A member of Conan O’Brien’s writing staff, Andrés du Bouchet, slammed the state of late-night comedy on Twitter last week, calling O’Brien’s competition “Prom King Comedy.” “Comedy in 2015 needs a severe motherfucking shakeup,” du Bouchet, who has worked as a comedy writer for seven years, wrote. “No celebrities, no parodies, no pranks, no mash-ups or hashtag wars. I’m fat.” Many of the tweets have since been deleted, but Uproxx saved some of them in screenshots and the text of the tweets is recreated below:
Comedy in 2015 needs a severe motherfucking shakeup. No celebrities, no parodies, no pranks, no mash-ups or hashtag wars. I’m fat.
and shove your lip-synching up your ass.
Prom King Comedy. That’s what I call all this shit. You’ve let the popular kids appropriate the very art form that helped you deal. Fuck.
None of the funniest stuff ever involved celebrity cameos.
Once again I’m a bonehead for tweeting as a fan of comedy instead of as a guy who earns a living doing it.
@guybranum thanks but now comes the inevitable dressing down at work for criticizing other talk shows!
add games and lip synching and nostalgia and karaoke to this list.
Sorry for being a bloviating elitist windbag last night. I know tons of talented people are making the stuff I enjoy shitting all over.
Clearly du Bouchet is referencing the lip sync battles, pranks and celebrity games employed by “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and, most recently, “The Late Late Show with James Corden” to win what’s now called “the morning after.” (For the record: Fallon, at the time of publishing, has over 7 million YouTube subscribers, Kimmel has 5.7 million and Conan has just over 2.6 million.) O’Brien, though, tweeted a response to du Bouchet, which seemed to support his fellow late-night hosts, viral videos and all. Team Coco did not return our immediate request for comment.
I wish one of my writers would focus on making my show funnier instead of tweeting stupid things about the state of late night comedy.
— Conan O’Brien (@ConanOBrien) April 19, 2015
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