John Oliver’s didactic news show Last Week Tonight returned last week for the start of its much anticipated third season. Having been off the air for three months since the end of season two, Oliver proclaimed his enthusiasm of once again being able to talk about politics, Martin Shkreli and Kanye West.
The season premiere addressed several topics in quintessential John Oliver style. Calling out the mediocrity of voter ID laws, selecting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement, the troubles of Chipotle and a dildo hitting New Zealand politician, Steven Joyce, in the face were all under Oliver’s scope.
While Oliver addresses top news stories, he also gets into the nitty gritty with topics we all think about, topics we don’t think about and topics we don’t like to think about. These topics could be the current state of politics, explaining net neutrality or opening our eyes to the unnerving power of the NSA. Oliver delivers swift sermons each week that entertain and inform.
With its comedic tone, Last Week Tonight is compared to other satire news programs like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. A comparison to The Daily Show is warranted, after all, Oliver is an alum and even hosted the show during Jon Stewart’s absence while Stewart directed a movie. Oliver even contends, like Jon Stewart, that his show is not journalism, but comedy. Yet, the two shows are not the same and Last Week Tonight is much more than just comedy. The Daily Show harps on the foolishness of republicans and hypocrisy of democrats as the crux of the show, while Last Week Tonight has ridiculous politics as only part of the show and instead does some serious investigative journalistic work.
Last Week Tonight transcends the way news is presented to us. The presentation equation Oliver uses tends to look like this: an intelligent joke introducing a news segment, informative lecture on said news segment and more often than not a demand for change in what is usually a fairly absurd practice. An example of this is the segment on the ludicrousness of pennies. Oliver dismantles the copper coin (which isn’t even entirely copper anymore) and offers a straight forward solution to the problem of the penny—get rid of it.
Last Week Tonight is known for its ability to cut through the junk that the topics tend to be convoluted with. Oliver and his writing team do this by putting in the research work in order to expose fallacies, like when Oliver dug up the troubling truth on scholarships “provided” to women by Miss America Pageants.
Oliver’s genius is not only evident in his research, but also in his deliverance. Oliver knows that the news can be duller than a wooden spoon, so he mixes in cleverly placed jokes. This formula Oliver has created speaks to the fact that some of the events happening in the world are as absurd as the jokes he makes about them.
The brilliance of John Oliver is his ability to speak directly to the public consciousness. Last Week Tonight uses intense and thorough research to do what makes good journalistic work great—letting people know and getting them to think.
