Conan O’Brien Accepts the Mark Twain Prize With ‘Unceasing Silliness’

ABLUpdated 2 weeks Ago5 Mins read8

These are the full remarks made by Conan O’Brien upon receiving the 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, March 23, 2025. The award is given annually to comedians whose work has had a profound impact on the public and popular culture.

This year’s ceremony was the first major, splashy event held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since President Donald Trump packed the arts institution’s board of directors with allies who then elected Trump as board chairman, replacing longtime chair David Rubenstein. Trump also fired Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter and placed another loyalist, Richard Grenell, in her role, which has led to uncertainty about the Center’s future and anxiety among performers and its existing staff .

Here’s how O’Brien accepted his prize while addressing the moment. A fuller recap of the event can be read here. The ceremony will stream on Netflix starting May 4.

To be handed this award by David Letterman is, to be honest, very hard for me to comprehend. I need to put this in context so you will understand. The year is 1987, and I’m living in Los Angeles. I’m only two years out of college, and I’m unemployed. My partner Greg [Daniels] and I had just lost our first job writing for television, and I’m sitting alone in a Du-Par’s Diner on Wilshire Boulevard eating pancakes very slowly at one in the afternoon to try and fill out the entire day. My burning ambition — I believe my destiny — is to write for Dave’s late-night show, and I have just heard from their head writer that the only open slot has already been filled and there will be no job. I remember it feels like a steel door has come down. I have no idea what is going to become of me.

Two weeks later — this is true — I go to take a job at Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather. I live in a $380-a-month apartment. I drive an old Plymouth Valiant that I bought from some surfing drug dealers in Santa Monica. And my supposed career in comedy feels, at best, tenuous. All I know for sure is that I am very, very scared. Now, imagine that suddenly some angel from the future appears in that Du-Par’s on Wilshire and tells me that 40 years from now, I’m going to be onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington and that the most prestigious award in comedy is going to be handed to me by David Letterman. I would have stared at that angel in utter shock and said, “Wait a minute. David Letterman is still alive? Forty years from now? He’s 20 years older than me! God, how does he look?” The angel would say, “He’s got a beard.” I’d say, “Is it trim and fashionable?” The angel would say, “No! It’s really white and crazy-long. Imagine if Dostoevsky was panhandling for gold in the Yukon.” [O’Brien turns to Letterman, seated in a box adjacent to the stage.] What are you doing, man?

So you have to understand that what just transpired for me was an Oppenheimer at Los Angeles — well, close — Oppenheimer at Los Alamos moment. Before I go any further, I have to give thanks first to my parents, who missed witnessing this by three months. They would have absolutely loved this. To my beautiful and talented wife, Liza. To my patient and perpetually unimpressed children, Neve and Beckett. They honestly don’t get it, and they’re not wrong.

I want to thank this band — Max Weinberg and the rest of the band. I want to thank all the insanely generous and talented speakers who flew to D.C. on my behalf for this evening. I will never recover from this. It is what my people call a mitzvah. My people borrow stuff we like.

Also, my thanks to the people who invited me here several months ago, David Rubenstein and Deborah Rutter. Honestly, I don’t know why they aren’t here tonight. I lost Wi-Fi in January. I assume they’re in traffic. And a special thanks to all the beautiful people who have worked here at the Kennedy Center for years and who are worried about what the future might bring. My eternal thanks for their selfless devotion to the arts.

There are so many people to thank, and this is always where these speeches go south, because you have to thank all these people. You have to. It’s the rule. But then it takes forever. So I had an idea to thank everyone as quickly as possible.

[Conan introduces a professional livestock auctioneer, who comes out and very quickly reads a long list of names.]

Any award, or in this case prize, which technically is three notches down from an award — “I got a prize! It came in cereal!” — let’s be honest, it can seem trivial. This honor feels very different to me. I think accepting an award named after Mark Twain is a responsibility. One cannot invoke Twain without understanding who he was and what he stood for. Now, don’t be distracted by the white suit and the cigar and the riverboat. Twain is alive, vibrant, and vitally relevant today. Yes, he is America’s greatest humorist, but his enduring power springs from his core principles, principles that shaped his comedy and made him one of our greatest Americans.

First and foremost, Twain hated bullies. He populated his works with abusers such as Huck Finn’s alcoholic father and Tom Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and he made his readers passionately hate those characters. He punched up, not down, and he deeply, deeply empathized with the weak. Twain was allergic to hypocrisy, and he loathed racism. Twain wrote, “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Twain empathized with the powerless in America — former slaves struggling under Reconstruction, immigrant Chinese laborers in California, and European Jews fleeing anti-Semitism. Twain’s remedy for ignorance about the world around us was to travel at a time when travel was very long and very difficult. Twain circled the globe and he wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

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. 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.”

Some of you might be thinking, What does this have to do with comedy? It has everything to do with comedy. Everything! The comedy I have loved all of my life is comedy that is self-critical, deflating, and dedicated to the proposition that we are all flawed, absurd, and wallowing in the mud together. Twain is funny and important today because his comedy is a hilarious celebration of our fears, our ineptitude, and the glorious mess of being human. When we celebrate Twain, truly see him for who he was, we acknowledge our commonality, and we move just a little closer together. So I accept this award in the spirit of humility, stupidity and envy, irrelevance, fear, self-doubt, and profound, unceasing silliness. I thank you. It’s the honor of a lifetime.