Former late night host Conan O’Brien is so close to getting it. During a Tuesday appearance at the Oxford Union, O’Brien criticized the type of comedian who has reduced themselves to saying nothing except “F Trump.” However, earlier in the event, O’Brien refused to apply this standard to the likes of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and CBS’s Stephen Colbert.
It is a point O’Brien has made in the past: that Trump is hard to parody, and as a result, too many self-styled comedians have allowed themselves to turn into rage machines. This time around, O’Brien declared, “I think with Trump, we have a similar situation in comedy, which is people saying, ‘We've got a great Trump sketch for you. In this one, he's kind of talking crazy. And he's saying stuff, and he tears down half the White House to build a giant ballroom. And he says it's gonna be the new Mar-a-Lago.’ ‘Yeah, no, that happened yesterday.’ ‘Oh, well, where's my check?’ ‘You don't get a check. Come back to me and tell me when you've got an idea.’”
He continued, “And so comedy needs a straight line to go off of. And We don't have a straight line right now. We have a very bendy, rubbery line. We have a slinky, we have a fire hose that's whipping around spewing water at 100 miles an hour or something else, I don't know.”
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