This weekend, Conan O’Brien will host the Oscars for a second time. His first time hosting last year was a massive hit with viewers, so much so that he was signed to return almost immediately. By the time he arrives on the Oscars stage on Sunday, we can be sure his monologue jokes have been fine-tuned, as he's been practicing them, though he’s not the only one.
A new profile in THR mentions that Conan O’Brien has been doing a number of surprise appearances at comedy clubs in Southern California in recent weeks, where he’s been performing his Oscars monologue in order to see how it works in front of a crowd. This isn’t a new endeavor, as he mentioned last year on his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast that he’d done the same thing last year. He explained…
We got a lot of clarity because I started going out to different clubs and doing jokes, and I could see which ones consistently worked well. Also, the audiences were very nice because I would go out and say, I know Nikki Glaser does this as well but it’s a very good tool to go out and try things out with an audience, but I would say, ‘Please don’t record this,’ and they wouldn’t. Which was really nice, because all someone would have to do is put that online, and you’re completely screwed.
While getting your work posted online before the big show would have been bad, it’s not the only problem that Conan had to navigate while working comedy clubs ahead of the Oscars. The bigger issue is that he’s not the only comic doing this. Because there are so many award shows going on in the early part of the year (like the Golden Globes, which Nikki Glaser hosted in 2025 and 2026), there are actually multiple comics trying out material. Head writer Mike Sweeney described it, saying…
Once we were going to go to a club, and they’re like, ‘Sure, you’ll go on after so and so who’s hosting,' you know, Judd Apatow’s hosting the DGA Awards, he’s going to do his monologue first.
I can only imagine what it’s like to find yourself in an LA comedy club and have an absolute all-star roster of comedians working their way through the night, each one with what is, hopefully, A+ material about the entertainment industry. It has to be an incredible night of comedy.
Still, the complexities of it all aren’t done yet, because as Conan then explained, you have a pair of somewhat contradictory influences directing your own monologue. On the one hand, you don’t want to hear the monologues of the other hosts, because you don’t want to be unduly influenced by them. On the other hand, you need to know what jokes they’re using, because if they’re going to use a particular joke on stage before you, you can’t use a similar bit yourself. Conan said…
We can’t even be there when he does his because we don’t want to hear something, we can’t be influenced, we want to make sure there’s no overlap…You have to wait, and if anyone does any joke you can’t do that joke anymore. It’s gone.
The whole thing sounds like an incredible amount of work. It's no wonder some of Conan's friends were shocked he took the Oscars hosting job in the first place. Still, he must have enjoyed the entire process enough if he was willing to do it all again.
The finalized and polished monologue will open the Oscars this Sunday, which will begin at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu. If it’s as good as it was last year, the show will be off to a great start.
