John Oliver evokes Cillian Murphy's parents' "hot Irish sex" to explain a bizarre legal quirk

John Oliver, in typical John Oliver fashion, deployed a rather, er, colorful metaphor to help explain a very serious topic in his main story last night. “At a certain point, assigning an outcome to a chain of causation no longer makes sense,” the Last Week Tonight host said. “It is why, when the Oscar for Best Actor was awarded last year, it was given to Cillian Murphy and not to his parents, whose hot Irish sex led to his existence.”

Believe it or not, this was a pretty good illustration of why a bizarre legal quirk that’s become “one of those quiet drivers of mass incarceration we never acknowledge” is so insidious. Oliver spent the bulk of his main story discussing felony murder, an under-discussed loophole in which accomplices to a felony who didn’t actually kill anyone can still be charged with murder—and, in some cases, given decades to life without parole—just for being connected to the original crime. Those connections can be incredibly tenuous, as well. Oliver spotlighted the case of Ryan Holle, a Florida man who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2004 after lending his keys to his roommate, who used the car as part of a robbery that resulted in someone’s death. (All four men who were a part of the robbery were also convicted of murder, though only one of them did the actual killing.)