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Conan O’Brien Decries ‘Bullies’ While Receiving Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize 

Comedian Conan O'Brien waves to the crowd at the start of the 25th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Celebrating Conan O'Brien, Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. (AP)
Comedian Conan O'Brien waves to the crowd at the start of the 25th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Celebrating Conan O'Brien, Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. (AP)
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Conan O’Brien Decries ‘Bullies’ While Receiving Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize 

Comedian Conan O'Brien waves to the crowd at the start of the 25th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Celebrating Conan O'Brien, Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. (AP)
Comedian Conan O'Brien waves to the crowd at the start of the 25th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Celebrating Conan O'Brien, Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. (AP)

Conan O'Brien accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Sunday with a not-so-subtle broadside against President Donald Trump, whose takeover of the Kennedy Center, which awarded the prize, has shaken the arts world.

A host of comedians including David Letterman, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert celebrated O'Brien for comic greatness while ribbing the Trump administration and putting a spotlight on the renowned arts facility that is now overseen by Trump allies.

But it was O'Brien, the longtime late-night television host and comedy writer, who aimed his comments most directly at the Republican president without using his name.

"Twain hated bullies," O'Brien said. "He punched up, not down. And he deeply, deeply empathized with the weak."

O'Brien described the award's namesake as "allergic to hypocrisy" and suspicious of populism and imperialism. "He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed," O'Brien said.

Trump, who came into office in January, has spent the last two months implementing much of the populist agenda that helped him get elected last year while advocating for US annexation of Canada and Greenland, firing federal workers, and deporting migrants who were in the United States illegally.

The show was the first signature event at the Kennedy Center since Trump announced he would become chairman of the institution, pushing out billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein.

Trump dismissed board members appointed by former President Joe Biden and installed officials loyal to him. He handed leadership reins for the facility to Richard Grenell, a close ally and former ambassador to Germany who is serving as envoy for special missions in Trump's current administration.

The new board, which includes White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance, fired its former president, Deborah Rutter.

Trump visited the center last week and declared it in "tremendous disrepair." O'Brien thanked Rubenstein and Rutter in his remarks, drawing loud applause from the audience.

"When he accepted the Mark Twain Prize, this was a very different place," Colbert said from the Kennedy Center stage. "Today they announced two board members: Bashar al-Assad and Skeletor," Colbert quipped, referring to the former president of Syria and a cartoon villain.

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Other comedians joked that this would be the last Mark Twain Prize awarded by the Center. John Mulaney cracked that the facility, which is seen as a memorial to slain former President John F. Kennedy, would be renamed after Roy Cohn, a political fixer known for his role in Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist scare campaigns of the 1950s, and a lawyer for Trump in his early years in business.

Along with the annual Kennedy Center Honors in December, the Mark Twain Prize is one of the premier events at the renowned arts institution.

Trump did not attend the event on Sunday and did not attend any of the Honors performances during his first term.

O'Brien hosted the Oscars earlier this month and is slated to come back in the emcee role next year.

He was the host of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" on NBC and "Conan" on TBS. He is a former writer for "Saturday Night Live."

"You are a genius, my friend," comedian and actor Will Ferrell said from the stage.

"You're an absolute giant in the world of comedy," said actor and comedian Tracy Morgan.

O'Brien told reporters before the show that he wanted to go through with the event to support Kennedy Center workers. "Our country has been through many different sea changes, and my thought is I will be here specifically to honor Mark Twain and the people that this award stands for," he said.

Previous winners of the Mark Twain Prize include Kevin Hart, Sandler, Jon Stewart, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Carol Burnett. Sunday's show will be available for viewing on Netflix on May 4.

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Richard Linklater’s Ode to the French New Wave Enchants Cannes

(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
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Richard Linklater’s Ode to the French New Wave Enchants Cannes

(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)

When Richard Linklater first started thinking about making a film about the French New Wave, he figured he'd show it all everywhere except one place.

"I thought: They'll hate that an American director did this," Linklater said Sunday. "We’ll show this film all over the world, but never in France."

But Linklater nevertheless unveiled "Nouvelle Vague" on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, bringing film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" to the very heart of the French film industry. It was, Linklater granted, an audacious thing to do.

And "Nouvelle Vague" went down as one of the biggest successes of the festival. At a Cannes that's been largely characterized by darker, more portentous dramas, "Nouvelle Vague" was cheered as an enchanting ode to moviemaking.

"Nouvelle Vague" is an uncanny kind of recreation. In black-and-white and in the style of the French New Wave, it chronicles the making of one of the most celebrated French films of all time. With sunglasses that never come off his face, Guillaume Marbeck plays 29-year-old Godard as he's making his first feature, trying to launch himself as a film director and upend filmmaking convention.

Linklater's movie, which is for sale at Cannes and competing for the Palme d'Or, is in French. It not only goes day-by-day through the making of "Breathless," it endeavors to capture the entire movement of one of the most fabled eras of moviemaking. Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol, Melville, Rohmer, Rossellini and Rivette are just some of the famous filmmakers who drift in and out of the movie.

Linklater told reporters Sunday that he wanted audiences to feel "like they were hanging out with Nouvelle Vague in 1959."

"It was an old idea of some colleagues of mine," said Linklater. "Thirteen years ago, we started talking about it. We're just cinephiles Austin, Texas, who love this era, and it's meant so much to me in my filmmaking. It represented freedom and the notion of the personal film. I've made a lot of films, and I've always felt if you do it long enough, maybe you should make one film about making films."

The stars of "Breathless" — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg — are played by Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch, respectively, in "Nouvelle Vague." With precision, Linklater captures them making some of the most famous shots from "Breathless" with a visual style and camera movements typical of that time.

"We couldn’t work quite as fast. We had sound and things," said Linklater, chuckling. (Godard dubbed sound after shooting.)

"It was a crazy idea and I haven’t really ever seen a film exactly like this. I said: We’re making a film from 1959 but it’s not a Godard film," said Linklater. "You can’t imitate Godard. You fail. But we could imitate the style of the time."

In "Nouvelle Vague," Godard is surrounded by doubts — Seberg is notably unsure of the project — but he stubbornly sticks to his instance on spontaneity. There's no real script, some shooting days just last a few hours and lines are improvised on the spot. In one fittingly moment where Godard tells his actors just to quote Humphry Bogart movie lines, he explains: "Not plagiarism. Homage."

Linklater's own homage in "Nouvelle Vague" brought him back to his early days as a filmmaker. His first films — "Slacker,Dazed and Confused,Before Sunrise" — have much of the independent spirit of the New Wave, he said.

"Making this film all these later, I felt like I erased my own history," said Linklater. "I was going back to being in my late 20s making my first film. I told a friend last night: I felt like I was 28 years old making this film."