John Oliver Needs to Up His Game

Over the past four years, in response to  Trump’s rise, late-night TV hosts have been riding high. Seth Myers, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah—since 2016, we’ve flocked to them not just for laughs, but also for political commentary: a reassurance that the Trump era was as upsetting as we felt it was. The craziness of a day’s headlines, comfortingly packaged between disarming jokes and served with a teaspoon of righteous indignation. 

The king of this late-night political punditry is John Oliver. His 20-minute main stories are regularly on the top of the YouTube trending page the day after they air. Somehow, this middle-aged British man has found his way into our hearts with a show that—at its best—is masterful. Let’s take a look at what I consider to be Oliver at his best: this 2017 segment on Alex Jones, host of InfoWars and the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend watching the video—it’s a work of art. Oliver is funny and irreverent, and the video ends with a truly hilarious joke ad satirizing the products Jones hawks on his show. But the true genius of Oliver is in his message. The easy thing to do would be to make fun of Jones as a crazy man: to play his conspiracy-ridden tirades, then laugh along with the audience, and perhaps end with a somber warning that InfoWars is reaching a large audience with this fake news. That, of course, is a predictable, easily digestible message for the left-leaning audience of late night. And Oliver does a little bit of that but then gets down to business. As it turns out, Jones makes large amounts of money by using his fear-mongering to advertise his online store. And Oliver is insightful and ruthless in his closing. 

“To an untrained eye, it sure seems like he was using the idea of a gay frog to sell his products. I’m not saying the only reason Jones is talking about the globalists systematically feminizing us is to sell overpriced nutraceuticals so he can buy luxury watches, but if I were saying that it certainly wouldn’t be the stupidest conspiracy theory that you’ve heard so far tonight … The fact that he happens to sell so many solutions should really re-contextualize how you think about what he is claiming are problems.”

Is this not remarkable? A comedian with a show airing late in the night, ostensibly to tell vaguely provocative jokes, injecting nuance and critical thinking into our political discourse. The first time I saw that segment, I realized it contained more insight than any equivalent span of time on a cable news show. It makes sense that so many of us have started to get our news this way. We trust Oliver to find the important stuff and tell us about it with enough sophistication to properly understand it. 

But since that glorious segment in 2018, something has changed.

On March 15, 2021, Last Week Tonight ran a segment on Tucker Carlson, (in)famous Fox News host. And sitting down as it began, I was freaking excited because like Jones, Tucker Carlson is pretending to be someone he’s not. This is a man who rails against liberal elites—but grew up in suburban Southern California, has a stepmother who is the heiress to the Swanson foods fortune, and was known early on in his career for bowties that’d make Bill Nye the Science Guy blush. 

You know what, just watch this instead. It’ll do a better job of explaining what I’m getting at, and it’s a good idea of what I was expecting from John Oliver. It’s not enough to make fun of Tucker or complain that his rhetoric is damaging. There’s a real story here, and I thought I could count on Oliver to pick it up and expose this man.

Nope. I waited for twenty-four minutes for Oliver to pivot from mocking his target to unpacking the duplicity behind this man. Instead, Oliver was content to keep playing outrageous clips of Carlson blowing dog whistles like a fifth-grade trumpet player at a school recital. There’s nothing wrong with that—Oliver points out, correctly, that Carlson is a bigoted liar whose access to a megaphone is damaging to our democracy. But this is a man who we expect to teach us, and all he did on March 15th was feed my leftist outrage. 

There was no moment like the one in the Jones piece, no calculated explanation of Carlson’s behavior or exposé on his facade. All we got, towards the end, was a throwaway rant that Carlson’s rhetoric was having a real impact on right-wing disinformation.

“The fact is millions of viewers a night watch him once. And once is already more than enough.”

I’m sorry John, but that’s not insightful. That’s generic.

That is the decline of John Oliver. He was more than a late-night host—he was a pundit-journalist who explained ideas to us. And now, he flubs an easy story about a host who pretends to be something he isn’t and goes for the easy outrage. Make no mistake: Last Week Tonight remains excellent, but I walked away from the Carlson segment feeling as if the show I held up as almost perfect was only slightly better than the offerings from Colbert and co. 

Look, I’ve been watching this show for the last five years and I am aware that I have written the sort of obsessed article that might have come from a hallucinating crazy person at three in the morning. Is the quality of Oliver’s show particularly relevant to our understanding of contemporary American politics? Nope.

But this shift in Oliver’s content really bothers me, and it’s made me realize that part of being a good citizen is to check now and then that the sources you trust are still good enough to warrant consuming. I don’t watch Last Week Tonight anymore. My name is Ian Carson, I am obsessed with late-night political commentary, and John Oliver’s show has gotten worse.

by IAN CARSON