Last night on Conan, supermodel/media personality/future leader of the free world (probably) Tyra Banks sat down with Conan O’Brien to discuss her time attending Harvard Business School. Conan, a Harvard alum himself — and more aware than most what a paradox this is — managed to throw a few jokes about his alma mater into the discussion. Here are some highlights of the interview:

• Harvard Business School is making Tyra live in the dorms while class is in session. OH THE HORROR!
• Conan can’t figure out why Harvard guys aren’t hitting on Tyra, then realizes why approximately two seconds later.
• Conan compares some of the female students at Harvard to  ”Emily Dickinson after a bike accident.” Ouch.

Enjoy the whole clip below! (At the four-minute mark, though, she starts talking about smizing. At that point, we fully encourage you to close the window.)

It has certainly been a year to remember for Ivy League graduation speeches. While Amy Poehler gave a Harvard student the finger, Tom Hanks decided to visit the campus of Yale so he could get into character for his new movie. Rudy Giuliani provided Cornellians with a fun-filled drinking game (Drink every time Rudy mentions “politics,” “terrorism,” or “9/11”), and Columbia’s guest speaker asked every student at Barnard to friend her on Facebook. Princeton snagged Brooke Shields (HOT) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (NOT AS HOT). At UPenn, Denzel depressed students by encouraging them to fail. And lastly, Brown University decided to be really hipster by choosing a guest speaker that none of us have ever heard of.

Yet it is quite clear that none of these guest speakers could measure up to Dartmouth College’s Conan “Coco” O’Brien, who definitely delivered the goods. Conan, whose last graduation speech came in 2000 at his alma mater, Harvard, knocked this one out of the park by cracking an abundance of hilarious jokes at the expense of Dartmouth and the rest of the Ivy League. Here’s my favorite line of the speech:

No, Dartmouth, you must stand tall, raise your heads high and feel proud. Because if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are your self-involved, vain, name-dropping older brothers, you are the cool, sexually confident, lacrosse-playing younger sibling who knows how to throw a party and looks good in a down vest.

Brown, of course, is your lesbian sister who never leaves her room … And Penn, Columbia, and Cornell, well frankly, who gives a shit?

Congrats to Dartmouth and Conan for winning IvyGate’s first annual “Kick-Ass Graduation Speech Award,” and enjoy the entire speech in its YouTube glory below:

Big news: Late-night host Conan O’Brien will speak at the Class of 2011′s Commencement, according to the Dartmouth. But the funny man’s talents weren’t procured easily. Apparently, President Jim Yong Kim had to pull some strings with a former teacher in order to snag Conan’s number — that teacher being Thomas O’Brien, Harvard Medical School professor and Conan’s dad. Just goes to show that the valuable connections you make at school (read: Harvard) really do last a lifetime, and apparently extend to other Ivy League institutions. (Except for Brown — JimKim’s ditched you twice! Once for HMS, again for the presidency at Dartmouth.)

Not to break any hearts in Hanover — being so deep in the woods, we so rarely get to be on the bleeding edge of culture — but Harvard, like the Simpsons, did it first. (Coincidentally, Conan O’Brien once wrote for the Simpsons!) Back in 2000, the talk-show host delivered an infamous, oft-quoted Commencement address for Class Day. Fortunately, any dissatisfaction Dartmouth students might feel over receiving Harvard’s sloppy seconds is mitigated by the relief of finally getting a speaker their state school friends have actually heard of (instead of, say, the first female president of an African country).

Okay, the three of you who watch late-night network TV on the regular: Vanity Fair has released a scintillating, way-insidery take on the Conan O’Brien sturm und drang: apparently, NBC head Jeff Zucker H’86, former Crimson president, is taking revenge on former Lampoon president O’Brien, H’85:

It’s a prank that included uprooting Conan and his staff from New York to Los Angeles, spending hundreds of millions of G.E. and Universal shareholders’ dollars, all just to yank the rug out from under O’Brien. Was it really worth the effort?   Yes, when you remember that Conan started it.

Turns out, NBC never wanted Conan at all! And Crimson editors are able to turn their aggression towards outsiders, not just each other.

The post unfolds like an online-only version of Pale Fire (with Carson Daly playing the role of Zembla), as the “editor,” a Lampoon alum, cuts chunks of Ben Schwartz’s prose and asks “What about the lobster incident?” Well. The Cheerful Money bit has been done to death, but the theory maybe holds up—that this whole fracas is just one in a series of escalating pranks. Hey, remember the prank war Gob and the seal dealer had on Arrested Development? Well, it ends with middlebrow lisping on NBC at 11:35.

More theorizing after the jump.

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