Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Well first of all, I have always liked John Oliver. He is yet another talented comedian in a line of many others bred at the talent breeding grounds known as the Daily Show. For people who don't know, Oliver lured away the talented Tim Carvell, former head writer for the daily show, away from Jon Stewart. This was clearly a brilliant move and Stewart was nice enough to part with Carvell. Now that both Oliver and Carvell have a show on HBO with pretty much unlimited creative freedom, they are tackling the most important issues with a fearless tenacity that most comedians/hosts/shows can't afford to have. The reporting is concise and brilliantly edited, the delivery is sharp and witty, and the fact that the show is only 30 minutes long is long enough to hold most people's attention. Good job HBO on creating this gem!

Especially because most of those reviews, conveniently mostly post-2016, will say things like 'He used to be balanced but now it's leftist/woke/agenda-driven. I've watched every episode of this show and it's ALWAYS been left-leaning. Social justice, pro-healthcare, anti-gun... That's what the US needs to hear specifically because the US is none of those things at the moment. Don't pretend that people like John Oliver used to represent everyone equally and then suddenly went Left. That's like suggesting that Tucker Carlson used to be more Centre and then suddenly, out of nowhere, he's become Right, when he's always been Right.

In saying that, I love that he provokes conversation and forces audiences to think beyond just the acceptable alternatives. Rather than increase funding in this, why not scrap it entirely and go with that instead? Sure, some will watch it and think, "Nup, that's going too far" or "That's so un-American" or even "He's pandering to this group or that ideal", but sometimes Americans need to hear those extreme views, especially when their own leaders are happy to implement even more extreme measures (like locking up kids because of their skin colour, building a wall much like the Berlin Wall, and labelling all Mexicans as "rapists and murders...and some, I assume, are good people").

I, for one, love that John is willing to push his views so far that it'll piss many people off, because, if nothing else, it starts a conversation. Since the US has seen absolutely no major social, political or financial reform in the last 50 years, the country needs to be shoved out of its racist, elitist apathy and shaken vigorously until actual change becomes part of the conversation.

After the season finale of Game of Thrones, Veep, and Silicon Valley (whichever comes last), I was going to cancel my subscription to HBO. Now comes Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and I'm in a quandary. The history of television and big belly laughs for me is a rare combination. The best sitcoms every have mostly merely amused me. Laughing out loud so hard I can't stop and I have to get online and tell my friends to add this to their watch list is more rare than a lamb chop in Hell's Kitchen. John Oliver made The Daily Show funnier. It's great to see talent like that finally get its due share of hate mail.

So now, what to do... cancel HBO and pay $1.99 per episode to watch it on Roku? Yeah, that's how frugal I can be. But can I wait 24 hours for that kind of laughter? Therein lies the quandary.

I must take a moment to thank John Oliver and his creative team. Laughter is the best medicine. You're saving the planet--perhaps the multiverse. Boredom is hell. Torture is preferable to boredom. At least torture is something. So thank Fox for 24 hours of torture. But boredom will kill you to death. I didn't know what I was going to do after Dexter ended. Being Human relieves me for a few months, then it's agony. Hannibal comes along and I'm mesmerized for a few months, then I have to wait like a pregnant woman for the next amazing moment. OK, I admit, Wednesday nights in the summer are delicious because of the people who think they can dance. But you, sir, you are the kind of jester who comes along once in the history of an empire, and where would we be without you? Perish the thought.

I'm not a conservative Trump supporter and even I can't stand the amount of political vitriol that is in this show. Earlier episodes of Last Week Tonight before the Trump era were somewhat insightful and funny, but those qualities have been absent from the show since. Nowadays, this show just serves to belligerently and unfairly attack anything that is even the slightest bit conservative, leaving audiences with a strong disdain for Trump and other Republicans.

If you do further research on some of the political topics that are discussed in the recent episodes of this show, you will find that John Oliver clearly cherry picks facts that satisfy his progressive ideologies while omitting anything that is inconvenient for him, leaving his audience very misinformed after the episode ends.

Shows like this one are directly responsible for the heightened amount of political polarization we see today.

John Oliver's show is one in which he intersperses current events with comedy. And to keep your audience laughing while looking at such events today is quite a feat. I've only been familiar with Oliver and his show since March of 2016, so I didn't know about the kerfuffle raised when he was not picked to host The Daily Show after Jon Stewart left. However, I think things turned out for the best because John in a weekly show where he gets to go deeper on issues is probably more useful and funnier than John only getting a monologue and a few one liners in on a nightly show.

John rarely has guests of any kind, so he has to be imaginative in his main segment or he risks getting preachy, which usually just consists of John talking to the audience with clips to illustrate the point he is making.

Oliver always maintains a sense of humor even when he is discussing some of the more heinous institutions of American life such as the concept of medical debt and medical debt collections. He doesn't sport a condescending smile but rather a "isn't it ridiculous that we do things this way" smile. He is quite unpretentious, describing himself as a "rat faced Brit" and his show as "a petting zoo with a desk".

Since I only started watching the show since 2016, John has been blessed with having Donald J. Trump as an unfortunate wealth of comic material. So far in the 15-18 months I have been watching the show, John has highlighted some really oddball third party presidential candidates in 2016, and in the most recent season he transformed his desk into a French Bistro to explain to the French people in their own tongue - while smoking! - why they should not vote for far right wing candidate Marine Le Pen, given a new train set to a local news show in Scranton - John is somewhat obsessed with local US news programs, and traveled to Pennsylvania to buy five wax figures of presidents from a presidential wax museum that was closing, one of them being Warren G. Harding. He then proceeded to show a trailer of a movie entitled "Harding" that could be made if one had access to a wax figure of the president, which his show did. It was actually the only trailer I've seen in the past two years that made me want to buy a movie ticket - and the film doesn't even exist!

Highly recommended if you want to see some horrifying things about American political and economic trends that you will definitely not see on the 24 hour news cycle, and get some creative laughs to somewhat counteract that horror. Highly recommended.