Conan O’Brien faced a thorny question when accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Sunday night.
In the headlining speech for the most-high-profile event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since President Trump purged Democrats from its board, cashiered its leaders and made himself chairman, how political should he be? Considering artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Issa Rae have said they are boycotting the Kennedy Center in protest, should he even show up?
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the puppet voiced by Robert Smigel, who was on the original writing staff of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” captured the dilemma of his position when he welcomed the audience in a gravelly voice: “Thank you for coming and shame on you for being here.”
The assignment was especially tricky for O’Brien, because unlike past recipients like Jon Stewart or Dave Chappelle, his comedy has always steered clear of ideological fervor. But moving out of his comfort zone, O’Brien delivered what amounted to a bristling attack on the current administration artfully disguised as a tribute to Mark Twain.
“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, steadily, soberly. “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.’”
O’Brien’s speech, which along with the rest of the show, will air on Netflix on May 4, followed a murderer’s row of comedians — who put on the best Twain Awards in recent memory. Among those gushing about O’Brien were father figures (David Letterman), peers (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Stephen Colbert) and his comedic children (Nikki Glaser, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney).
The evening began with an appearance from the masturbating bear, a beloved character from his late-night talk show. Countless jokes were made about O’Brien’s pale skin and red hair (Adam Sandler said “his bright red hair was the true cause of the Palisades fire”). Sarah Silverman did one of the most elaborate vagina jokes you will ever see and Martin Short taped a video offering insults (“Every time I see Conan on my screen, I am whelmed”).
The warm-up comic Seth Herzog’s promise of “a fairly politics-free evening” was not the case. In a killer set, John Mulaney said, “It’s an honor to be here at the Kennedy Center, or as it will be known next week, the Roy Cohn Pavilion for Big Strong Men who Love ‘Cats.’”
The many jokes about the current administration were setups to the main event. In a pointed moment, O’Brien thanked the Kennedy Center’s former chairman, the financier David M. Rubenstein, and its president, Deborah F. Rutter, who invited him several months ago. “I don’t know why they’re not here,” he said, in a mock-naïve voice. “I lost Wi-Fi in January. I’m guessing they’re in traffic.”
Then he paused and spoke slowly about the staff at the Kennedy Center worried about their future. “My eternal thanks for their selfless devotion to the arts,” he said to a roar and a 25-second standing ovation. To which O’Brien joked: “That was plenty.”
But the heart of his speech was an effusive and serious consideration of what Twain stood for. O’Brien said that Twain is “alive, vibrant and vitally relevant today, ” citing his novels as well as his career as a traveling performer. Twain’s enduring power, he argued, stemmed from his core principles, which shaped his comedy.
“First and foremost, Twain hated bullies,” he said, saying he populated his works with them, and made his readers hate them. Twain was allergic to hypocrisy and loathed racism, empathizing with former enslaved people struggling during Reconstruction, immigrant Chinese laborers in California and European Jews fleeing antisemitism.
O’Brien paused, saying that some might be wondering what this has to do with comedy. “It has everything to do with comedy,” he boomed. “I have loved all my life comedy that is self-critical, deflating and dedicated to the proposition that we are all flawed, absurd, and wallowing in the mud together.”
When O’Brien left “The Tonight Show” in 2010, refusing to agree to move its time slot back a half an hour (to make room for Jay Leno), he spoke directly to his audience, with humor and silliness, but also in a new register. He told them to never get cynical, that it leads nowhere.
This tribute to Twain had a similarly earnest tone. There’s always been an ethical underpinning to O’Brien’s buffoonery, a careful commitment to making himself the joke in a way that emphasizes our common humanity. Here he leaned in. When O’Brien described Twain’s faith in travel (quoting him saying it’s “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”), you can detect a serious intent behind his idiot abroad act on the travel show, “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”
One doesn’t need to strain to see his vision of Twain as a comment on the current president. When I asked O’Brien about delving into political comedy in an interview last year, he brought up a story of Groucho Marx acting baffled when a journalist praised him for taking a stand against fascism with the movie “Duck Soup,” which lampooned dictators soon after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. “We’re just four Jews trying to get a laugh,” Groucho said.
O’Brien said he deeply related. But this political moment, at a time when academic institutions and prestigious law firms have buckled under pressure from the administration, demanded something different, and he went for more than just a laugh. His was a political argument wrapped inside an artistic one, but it would be a mistake to not see that he takes both seriously.
O’Brien wanted to speak up for comedy without overstating its power to effect social change. He praised humor that punches up, not down, sides with the weak and the powerless. Comedians have long thrown spitballs at those in power, but have also joked with them. Today, comics like Joe Rogan and Theo Von have appeared to join the Republican establishment, even showing up at the inauguration. Others spent years bemoaning cancel culture but now are muted about current attacks on free speech. In a scathing critique of his own industry, on his podcast and his website, the comedian Marc Maron surveyed the field and noticed comedians “speaking power to truth.”
Sunday night felt like some of the biggest names in the field pushing back. But ever allergic to self-importance, O’Brien crafted his speech to be oblique enough to be read as not about politics. (Trump’s name was never uttered.) He also followed it with a trademark flight of fancy, one involving him doing the twist while a dozen different Twain impersonators (one of whom insulted all the rest of the Mark Twain Prize winners in the room) were wrapping one another in awkward hugs.
This brought the evening back to the essential lightness of Conan O’Brien. Ending with the surreal was a way for him to avoid the trap many critics of Donald Trump fall into, where their reactions end up distorting their own views. In politics, this is called negative partisanship. But this dynamic operates in culture too, including the current heated discussion over the Kennedy Center, which has led people upset at how it’s being politicized to exaggerate the role of the theater.
As someone who grew up in Washington, watching the longtime presenter of the tourist-trap play “Shear Madness” referred to as a premier home for culture has been odd to witness. No one I know saw the Kennedy Center as one of the most important arts institutions in the country. It is odd that Sunday night was the first time among the many that I have visited its cavernous, columned space, that it felt like it to me.
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