In its first two episodes, John Oliver’s news-satire show, “Last Week Tonight,” which airs on Sunday nights, on HBO, devoted long segments to the ongoing Indian elections and to the status of the death penalty in the United States. In each case, Oliver, grinning, but with serious, almost desperate purpose, argued that these were subjects that Americans, either out of ignorance or owing to an aversion to facing hard truths, were talking and thinking much too little about. Of the Indian election, in which more than eight hundred million people are eligible to vote, but which has received scant U.S. cable-news coverage, he said, “If this story isn’t worth covering, then nothing is worth covering.” Regarding the death penalty—which was in the news last week, after a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma—Oliver reached for simile: “The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it’s so tantalizing. But when they bring it back, you think, This is ethically wrong.”
“Last Week Tonight” looks and sounds a lot like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” where, beginning in 2006, Oliver worked as a writer and an on-air correspondent; this past summer, he guest-hosted the show to career-making effect. At the outset of “Last Week Tonight,” the studio audience cheers wildly, and it laughs reliably throughout. Oliver leans eagerly over his desk, as if in a hurry to fit all of his amused outrage into the half hour. Ironic images flash in the top left of the screen, either amplifying or jarringly contrasting what Oliver is saying. (During the death-penalty segment, there was a picture of Winnie the Pooh holding a syringe.) Politicians and cable-news personalities come in for scathing attack in equal measure, with short video excerpts used to reveal idiocy, mendacity, and hypocrisy. In the first episode, there was a bit featuring a the musician Lisa Loeb mocking Oregon’s health-care ads, as well as a delightfully strange confrontational interview with Keith Alexander, former head of the N.S.A. Most notably, Oliver, who, in interviews, repeatedly emphasizes the debt that he owes to Stewart, shares Stewart’s basic tonal template: aggrieved by the necessity of the task at hand, as if to remind the audience that, in a better world, it wouldn’t fall to a comedian to straighten out all these serious issues for us.
This irritation, however, is mostly a sleight. Oliver, who is thirty-seven, established his comic voice in Britain by pillorying conservative social values and entrenched institutions: the Catholic Church, the monarchy, finance types, vain and dangerous dictators and autocrats. The pompous and the powerful have long been targets of his hyper-articulate, profanity-happy outrage—in his standup shows, his appearances on the British panel show “Mock the Week,” in the mid-aughts, and on his consistently brilliant and uproarious weekly news-satire podcast, the Bugle, which he has recorded with Andy Zaltzman, a fellow British comedian, since 2007. (One hopes that Oliver’s new gig doesn’t mean the end of the Bugle.) Many of the subjects of recent Bugle episodes hint at the kinds of stories that Oliver will tackle on television—for example, his fascination with the Indian politician Narendra Modi. As is typical of Oliver’s delivery, what begins as a simple explanation of facts grows louder and more urgent before escalating to a crescendo of silliness. On a March podcast, he said, of Modi’s campaign slogan, “Toilets Not Temples,” “He’s running on a pro-toilet platform. It works both as a positive for him and negative for his opponent, because he is essentially saying, ‘My opponent wants you to shit in the street.’” Then Zaltzman chimed in: “Or to shit in the temple.” There is something winning about hearing the two men laugh at each other’s jokes.
By himself on television, Oliver rehashed the bit about Modi and the toilets, but was less profane and noticeably more earnest about why something like toilets matter: “This is both funny and incredibly important as a public-health issue.” If the Bugle is smart-alecky schoolboy nonsense, then “Last Week Tonight” is a schoolboy putting on a blazer and playing it straight(er). The show’s strengths are its writing and Oliver’s insistent delivery. When talking about Rahul Gandhi, the Indian candidate for prime minister, he said, “So let’s deal with Gandhi first—and I realize it is not the first time that sentence has been said in a British accent.” And Oliver has not blunted his edges. In a segment mocking the nefariousness of food labels, he showed a Pop-Tarts ad that touts the product’s “real fruit” and promises that feeding the breakfast pastry to your kids will make them rise and will make you shine. To this, Oliver responds, “Fuck you. And I’ll tell you why: because there is no significant amount of fruit in Pop Tarts, and within thirty seconds of eating your children will not rise and shine, they’ll run around punching people in the dick before collapsing into a puddle of tears.” (HBO doesn’t bleep out the dirty words.) Among the current handful of American late-night hosts, only Oliver could successfully deliver such a line.
This assured start has led some people to the snap judgment that Oliver has surpassed Stewart, or that “Last Week Tonight” harkens back to Stewart’s better days, when he was a more joyful culture warrior. The show has been called the “All Things Considered” of late-night news satire (by the New York Times) and the Al Jazeera of late-night news satire (by the Los Angeles Times). Both comparisons are nods to its deeper dives into the issues—the weekly schedule affords it more time for research and polish than “The Daily Show,” which airs four nights a week—and to its focus on international news. (The show’s set, which looks at first like a bland cityscape, is, in fact, made up of famous buildings from around the world, a kind of Esperanto skyline.)
So far, like “The Daily Show,” “Last Week Tonight” takes merciless aim at cable news and at talking heads, using cherry-picked clips to mock the media’s insipid treatment of major issues. Yet this kind of media criticism is not only well worn—criticizing “cable news” as an omnibus bogeyman also feels out-of-date. (To highlight the lack of American coverage of the Indian election, Oliver ran a recent clip from the “The McLaughlin Group,” which is hosted by an eighty-seven-year-old man who hasn’t enjoyed wide cultural relevance since Dana Carvey impersonated him on “Saturday Night Live,” at the beginning of the nineties.) There is also something slightly disingenuous about a show like Oliver’s directing outrage at cable news in the first place. He would find little to talk about if he couldn’t mock the media’s foibles, and, structure-wise, the show couldn’t tell its stories without leaning hard on the straight-man explication that these news outlets provide.
Where Oliver’s show has the potential to outpace “The Daily Show,” or at least to break from it more convincingly, through a sustained campaign against another target: its own audience. Jon Stewart has gained a steady, dedicated following by marshalling the anger and frustration of his like-minded fans against the villainy of Fox News and the Republican Party. It is a world of us against them. Oliver, meanwhile, appears to be doing something different. Rather than become the leader of an audience of acolytes, he seems to be out to subtly correct his audience’s prejudices and blind spots. If Stewart is evangelical, Oliver is professorial. His bit on the Indian election was akin to the current rush of explainer journalism, in which a smart person more or less reads the newspaper for you, tells you why this or that thing matters, and nudges you toward a final judgment. In the second episode, Oliver began a segment on Sharia law in Brunei by saying, “There was big news out of Brunei this week. Wait, let me back up a second. There is a country called Brunei.” The joke here, partly, is that liberal American audiences enjoy being scolded about our ignorance of geography, especially when the person doing the scolding speaks in a British accent. (Oliver, who grew up in eastern England and went to Cambridge, has become a permanent resident here, and he has embraced American culture, downplaying his role as an incredulous outsider critic.) But Oliver’s line was also a muted challenge—one that left my own fluency in international politics feeling mighty exposed. It’s a good thing for comedy to be aspiration, for the viewer to feel like he needs to get smarter in order to get the joke.
Yet there is a way that Oliver’s obvious urge to instruct can give way to air of self-satisfaction. His segment on the death penalty has been celebrated this week, though most people have focussed largely on its length, as if devoting twelve minutes to the subject were itself evidence of some latter-day Murrow-style bravery. Oliver’s essential argument came down to a complex and vital question: “If someone is guilty of committing a horrible crime, and the family of the victim want the perpetrator executed, do we want to live in the kind of country that gives that to them?” But, to get there, he spent a lot of time highlighting just how amazing it was that his show was taking on the issue in the first place. Introducing the segment, he said,
Later, he added, before making another point, “And here is when it gets hard, harder than is potentially appropriate for a comedy show late on a Sunday night.” This the kind of disingenuousness that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have sometimes flirted with in the past, a way to downplay themselves as simple comedians while at the same time elevating their importance by emphasizing just how bold and thoughtful their comedy is trying to be. Oliver’s aims at real social commentary are plain, and there is little to be gained by being coy about them. Maybe we could have done without the tiny-hamster chaser.
What is clear so far is that Oliver is sure-footed and charismatic performer. He is exceedingly comfortable in the chair. The show is tightly and smartly scripted. These are the things that make it worth watching, and give reason to think that it will only improve. The hope is that, as time passes, “Last Week Tonight” will continue to explain, in its funny way, why the news matters, and spend less time arguing for why the show itself, matters.
Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/HBO
