Conan O'Brien thinks comedians are right to go after President Trump—he just thinks many are doing it badly. In a wide-ranging talk at the Oxford Union, the former late-night host warned that comics who lean too heavily on blunt anti-Trump lines risk dulling their sharpest edge. "Some comics go the route of, 'I'm gonna just say eff Trump all the time,' or that's their comedy," the 62-year-old said. "I think now, a little bit, you're being co-opted. Because you're so angry you've been lulled. It's like a siren leading you into the rocks."
O'Brien said he's heard peers argue that the stakes in politics are now too high for purely funny material, a view he rejects. When anger replaces craft, he argued, comedians "put down [their] best weapon, which is being funny, and ... exchanged it for anger." The challenge, he said, is to channel outrage into sharper work: "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 that "comedians always need to be funny," per Deadline.
The remarks come as O'Brien has been reflecting on the state of his industry. After receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor last year, he predicted in an August speech that traditional late-night TV "as we have known it since around 1950 is going to disappear," but he said the hosts themselves would adapt. Citing CBS' cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, he called Colbert "too talented, and too essential, to go away," and forecast that he would "shine brighter than ever in a new format that he controls completely."
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