“The world is dabbling with something very dangerous right now,” warned John Oliver at the conclusion of his last Last Week Tonight main story of the year on Sunday. No, not our near-universal obsession with Bradley Cooper’s new version of A Star Is Born. Sure, that’s hyperbolic and a little weird, but basically…

One of the unique benefits of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight approach to the late-night political comedy scene is his willingness and ability to pick a single, illustrative issue and descend into it, all the way to the murky bottom. Sure, any old person with eyes, a social media presence, and a functioning central…

With the midterm elections coming up tomorrow, John Oliver had plenty of topics to work with when it came to spurring his audience to vote on whether or not Donald fucking Trump’s America is something they really want to support. Presumably spinning the wheel of bigotry, attacks on civil and voting rights, sexual…

On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver knew he was fighting a losing battle with his main story segment about Attorneys General. For one thing, the proper plural of “Attorney General” is the sort of pedantic detail that eminently punchable grammar nerds love to say. (Cue picture of pedantic grammar nerd Oliver in…

On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver continued his weekly public service of processing seven days’ worth of hateful, dispiriting bullshit into a half-hour of expertly modulated, laugh-punctuated comic outrage, as he took a look at the United States’ long and morally queasy relationship with the oil-rich…

Sure, it seems lazy to brand every right-wing authoritarian blowhard candidate [Country X’s] Donald Trump, but, as John Oliver revealed on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, Brazil might just be on the verge of electing the Trumpiest Brazilian Trump possible. Indeed, as Oliver went to air, he was unsure which way Brazil’s…

John Oliver’s weekly platform for calculatedly hysterical outrage, Last Week Tonight, might seem to be at a disadvantage when reacting to the fast-erupting sewage-news overflowing the White House containment tanks during the Donald Trump administration. Yet, like someone who wisely takes a few deep breaths during a…

After a blisteringly funny opening spent compiling all the new shapes into which conservative commentators are contorting themselves in their frenzied mission to excuse yet another powerful accused Republican sex creep (Jeanine Pirro really needs to stop trying to make “Democratic demon rats” happen), John Oliver…

Last Week Tonight returned on Sunday night after taking multiple weeks of nights off from comedically dissecting the exact manner in which we are thoroughly and irretrievably fucked. Take the upcoming, ridiculously vital midterm elections in November, where the cartoonishly corrupt Republican Party is really outdoing…

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…

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…

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…