Conan O’Brien reveals the one joke he wasn’t allowed to tell at the Oscars
Conan O’Brien has revealed the one joke that he couldn’t get past the Academy during his hosting stint at the 97th Oscars. Rather than being about the nominees or the volatile political climate or even Hollywood as a whole, it was about the Oscar statuette.
Hosting cinema’s most prestigious awards ceremony is widely considered to be one of the toughest gigs in show business, but O’Brien managed to thread the needle throughout the three-plus hour broadcast and earn stellar reviews across the board for his performance.
During the broadcast, he did make a few risky moves, including a riff about ‘Best Actress’ nominee Karla Sofía Gascón and a subtle jab about Donald Trump’s soft spot for Vladimir Putin, but overall, he didn’t court controversy.
Still, in the most recent episode of his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the comic revealed that he did present the organisation with one idea that they batted down. He was planning to film a promotional video for the show in which he pretended to be in a crumbling marriage with a giant Oscars statuette. When he suggested that it be laid on a sofa at one point so that he could berate it for not doing enough work around the house, the Academy put their foot down.
“There was whispering in this big room,” O’Brien remembered, “And then one of the people from the Academy came over and said, ‘Oscar can never be horizontal.’” They also refused to let him put an apron on the statue.
O’Brien and his team took it in stride. “This awards ceremony has been around since 1929, and there’s a lot of, sort of, shorthand for what can and can’t happen,” he acknowledged.
“But they ended up being very helpful, I want to stress that. They were great,” the comic added. In the end, he was able to make the promotional video, but only with a vertical, naked statuette.
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