Conan O’Brien wasn’t taking sides in the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, said the writer behind his biting Oscars joke.
During the Sunday, March 2, awards ceremony, O’Brien, 61, quipped, “We’re halfway through the show, which means it’s time for Kendrick Lamar to come out and call Drake a pedophile.” The joke was an apparent reference to Lamar’s scathing Super Bowl LIX halftime performance in February, where Lamar performed his Drake diss track, “Not Like Us.” (Lamar famously accused Drake of pedophilia on the 2024 track, something Drake has denied.)
Skyler Higley, O’Brien’s joke writer, told TMZ on Monday, March 3, that the quip was all about tapping into the pop culture zeitgeist and not a diss toward either artist.
“The idea that it’s being taken as a real call-out or taking sides in any way in the beef is absurd,” Higley, who worked on O’Brien’s former TBS talk show, told the outlet.
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During Sunday’s Oscars telecast, O’Brien also delivered some stinging one-liners about Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet and Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón.
“Timmy Chalamet is up for Best Actor tonight, you’re amazing and you look amazing. I love that suit. You will not get hit on your bike tonight,” O’Brien told the audience inside Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre, referring to the actor receiving a fine for taking a rideshare bike to the London premiere of A Complete Unknown. “Safe! Amazing actor. Timothée is nominated for his portrayal of Bob Dylan, yeah. Bob Dylan wanted to be here tonight, but not that badly.”
Addressing Gascón, whose past offensive X posts resurfaced following her Oscar nomination for Emilia Pérez, O’Brien joked, “Karla, if you’re going to tweet about the Oscars, remember, my name is Jimmy Kimmel.”
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After Sunday’s ceremony, O’Brien revealed that he made changes to his jokes on the night.
“There are times where you think, ‘We’ve got a good joke here, but I’m not gonna do it. It doesn’t feel right.’ We made a lot of changes backstage,” O’Brien told E! News at the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. “You just decide, ‘Oh, this is a better joke,’ or you think of something in the moment, and you just go with it, and those can be blessings.”
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Thankfully, O’Brien’s hosting style went down well with the A-listers in attendance.
“There’s the agony of before — preparation, getting ready — and that goes on for months. Then we worked so hard that by the time we got to the point where it was time to go, I couldn’t wait. And it was a really great crowd. They were laughs, thank God,” he told E! News.
