Conner O'Malley

Conner O'Malley (born December 20, 1986) is an American comedian, writer, actor, filmmaker, and social media personality. For his work on Late Night with Seth Meyers, he received three Writers Guild of America Awards nominations. He produces videos on YouTube, and was active on the now defunct social media platform Vine. O'Malley has also appeared on Broad City, Joe Pera Talks with You, and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. He is married to actor and fellow comedian Aidy Bryant.
O'Malley grew up in the North Side of Chicago. He was the first of three brothers. His father, brothers, and several uncles were all elevator mechanics. His father wanted him to be a mechanic as well, and when O'Malley took a test to become one at age 18, he failed it "kind of on purpose". He then wanted to be a comedian, and was inspired by Conan O'Brien and Norm MacDonald.
O'Malley started frequently performing in the standup and improv comedy scene present at Chicago's Second City theaters. Performing at the Annoyance Theatre, he met his future wife, Aidy Bryant. When Bryant was cast on Saturday Night Live in 2012, the two moved to New York City, where O'Malley began uploading short comedy videos to the social media platform Vine while working as a dog walker. His Vines, uploaded until the site shut down defunct in 2017, mostly showed him confronting drivers on New York City streets and talking to them in non-sequiturs. Those videos were profiled by Alex Naidus for BuzzFeed in 2013.
O'Malley's videos quickly began to gain attention and acclaim, and in 2014, he was hired as a writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. While writing for Late Night, he occasionally performed on the show, creating several re-occurring characters, such as "Anniversary Guy", "Stink Mouth PigMan", and "Gørbøn Hausinfrud".
In addition to Late Night, O'Malley has also written for Joe Pera Talks with You, which he also co-starred in as Joe's neighbor Mike Melsky; and the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards. As an actor, O'Malley has been featured in several television shows, most notably Detroiters, where he played Trevor, Tim's free-wheeling brother; and Horace and Pete, where he played Eric, the boyfriend of Horace's daughter, played by Bryant. O'Malley has also appeared on Broad City, and on Netflix's The Characters, and has been a recurring guest on The Chris Gethard Show since 2013. In 2019, he appeared on I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. In 2021, he appeared on HBO's That Damn Michael Che.
Since 2016, O'Malley has also frequently posted videos on his YouTube channel, similar to his Vine work. In 2023, he began pay-per-view selling his videos on his own website Endorphin Port.
In 2024, O'Malley released the stand-up comedy special Stand Up Solutions, which satirizes late capitalism and artificial intelligence. Filmed in Brooklyn, the special received critical acclaim upon its release, with Tim Marcin of Mashable describing it as "a scathing critique of our AI reality" and Clare Martin of Paste calling it a "fever dream, frantically reflecting our own overwhelming, tumultuous present while still keeping us in stitches".
O'Malley co-directed (with Danny Scharar), wrote, and starred in Rap World, a 2024 mockumentary about three men in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, in 2009, who try to record a hip-hop album over the course of night, despite "having no songs or real focus to speak of", as David Fenshaw writes for The Fader. The film is shot with a period-accurate video camera and is edited like a YouTube vlog from that time. Fenshaw referred to Rap World as the funniest film of 2024.
O'Malley's characters often have a manic and aggressive persona, speak with loose thoughts, and have a comically overzealous interest in politics and popular culture. His videos on YouTube and X (formerly known as Twitter) have included increasingly chaotic and demanding vlogs, such as a 2019 series jokingly directed toward 2020 U.S. presidential election candidates, Howard Schultz (the CEO of Starbucks) and then-U.S. representative Beto O'Rourke.
Jeremy Gordon, writing for The Outline, described the latter videos as "performance art". Chloe Lizotte, writing for Reverse Shot (the publication of the Museum of the Moving Image), used the series to show how O'Malley's work frequently switches between different styles of filmic storytelling. The videos feature O'Malley as a "deranged, diehard" fan of Schultz and O'Rourke's campaigns, who stands in a construction site and yells compliments at the two men in personal messages to them recorded on his phone. The character has many unexplained bodily injuries and an addiction to nondescript pills. He then gets kidnapped and tortured in a van by representatives of Starbucks—the camera switching to their perspective, shot like a snuff film—until he is released into the public. At a shopping mall, filmed like a normal narrative film, O'Malley's character tells strangers that Howard Schultz "made me normal"; Lizotte writes that this character, like many others of O'Malley's, are "socially aloof" people who "navigate a world corroded by mediation", similar to Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati's characters but within the "contemporary American hellscape".
Shane Ryan, writing for Paste, said O'Malley's comedy expresses "anger and envy and a sort of perverted worship of wealth and the American dream". O'Malley has also published comedy videos on YouTube that have satirized InfoWars, South by Southwest and the AVN Awards. Chloe Lizotte compared O'Malley's work to Adam Curtis and said that his videos "mock the idea that commercial entertainment could stand in for political action or fill a spiritual void."