John Oliver is the voice of sanity for these troubled times

The Binge
Jessica Zafra

EVERY GENERATION has its voice of sanity. In the 1950s when the McCarthy witch hunts threatened the same freedoms it claimed to safeguard, America had the esteemed news anchorman Edward R. Murrow. In the 1970s when the oil crisis, the Watergate scandal and the unwinnable war in Vietnam shook American self-belief, it was the unimpeachable anchorman Walter Cronkite. In the early decades of television, the audience looked to news anchors to help them understand the world. Anchormen were solid, trustworthy, the foundations of a world that made sense.

But the world grew bigger and scarier, and then it was no longer enough to have the news delivered on TV every night. There were too many questions and unsatisfactory answers. Those in charge were hiding things; the people didn’t know whom to trust anymore. So they turned to someone who did not claim to have all the answers. Not only did he not profess to know the truth, he even described his nightly broadcast as a fake news show. He shared the audience’s anxiety, and he dealt with this anxiety by laughing in its face.

Taking his cue from the great stand-up comics, Jon Stewart weaponized irreverence and irony. In the guise of comedy he poked at the lies and Orwellian poses of the post-9/11 world, and made the viewers feel less alone. There were other TV personalities who offered sharp political commentary, but it was Jon the failed-actor-turned-host of The Daily Show who connected with the audience. Later he was joined by former Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert, who took irony even further by adopting a persona who espoused views that countered his own. (On the un-ironic side there was Anderson Cooper, whose emotional freakout on live television in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made him a hero of truth and justice.)

When Jon Stewart announced in February 2015 that he was ending his 16-year run as host of The Daily Show, the Internet had a nervous breakdown disproportionate to the Comedy Central program’s ratings. There was fevered speculation as to who would succeed him. The heir presumptive had been John Oliver, a British comic who had joined The Daily Show in 2006. He looked like Harry Potter grown up and working in a cubicle farm. Oliver’s self-deprecating humor and his skill at zeroing in on the absurdity at the core of serious issues made him an audience favorite. He belonged to the British tradition of intelligence masquerading as silliness. When Stewart took time off in 2013 to direct a feature film, Oliver was the guest host and he was brilliantly hilarious. The viewers found themselves wishing Stewart would extend his sabbatical.

John Oliver never did take over The Daily Show; within weeks of his guest-hosting stint he was signed by HBO. (The South African comic Trevor Noah succeeded Stewart. He is, shall we say, still finding his legs.) In April 2014, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver premiered on HBO. It’s glorious. Whether he is asking Stephen Hawking about the theoretical possibility of dating Charlize Theron in a parallel universe or causing a shift in the Federal Communications Commission’s stance on net neutrality, he has a knack for taking obscure subjects and making them comprehensible without oversimplifying. He can do episodes on chicken farmers, standardized testing, or the candidates in Canadian elections (including a video of last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Manila heartthrob Justin Trudeau falling down the stairs) and make them compelling.

Last Week Tonight had not been on the air that long when pundits coined the term “The John Oliver Effect” to describe his influence on US legislation and court rulings. For instance, his report on chicken farmers critical of industry practices led to a congressional vote ensuring protection for these chicken farmers. The excellent writing on the show is backed by exhaustive research that puts news programs to shame. Consider their investigation into the Miss America organization’s claim that it was the largest provider of scholarships for women. It turned out that the organization was using a creative interpretation of “provided” that was not the same as “distributed.”

The strongest episodes are fueled by spitting outrage and helpless laughter. In “Migrants and Refugees,” he addresses fearmongering by the news media. Language matters, he says, noting how the British Prime Minister had said “a swarm of refugees.” Referring to a swarm of anything sounds terrifying. “If I hear that a lot of kittens are coming my way, I’m going to be delighted. But if I hear that there is a swarm of kittens approaching, I’m grabbing a shotgun and I’m getting to high ground because I’m not letting those furry fuckers take me alive.” He calls out Fox News for calling migrants “terrorists” and then adding a disclaimer that not all migrants were terrorists. Then he shows the infamous video of a Hungarian camerawomen kicking refugee children at a camp, and then releasing a statement saying, “I’m not a heartless, racist, children-kicking camerawoman.”

“Which I can only presume means she’s a loving, accepting, children-kicking camerawoman,” Oliver says, “because the children-kicking is not up for debate anymore.” As for Slovakia declaring that it is unable to take in Muslim refugees because it doesn’t have any mosques, he replies, “You can build those, right? Mosques don’t naturally occur in the wild due to erosion or particularly devout beavers.”

In the general gloom and despair that followed the Paris attacks in November 2015, John Oliver unleashed an expletive-laden defense of civilization itself. Making superb use of HBO’s relaxed policy on profanity, he declared that the attack “was carried out by gigantic fucking arseholes, possibly working with other fucking arseholes, definitely working in service of an ideology of pure arseholery.”

The appropriate reaction to the rant that followed was to stand up and sing the “Marseillaise.” “France is going to endure and I’ll tell you why. If you are in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck. Go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Gauloise cigarettes, Camus, camembert, madeleines, macarons, and the fucking croquembouche. You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friend.”

Last week, John Oliver delivered a systematic point-by-point rebuttal to the lies and inconsistencies spouted by the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump. It is awesome, and if it doesn’t wake the voters out of their stupor, they deserve a Trump presidency. You can see that episode on Last Week Tonight’s official YouTube page, along with every episode from the show’s monumental first two years. You might not get any work done today, but it’ll be worth it.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.

Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.