Late Night Last Week: No Kings (Except Maybe John Oliver)
Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, it’s all about one man: John Oliver, the best late night has to offer today. Oliver was all over TV, from his own show Last Week Tonight, to a guest spot on Colbert, to a feature profile on 60 Minutes.
Following the all-hands-on-deck celebrations to mark five decades of Saturday Night Live, late night programming at NBC took last week off. So too did The Daily Show. And Jimmy Kimmel Live!
But that’s all okay, because we have John Oliver, who had himself quite a week, proving once again his status as the king of late night. Today, he is the sole focus of this column. Let’s dig in.
Breaks Record For Most Colbert Appearances
On Monday, February 17, John Oliver appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the program hosted by his old Daily Show comrade. With the appearance, Oliver retook the lead for most appearances on the show, an honor he claimed from CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson. It was Oliver’s 20th appearance on the program.
“One more appearance and we can drink,” Oliver replied when given the news. “Is that how it works?”
Oliver’s previous appearance on the program came just before the presidential election. Colbert asked Oliver, who recently became a U.S. citizen, whether he would stick around given the events of the last, well, four weeks. Oliver said he was prepared to go down with the ship. He insisted that he will be going nowhere and ready to tackle the years ahead.
“I don’t think you get to be that surprised by it,” Oliver said when asked about Trump. “Dr. Phil on the ICE raids? You don’t get to be surprised by that.”
“You can be surprised that Drs. Drew and Oz were not with him,” Oliver added. “Dr. Phil makes as much sense there as he does in a psychiatrist’s office.”
Wears A Cute Sweater
Earlier in the broadcast, John Oliver also made an appearance following Colbert’s monologue. He and the host sat together on a couch, wearing cozy sweaters, staring right into the camera. They took on the roles of the dad and uncle of the American viewer, counseling us on how to navigate Trump’s return to power.
“I asked your Uncle John to be here because you seem stressed lately,” Colbert said. “And I thought it would be good to hear from someone who seems stressed all the time.”
Both Colbert and Oliver assured the young kid (again, us) that it was okay to be stressed about things, and that, actually, it is good to talk about them.
“It’s still helpful just to talk about it every night,” Colbert said.
“Well, no, once a week is perfectly fine,” Oliver replied.
The pair go on to bicker. “Immediacy is the important part,” Colbert said. “Well, that can be overrated,” Oliver wisely retorted.
Gets the 60 Minutes Treatment
On Sunday, Oliver was profiled on 60 Minutes by Bill Whitaker. The segment began at the Fringe in Edinburgh, where Oliver reflected on his early days trying to make it in stand-up comedy. He and Whitaker sat in a small theater where the comic once performed to only four people, then two, then one woman, who then politely exited in the middle of his set.
Oliver remembered the sound technician asking whether he wanted to continue. “And I said, no I think we’re done here,” Oliver told Whitaker. “And also… do you mean this show? Or this career?”
It was that moment, Oliver said, that he decided to pivot to political comedy. “When I started off, I just wanted to make people laugh,” Oliver said. “Then, I wanted to make people laugh about things I cared about.”
The decision eventually led him to The Daily Show. Apart from Oliver’s musings on his life and comedy, the interview features fantastic archival footage from Oliver’s original Daily Show audition. He and Jon Stewart riff on then-Vice President Dick Cheney famously shooting a man while hunting. After the audition: “he was hired on the spot.”
Oh, and he also managed to host his own show. The February 23 episode of Last Week Tonight marked the second of the program’s latest season, which debuted earlier this month. Oliver began his monologue by recapping the latest exploits of the Trump administration, including the apparently senseless cuts to essential government workers.
Oliver highlighted, for example, rangers of the National Park Service, who are now warning that an absence of workers may lead to bad shit like, uh, forest fires. He called the move short-sighted. “You are bullying America’s best dorks,” Oliver said, seemingly to DOGE. “They’re indoor kids who love the outdoors.”
The night’s monologue centered on Facebook, specifically the platform’s recent decision to forgo fact-checking as part of wider changes to content moderation. Oliver gives a nuanced view, noting how impossible it is to moderate all possible hate speech on a platform. “Deciding where speech becomes harmful is like trying to figure out which of the horrifying nightmares on an Animorphs cover you wouldn’t run over with your car,” Oliver said.
But as Oliver outlines, just years ago, Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress to apologize for the platform’s negligence when it came to moderating hateful content, and promised to do better. What followed was nowhere near perfect, but now, the platform and its head have done a complete reversal, closely associating with the incumbent administration and its view of “free speech.” In other words, anything goes.
“Facebook sure seems to have set to become an absolute sewer of hatred and misinformation, which I know, sounds like a pretty good description of Facebook already,” Oliver said. “But we’re about to see what happens when they really stop trying.”
Oliver then reminded his audience that there are ways to adjust the settings on your Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) to make it harder for the company to profit off your data. He then directed his audience to a URL throwback from a 2020 show saga: www.johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com.
All hail the late night king.
Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.