So without further ado.
Here is Conan O'Brien.
(host clapping)
(gentle orchestral music)
(audience applauds and cheers)
Thank you.
(audience applauds and cheers)
Okay, come on, okay, please. (audience applauds and cheers)
Thank you, no, that's too much (laughs).
I haven't even started yet (laughs).
Thank you, thank, whoa, oh my God.
That's crazy! (plane engines roaring)
(cheering and engines drown out Conan)
Oh man, thank you, yeah, whoa!
(artillery fires)
All right, thank you, thank you please, please.
Let's begin.
Greetings graduates, faculty, parents, relatives,
Zoom bombers, and the true heroes today,
the Harvard IT Department.
Really nice compression, guys.
Beautiful, very little buffering.
Nice job nerds.
Welcome to Harvard's first online graduation,
and congratulations to the Harvard Class of 2020.
(claps) Yes.
I wanna begin by telling you that the administration
has given me only 10 minutes to speak today,
instead of the traditional 20.
I promised to do my best, since everyone's
in such a big hurry to get back to doing absolutely nothing!
I'd like to take just a moment to thank Harvard College
for bestowing upon me an honorary degree,
Doctorate of Humane Letters and Philosophy.
I am truly, truly honored.
I'd also like to thank Harvard
for a doctorate honoring my groundbreaking work
in both sonic string theory and condensed matter physics.
Thank you, thank you, I worked with a great team,
thank you all.
Seniors, I know you belong
in the Tercentenary Theatre right now,
believe me all of us miss Harvard Yard.
I mean, where else can you find
two competing pro-communist newsletters
written in Dothraki all while signing a petition
to ban hotdogs and donuts
for promoting cisgender identities.
What a rare and unusual place.
But trust me, we are taking steps
to make today's commencement feel as authentic as possible.
In fact, right now, Harvard is charging each of you $50
for parking in Cambridge.
Yeah, plus, Harvard will see to it
that within the next hour, one of your grandparents
will be hit in the head with a stray Frisbee.
And be assured, one day in the future,
you will return to your alma mater, but for now,
you get to enjoy me speaking to you from my backyard.
Harvard has been graduating students for nearly 400 years.
This is the first one
where the commencement speaker is standing on a spot
where his dog urinated seven minutes ago.
Right over here.
This area, yes.
Yes, this commencement will be very different.
As you sit here today, or stand, or microwave a burrito,
or ride a Peloton, or recline uncomfortably
in your childhood bed, or mine Bitcoin,
or Google who is Conan O'Brien,
you are witnessing many, many firsts in today's ceremony.
For example, normally, graduates would greet and shake hands
with their faculty deans,
but now that shaking hands is a Class D Felony,
those faculty members decided instead
to give you a virtual butt bump on TikTok.
Yeah, and by the way, congratulations
to the department heads,
you really captured what Cotton Mather was all about.
In another first,
this year Harvard has discarded traditional grading
and switched to a pass/fail system.
That's right, as a result,
several members of the lacrosse team will graduate.
And finally, for the first time,
all of you will receive your diplomas by mail.
Now to make sure those diplomas
are not stolen from your porch by package thieves,
they will be mailed to you in a plain brown wrapper
labeled Cornell University Diploma.
It's foolproof (laughs).
No one's touching that thing (laughs).
Now I know for all of you,
this is not the graduation ceremony you were expecting.
Right now, your parents are realizing
they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
just to watch you basically graduate
from an online university.
In fact, this speech is being simulcast right now
to the University of Phoenix.
Yeah! (laughs)
(orchestral music) Phoenix, Phoenix!
Phoenix gets it done, yeah!
They get it done in two years, not four, uh!
(orchestral music)
Anyway, I know what some of you are wondering right now.
How could Conan, as his age, possibly relate to me?
Well to you I say, do not think of me
as someone who graduated Harvard 35 years ago.
Think of me as a fellow classmate,
a fellow classmate who looks like shit.
Somehow kind of wrinkled and bloated at the same time.
Very hard to do.
You see, I have some experience as a graduation speaker.
20 years ago, I told the graduating Harvard Students
to break out of their cocoon and take chances.
Well, 20 years later, I'd like to amend that slightly
and say, stay in your cocoon!
Stay, the cocoon, stay in it.
I had no idea about the virus.
And to you students who've moved back home to a blue state,
please continue to be patient, wear a face mask outside,
and trust in science.
To those of you who moved back home to a red state,
I'll see you guys tonight at Applebee's!
Get those onion rings!
So do not despair this online ceremony, but celebrate it.
You have been handed two choices.
Use the trial of this global pandemic
as the inspirational launching pad to a greater destiny,
or two, go the Trump route, and blame all your problems
on the previous graduating class.
Come on, who's with me, damn you class of 2019,
damn you to hell.
If nothing else, just make that a t-shirt.
Damn you to hell, 2019, that's a seller,
that moves, that's merch that moves.
I realize I've said many foolish things to you today.
It's kind of what I do.
But I would like to be sincere.
Before I spoke today, I really did give you,
the Class of 2020, serious thought.
And I'm honestly stunned
by what you've endured in your short lives.
For my Harvard class, 9/11 came in midlife.
But I was thinking about it, you came into consciousness
while our nation was still smoldering from that attack,
and you've only known a world beset by terrorist hate.
You've grown up with mass shootings and school lockdowns,
horrors completely absent from my childhood.
You have now witnessed two economic meltdowns
of stunning proportions.
You are actually living in a hotter
and more treacherous biosphere than the one I was born into.
Two months into your freshman year,
many of you voted for the first time in the 2016 election,
and ever since, you've been living
in the most polarized United States since the Civil War.
Now this you know all too well.
You've been handed more than your share.
Tom Brokaw famously hailed the people
who survived the Great Depression and World War Two,
not because of who they were, as much as what they endured.
He called them the greatest generation.
Now we don't know what you will be called
because the generation that cleaned up the mess
left by those a-hole boomers
doesn't just roll off the tongue.
You've been challenged your entire lives,
and you've demonstrated
one of the most precious qualities one can have.
Resilience.
Now cynics like to mock the supposedly spoiled
or callow youth of the new millennia.
But you have seen and survived so much.
And you've responded with wit, creativity, righteous anger,
activism, and a gritty determination
to take the reality you've been handed and make it better.
Look at you, 10 weeks ago,
you were told to leave your dorms immediately,
get your stuff, get out,
something no one has said to me since my first marriage.
And since that day, you have found ways to stay safe
under absurd and confusing circumstances.
And one way or the other, your hard won resilience
has gotten you here, today, to your TV, or phone,
or tablet, or smartwatch,
to graduate from Harvard come hell or high water.
As the father of two teenage children,
I look at all you've achieved in a frightful world,
and it gives me great hope.
You are remarkable examples to my children
of how to be smart, brave,
and yes, resilient in a scary world.
My generation was always embarrassed
to admit we went to Harvard, for fear of bragging.
But you, class of 2020, have earned the right
to be proud of your great accomplishment.
The next time someone asks you where you went to college,
hold your head high, look 'em square in the eye
and say two miles south of Tufts.
So today is unusual in two respects.
First, as I've said,
this iconic 384-year-old ceremony is online.
And we are strangely separate on a day
that's supposed to embody community.
Second, and more important, today's unusual
because at this commencement, you commence nothing.
You and your uniquely tested peers,
your generation commenced long ago
while the rest of us were busy complaining
about the Sopranos finale.
I have nothing to give you that you don't already have.
And have had for a very long time.
What I can offer is my boundless admiration,
my deepest respect, my gratitude for working so hard,
and bringing such honor to your families,
your faculty, and your alumni.
Our current troubles will pass,
and you will laugh and thrive and experience great joy.
I cannot wait to see what you fine people will accomplish,
and I know that one day, years from now,
one of you will stand where I stand, here in my backyard.
And I will have you arrested for trespassing.
Thank you.
(orchestral music) (audience cheers and applauds)
Thank you.
(orchestral music) (audience cheers and applauds)