Conan O’Brien has advised his fellow comics against being “lulled” into centering their comedy on criticizing President Donald Trump.
During a recent panel at the Oxford Union, the late-night legend, 62, who has long maintained his preference to keep politics out of his sets, spoke about how Trump’s presidency has “impacted comedy.”
“Some comics go the route of, ‘I’m gonna just say F Trump all the time,’ or that’s their comedy,” O’Brien noted. “But now I think, you’re being co-opted. Because you’re so angry you've been lulled. It’s like a siren leading you into the rocks.”
He continued: “You’ve been lulled into just saying ‘F Trump. F Trump. F Trump. Screw this guy,’ and I think you’ve now put down your best weapon, which is being funny, and you’ve exchanged it for anger.”
Urging comedians to “find a way to channel that anger,” he added: “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.”
Explaining how the comedy landscape has significantly changed in recent years, the former Late Night host said: “There was one magazine we could never do a parody of, which is the National Enquirer.”
He described the magazine as “the one that says ‘Elvis found in Titanic lifeboat 105 years after sinking. He is now a woman, and he’s married a giant peanut butter sandwich.’ How do you parody that? You can’t.”
“With Trump, we have a similar situation in comedy,” O’Brien said, “which is people saying, ‘We’ve got a great Trump sketch for you. In this one, he’s kind of talking crazy...and he tears down half the White House to build a giant ballroom, and he says it’s going to be the new Mar-a-Lago.’ Yeah, no, that happened yesterday.”
His latest remarks echo sentiments he’s made before. On a 2023 episode of journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast, he quipped that Trump’s “greatest crime” was inspiring bad and derivative comedy, arguing: “‘Doesn’t [Trump] suck?’ isn’t a joke.”
“I actually think Trump has been — whatever people say, all kinds of, he’s committed all these different horrible acts — but I think one of the worst is I think he’s bad for comedy,” he added.
O’Brien has largely refrained from wading into politics, telling Esquire in 2016: “If I do anything that’s remotely political or remotely about me having an opinion, I want it to be organic. I don’t want it to be something that I’m trying to do.”
