The Emmy-winning Last Week Tonight has made its comedy bones by exposing bottom-feeding charlatans, bigots, and the unjust. And that’s even before Donald Trump became president—and host John Oliver’s bottomless, soulless well of apoplectically delivered exposé comedy. So, in Sunday’s examination of the practice of…
One more drop of bullshit in Ajit Pai’s big ol’ coffee cup of crap this week, with the government’s inspector general’s office releasing a report stating that a cyber-attack the FCC claimed it was hit by last year—and which “coincidentally” lined up with John Oliver calling for his HBO audience to flood the…
Last Week Tonight continued host John Oliver’s Emmy-winning formula last night. You know the one, where Oliver attempts to make the week’s unendingly grim and terrible events go down easier with intermittent asides of humorously exaggerated reactions that only make you feel worse when he gets back to the awful stuff.…
John Oliver returned from a mini-hiatus with an extra-long Last Week Tonight on Sunday. After an abbreviated roundup of several weeks’ backlog of Donald Trump’s toilet tweets, the host launched into his main story about workplace sexual harassment, touched off by the fact that CBS President Les Moonves was just outed…
For every joke that makes it to TV, there’s probably a dozen that don’t. TV series, whether they’re sitcoms or talk shows, go through myriad iterations before hitting your eyeballs, and, on occasion, the best stuff hits the cutting room floor. That’s why John Oliver of Last Week Tonight regularly shares his team’s…
Being a late-night host seems exhausting. Not only do you have to be funny, poignant, and informative, but you have to cram all of your best content into a shareable, 3-5 minute clip so that the majority of America will actually sit down and watch it. On the most recent episode of The Break, Michelle Wolf expressed…
John Oliver took a nice, relaxing detour away from the weekly grind of comically chronicling the walking genetic nightmare that is the Trump family to have some fun with pig-Hitler. And, no, that wasn’t the new, in-retrospect ill-advised hashtag Last Week Tonight unveiled to really stick it to that Trump guy, but an…
On a recent episode of his HBO series Last Week Tonight, John Oliver decided to stop talking about America for a bit and focus on what’s been going on in China instead. For 20 minutes, Oliver detailed the great economic growth that the country is enjoying as well as the rise of lovable president/possible…
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver only spent a few minutes at the top talking about the never-ending racist clownshow that is the Trump administration (where “putting children in fucking cages” is yet another over-the-top evil milestone reached), to talk about Mexico. You know, America’s neighbor, trading…
After an opening segment outlining the fact that the American government is seizing thousands of children and putting them in fucking cages, John Oliver spent most of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight talking about China. You know, that faraway country with an ruler whose fragile ego, paranoia, authoritarian bent, and…
John Oliver has famously dubbed the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation “Stupid Watergate,” since, as the Last Week Tonight host put it on Sunday’s show, everyone involved in this latest attempt by a sitting president to undermine American democracy is “dumb, and terrible, and bad at everything.” Oliver might have…
John Oliver spent the bulk of his main story on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight hipping us all to yet another thoroughly, soul-crushingly unjust thing we didn’t realize was so hopelessly screwed up until he decided to tell us about it. This week, it was the almost entirely unregulated, scam-happy wonderland called…
After a brief up-front recap of the week in Trump administration lunacy—congrats, John Bolton, for being so hair-trigger irresponsible that Donald-fucking-Trump had to walk back your latest foreign policy blunder—John Oliver spent most of this week’s Last Week Tonight exposing yet another shady, scam-happy group. In…
It’s upfronts week, which means the TV universe is in upheaval. Cancellations! New shows! Surprise network switches! Stephen Colbert, whose Late Show is the sort of late-night institution typically immune to these forces, used the opportunity to flex some of his own creative muscles while appealing to the in-demand…
Considering what Last Week Tonight host John Oliver termed the “hurricane of shit” we in America have to deal with on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget that there are world governments even more corrupt, insane, and dysfunctional than the Trump administration. Take Venezuela, the subject of Oliver’s main story on…
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver spent the bulk of the episode pooh-poohing all the recent pundit handwringing over what as been the Lionel Hutz-esque debut of new Trump administration legal mastermind and former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani. From contradicting Donald Trump and Michael Cohen’s already…
Usually, Last Week Tonight sees host John Oliver summing up a truly terrible situation and then revealing the cheekily imaginative stunt he and his team have come up with to at least theoretically nudge said situation in the direction of sanity. And while Sunday’s show saw Oliver, indeed, doing his signature comic…
After his Tax Day main story exposé about the ridiculously evil lengths major corporations (Apple, Google, G.E.) continue to go to to avoid paying a fucking penny in taxes while—just for an example—hardworking freelancers sweat out how to make rent, John Oliver thought we could all use a little pick-me-up. (You’ve got…
By now, we’re far along enough into Trump’s first term that some equilibrium has returned to late-night programming. We’re no longer guaranteed to see multiple (still mostly male) hand-wringing takes on the latest attempt at a constitutional violation—often made during the president’s morning constitutional—as we…
You know John Oliver has hooked into a good story when his Last Week Tonight audience starts intermittently crying out like they’re about to rush the stage. And since Oliver spent the bulk of Sunday’s episode exposing the mendacious tactics of anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers”—that employ every deceitful trick…
