It’s one thing to stand up for your boss, and it’s another thing to go on an entirely unprompted rant about how everybody but your boss sucks. Andrés du Bouchet, a writer for Conan O’Brien who dates back to the Late Night show, decided that doing the latter would be a good use of his time and a good way to promote Conan. In a series of tweets that have now been deleted, du Bouchet went off on Jimmy Kimmel’s pranks, Chris Hardwick’s @Midnight hashtags, and Jimmy Fallon’s, well, everything. Though the tweets are gone forever, Uproxx had the foresight to copy all of them, so we’ll just quote them here:
“Comedy in 2015 needs a severe motherfucking shakeup. No celebrities, no parodies, no pranks, no mash-ups or hashtag wars. I’m fat.”
“And shove your lip-synching up your ass.”
“Prom King Comedy. That’s what I call all this shit. You’ve let the popular kids appropriate the very art form that helped you deal. Fuck.”
“None of the funniest stuff ever involved celebrity cameos.”
He later mentioned: “Add games and lip synching and nostalgia and karaoke to this list.”
He pulled it in later and tried to take back some of the things he had said, but his point was still that Jimmy Kimmel Live, @Midnight, and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show don’t deserve their success. It’s not just that, though, because the line about letting “the popular kids appropriate the very art form that helped you deal” comes across extremely elitist, like Fallon doesn’t deserve to make people laugh at all, no matter how he does it. Meanwhile, du Bouchet is Emperor Of Comedy, and only he gets decide what is and is not funny. Long may he reign!
In one of the tweets that Uproxx quoted, du Bouchet says he’s anticipating an “inevitable dressing down at work for criticizing other talk shows,” but it seemed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Now, however, Conan himself (or whoever runs his Twitter account) has commented on the situation, and it sounds like du Bouchet really should start getting ready for that inevitable dressing down: