it. I always hope to try and do that.”
O’Brien kicked off the show by warning attendees and viewers that “tonight could get political.” He added, “If that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternate Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at the Dave & Busters down the street,” referencing MAGA’s alternative Super Bowl halftime show headlined by Kid Rock in response to outrage over Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny’s performance.
Later in the show, when he noted that this year was the first since 2012 that no British actors were nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress, he quipped, “A British spokesperson commented, ‘Yeah, well, at least we arrest our pedophiles,’” following the arrest of former Prince Andrew for alleged sex crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
The hits continued into the night until O’Brien jokingly welcomed the audience back to “Has a Small Penis Theater.”
“Let’s see him put his name on that,” he added, following Trump’s forced rebranding of the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
The jabs come after O’Brien insisted that nothing about Trump was funny. “There’s a lot that’s so bombastic and so outrageous and so unprecedented that how do you—‘Oh, I’ve got a great Trump impression, and I have him saying this.’ Well, that’s not crazier than what really happened yesterday. So I don’t know how this is funny,” he told The New Yorker’s Radio Hour last month.
In January, O’Brien advised comedians to toe the line between their outrage and the job at hand. “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.”
He added, “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.”
O’Brien’s hosting stint went well enough that the Disney executive in charge of the telecast, Rob Mills, told Variety on Monday that “Conan is host for life.”
The host taped a self-deprecating One Battle After Another parody that played at the end of the show, in which he was told he’d done such a good job on stage that he’d been named the Oscars’ “Host for Life,” before being locked in an office, gassed, and then incinerated while in a jovial stupor.
The punchline came when his name was replaced on the door by YouTube star Mr. Beast.
But that “host of life” moniker is “no joke,” Mills said. “He hasn’t accepted yet. He’s just being told, we’re assuming that was not a comedy bit. We’re going to treat that as if that was fact.”
