Conan O’Brien used his gig hosting the 97th Academy Awards to deliver the kind of vintage Coco humor that the game’s been missing since his show ended, plus some shocking envelope-pushers—like when he addressed the elephant in the room with a Karla Sofía Gascón bit in his monologue. But there was one joke in particular that made the room gasp and the timeline light up, both for how effective it was but also how unprecedented: “We’ve reached the halfway point of the show,” Conan announced, “so now it’s time for Kendrick Lamar to come out and call Drake a pedophile.” As the audience registered this invocation of hip-hop’s biggest beef, “Not Like Us,” and the Super Bowl, Conan delivered a bonus punchline, smirkingly assuring the audience that he was “lawyered up”—a reference to Drake’s ongoing suit against Universal Music Group for promoting a song that defames him.
Shortly after it aired, comedian and writer Skyler Higley—a former writer on Conan’s self-titled late-night show and a member of the team of writers Conan assembled for his Oscars gig—tweeted his thanks to the Academy for keeping the joke in, and revealed that, thanks to a bet he’d made with the show’s producer as to whether or not the joke would land, he’d just won $50. Higley let off several more celebratory tweets as the show drew to a close—and then found his mentions on fire, as Drake’s ever-touchy, sore-loser fanbase set their sights on him for penning Conan’s joke. In the days since, delusional Stans have done everything from accuse Higley of “selling out” for $50—as if fifty bucks had been his actual compensation for the gig—and somehow connecting the dots between a Black man writing a joke about something that originated in Black culture for a white comedian to say and the murder of Emmet Till.
On the phone after a night of celebration (full of random sightings, like Anora’s Yura Borisov chasing Mark Edelshtyn around the bar) and a subsequent day of recovery, Higley was basking in the glow of a well-received show and taking the hate-tweets in stride. “I don’t know whether to be proud of the fact that I had a hand in creating one of the worst posts of all internet history,” Higley laughed, referencing the Till tweet. “But to have framed it like that. it still is so absurdly horrifying that it’s a little funny—but still horrible. Jesus Christ.”
Higley and his fellow writers have been hard at work since the very top of the year, crafting dozens of jokes and concepts, then fine-tuning them, especially during the last few weeks, as Conan field-tested the material in random comedy clubs across L.A. “It was pitched like any other joke,” Higley explained. “We would sit down and just write batches of jokes. And a lot of stuff moved around and a lot of stuff got lost. But that one worked, and Conan liked it. And when he did sets trying out some of the material, he always did that joke in the set and it always killed. We had very few that were 100% locked in—like, We’re definitely going to do it because it’s bulletproof—and that was one.”
Although the thought of Conan O’Brien digging into the nuances of K. Dot versus Drake and watching like, the “Family Matters” video for context is a funny one, Higgins argues that the joke succeeds because it needs no context. “This is a beef that went so mainstream that it went all the way to the Super Bowl,” he says. “The joke references what happened at the Super Bowl. So I didn’t have to explain the context, because if I had had to explain it probably never would’ve gone that far. And it definitely wouldn’t have gotten on the show because there would be the assumption that a lot of people might not get it.” (Higley notes with a chuckle that with a Substance-referencing opening that saw him emerging from Demi Moore’s body, Conan inadvertently “popped out and showed n-ggas.”)
