The excitement for Conan O’Brien’s recently announced commencement address is palpable. Around campus yesterday, seniors responded to the news with fist-pumps and high-fives while relatives of the soon-to-be graduates were relieved to hear that they would not fall asleep during this year’s ceremony. And everybody’s trying really hard to hide their enthusiasm from other recent commencement speakers, such as Canadian AIDS-fighter and Jim Kim butt-buddy Stephen Henry Lewis, author Louise Erdrich, and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
“I almost said, ‘Finally!’ to one of them,” College President Jim Yong Kim said in an interview with The Dunyun. “I was just chatting with Stephen, you know, just about everyday shit, and he asked who the speaker was gonna be. I lowered my voice really low when I said ‘Conan O’Brien’ so that he wouldn’t realize how much more excited everybody is about this.”
O’Brien, a graduate of Harvard, has had a tumultuous and meteoric career in comedy. His resume includes The Harvard Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien on NBC, and currently, the eponymous TBS show, “Conan”. His address at Harvard’s 2000 Class Day was incredibly well received and was seen by President Kim.
“I saw it, and I knew that that was who I needed to have as speaker for whatever school I ended up in charge of,” Kim said. “Don’t tell the others. You don’t know them like I do. It wouldn’t be OK.”
Out of respect for the achievements of previous speakers, The Dunyun called up each of them and asked what they thought about being the least exciting speaker in recent memory.
None responded for comment by press time, although one of them did call us assholes off the record.
O’Brien, the saint that he is, said in an interview with The Dunyun that he “was honored and humbled to be in the same category as the previous commencement speakers.” There you go again, Conan. Making the other speakers look bad by comparison.
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I guess a lot of people think that everything was fine!
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