John Oliver was off last week, which meant he didn’t have a chance to do a show at the very height of then–UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s unprecedented political implosion. (After becoming PM on Sept. 6, she was forced to resign on Oct. 25 due to a Benny Hill-ian litany …
Read More »John Oliver Explains (Again) Why Opposing Trans Rights Is Wrong
It had been seven years since Last Week Tonight first devoted its main story to transgender rights. On Sunday, John Oliver celebrated the fact that more people now appear to feel comfortable coming out as trans, but he also acknowledged that “in the past few years some on the right …
Read More »John Oliver Explains Why Local TV News is Criminally Bad
“If it bleeds, it leads” goes the old saying about the way TV newsrooms choose their stories. Grisly murders, gruesome accidents, and graphic violence often lead news broadcasts because producers know just as well as politicians that scaring people is a great way to make sure they keep paying attention …
Read More »John Oliver Goes Hard at Indiana Jones
John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight crew decided to do a longer-than-normal show all about museums. Which on the face of it sounds like a terrible idea, but it actually worked, because Oliver’s focus was on the theft by Western colonizers of other countries’ antiquities, and today’s Western museums …
Read More »John Oliver Warns Us About a Trump Clone With the Army on His Side
On this week’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver began by acknowledging Mahsa Amini’s death in Iran and the protests that have followed, serpentine Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s political stunt in which he (probably illegally) shipped 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — “We could spend the rest of this show talking …
Read More »Queen Elizabeth II Jokes Cut From 'Last Week Tonight With John Oliver' by U.K. Television Service
Britain has been in a ceremonial state of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last week — and that apparently extends to the airwaves as well. During a recent HBO broadcast of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the host’s jabs at the response to Her Majesty’s not-so-sudden …
Read More »John Oliver Has Some Bad News About 'Law & Order'
“I’m just gonna say this and you may not like it but it doesn’t make it any less true: The nicest thing the Queen of England ever did for anyone was die the week that [Liz Truss] became Prime Minister.” That pretty much summed up Last Week Tonight’s first segment, …
Read More »John Oliver Revisits the Site of America's Longest War
It’s been one year since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, surrendering the country to the Taliban and creating even more chaos and misery for Afghans who’ve endured nothing but chaos and misery for decades. So John Oliver devoted his main story to the country that served as the location …
Read More »What's the Difference Between Alex Jones and Monkeypox? John Oliver Explains
Although John Oliver’s main story on his latest episode of Last Week Tonight was about monkeypox, he couldn’t help but begin with Alex Jones, the odious conspiracy theorist who Oliver very accurately described as “a man who boldly answers the question, ‘What if Grimace were a Proud Boy?’” Jones was …
Read More »John Oliver Explains Why Looking For a Therapist Drives So Many People Crazy
The midterm elections are on the horizon, the war in Ukraine shows little sign of cooling down, we’re in approximately the billionth straight month of Covid, and Nichelle Nichols just died. So it’s little surprise that Americans are in serious need of therapy: four in 10 U.S. adults recently reported …
Read More »