Why Conan O’Brien Cut Jokes Backstage at Oscars 2025 – E! Online

Conan O’Brien’s 2025 Oscars routine was in the works right up until the last moment.

While the host’s emceeing act seemed effortless, it turns out his monologue—which took jabs at Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón and Timothee Chalamet—was meticulously curated. 

“There’s the agony of before—preparation, getting ready—and that goes on for months,” he exclusively revealed to E! News at the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscars party. “Then we worked so hard that by the time we got to the point where it was time to go, I couldn’t wait. And it was a really great crowd. They were laughers, thank God.”

But even with the preparation there were some jokes that, in the moment, Conan opted to leave out.

“There are times where you think, ‘We’ve got a good joke here, but I’m not gonna do it. It doesn’t feel right,'” he revealed. “So we made a lot of changes backstage. You just decide, ‘Oh this is a better joke,’ or you think of something in the moment, and you just go with it, and those can be blessings.” (For more from the Vanity Fair party, tune into E! News tonight, Mar. 3 at 11p.m.)