Conan O’Brien to receive Twain Prize for humor at Kennedy Center

The March 23 ceremony will be streamed on Netflix at a later date.

The Kennedy Center announced Thursday that Conan O’Brien is the 26th recipient of its Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The 61-year-old writer, podcaster and former late-night host will accept the award March 23 — a few weeks after he hosts the Oscars — in the center’s 2,465-seat Concert Hall, where fellow comedians will toast (and roast) him.

The award is given to comedians who, like Twain, have made a lasting impact on American society in the center’s estimation.

Richard Pryor received the first Twain Prize, in 1998. Though it has often gone to satirists such as David Letterman, Jon Stewart and George Carlin, the prize was most recently awarded to comedians with more populist appeal: Adam Sandler in 2023 and Kevin Hart last year.

“I am honored to be the first winner of the Mark Twain Prize recognized not for humor, but for my work as a riverboat pilot,” O’Brien said in a statement.

He is “a master of invention and reinvention, consistently pushing the envelope in search of new comedic heights,” said Deborah F. Rutter, president of the Kennedy Center, in a statement.

The prize ceremony will be streamed on Netflix at a later date.

The Irish-Catholic comedian — known for his height, swooping red hair, and surreal and utterly silly comic sensibility — was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1963 and attended Harvard University, where he was twice the president of its humor rag, the Harvard Lampoon. Not long after graduation, he began writing for “Saturday Night Live” and then “The Simpsons.”

O’Brien joins fellow former late-night hosts Stewart, Letterman and Jay Leno as a Twain recipient. But O’Brien’s late-night career was a little more complicated.

In 1993, though he was still largely unknown to the general public, O’Brien inherited NBC’s “Late Night” from Letterman. O’Brien’s run, which lasted until 2009, was characterized by a manic energy and frequently nonpolitical, non sequitur comedy. O’Brien’s wacky absurdity motorized the show with playfulness and goofiness.

The show was not embraced at first. O’Brien “is a living collage of annoying nervous habits,” wrote Tom Shales, The Washington Post’s TV critic, in September 1993. “He giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He’s one of the whitest white men ever.”

After O’Brien’s iteration of “Late Night” found its footing, O’Brien had Shales as a guest on his show — to read aloud the most scathing parts of Shales’s review.

In 2009, O’Brien took over “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno, who moved to a prime-time slot. NBC then moved Leno’s show to the 11:35 p.m. time slot, pushing “The Tonight Show” back by a half-hour. O’Brien was incensed and aggrieved. After less than nine months as its host, O’Brien left “The Tonight Show.”

“I got very depressed at times,” O’Brien said of the situation, on “60 Minutes.” “It was like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly. And I was just trying to figure out what happened.”

O’Brien swapped his suit for a leather jacket and jeans and moved to TBS, where he hosted “Conan,” a stripped-down version of the classic late-night format. After 11 years, he retired from late-night TV.

Now, he hosts the celebrity-interview podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” and has hosted two travel shows: “Conan Without Borders” and “Conan Must Go.” In November he was announced as the host of the upcoming 97th Academy Awards, perhaps his biggest stage yet.

For the second year running, the Twain Prize ceremony will be recorded and later streamed on Netflix, a platform that has embraced and promoted stand-up comedy.