Conan O’Brien is a man who knows a thing or two about being in the late-night wars.
The former host of Late Night and The Tonight Show addressed the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel for the first time.
“The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the promise to silence other late-night hosts for criticizing the administration should disturb everyone on the Right, Left, and Center. It’s wrong and anyone with a conscience knows it’s wrong,” he wrote on social media.
O’Brien joins the likes of Kimmel’s late-night peers Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart in voicing his dissension about Disney’s move to park Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Similarly, former late-night hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno supported the ABC host with the former saying, “You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office, that’s just not how this works.”
O’Brien hosted Late Night with Conan O’Brien between 2003 and 2009 before briefly taking over The Tonight Show with Leno moving to primetime before returning to take back NBC’s signature late-night show. O’Brien later went on to host Conan on TBS between 2010 and 2021.
Kimmel and Disney executives are expected to meet today to expand discussions from yesterday with the hope that the two parties can find a way to get the comedian back on the air.
The suspension of @jimmykimmel and the promise to silence other Late Night hosts for criticizing the administration should disturb everyone on the Right, Left, and Center. It’s wrong and anyone with a conscience knows it’s wrong.
— Conan O’Brien (@ConanOBrien) September 19, 2025
O’Briens’s comments come nearly 48 hours after ABC indefinitely preempted Jimmy Kimmel Live! following a furor around Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s killer.
On Monday, Kimmel said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”
FCC chairman Brendan Carr subsequently called Kimmel’s comments “some of the sickest conduct possible.”
This was soon followed by local station Nexstar saying it would “preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the foreseeable future” as it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk.”
Moments later, Disney made its own decision to pause the show.
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