Tuesday, 29 April 2014
If "The Daily Show” is MSNBC and "The
Colbert Report" is Fox, then "Last Week Tonight With John
Oliver," which debuted Sunday night on HBO is ... Al Jazeera America.
Ever since
the BBC debuted "That Was the Week That Was" in 1962 (Note
to Oliver: You didn't even consider singing the headlines?), riffing on current
events has fueled all sorts of comedy, from the opening monologues of "The
Tonight Show" to the satiric performance art of "The Colbert Report."
Indeed, 10 years ago, a Pew Center poll threw the news media into a tizzy by
revealing that more than 20% of young people said they got their news from
shows like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "Saturday
Night Live."
The format
has become so ubiquitous that these shows now must brand themselves in a way
similar to the newscasts they often lampoon. When HBO announced that Oliver, a "Daily
Show" regular who spent last summer subbing for Stewart, would be
hosting his own show on Sunday nights, all anyone wanted to know was what would
he do differently.
The short answer:
not all that much.
The long
answer (albeit based on a single episode and, therefore, very premature and
possibly meaningless but which, as Oliver himself might note, I’m going to give
anyway): Like Al Jazeera America, he will ostensibly go deeper, broader and
with niftier graphics.
He will also
drop a lot of F-bombs.Think London, mid-Blitz.
Because
Oliver is, of course, British and Cambridge-educated no less, which has always
given his take on the American sociopolitical scene the infuriating but
unavoidable charm of the expatriate -- happy to intelligently point out this
country's many flaws but never, you know, actually leaving.
Which isn’t
to put Oliver in the same category with, say, Piers Morgan. Heaven forbid. No, Oliver is
a quick and brilliant comedian whose gimlet eye is offset by an effortlessly
earnest tone and possibly the most adorable set of dimples on television today.
And he wisely references his native land’s own precarious history on a regular
basis, as he did Sunday night when entering a very long segment on the two
candidates up for election in India. "Let’s deal with Gandhi first,"
he said, adding, "and I realize that is not the first time that has been
said in a British accent."
The Indian
piece did, in fact, set the tone for "Last Week Tonight," which
followed a format similar to that of "The Daily Show" and "The
Colbert Report" if neither of those shows had
commercials. Oliver opened with fairly predictable bits on the dual
racism of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling before moving to the dual
canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II.
For most of
the 30 minutes, he sat at a desk, occasionally cutting to taped bits, including
"John McCain Tells the Same Joke Six Different Times" and a very
pointed interview with former National Security Agency chief Keith
Alexander, in which the two tried to rebrand the agency. (Alexander’s truly
hilarious idea for a new slogan: "The only government agency that really
listens.")
But with his
report on the elections in India, there was a sense of Oliver the comedian
rather than Oliver the "Daily Show" spinoff. Raging, as he often has,
that the American media are too obsessed with overcovering its own years-off
election to pay attention to important political shifts around the globe,
Oliver managed the fine double punch of stinging criticism and actual
information, which is the very reason so many people say they get their news
from comedy.
More
important, he did it in an arena that his even his colleagues too often ignore
— international politics.
Yes, he
followed it up with swings at lower hanging fruit, including a very funny
take-down of food labeling in general and Pop-Tarts in particular that included
one of the best uses of the F-word in recent memory. But it was with the Indian
coverage that he both shone (commenting on one candidate's use of holographic
appearances, he said, "That’s not just how you get elected. That’s how
religions get started") and set himself apart.
If Oliver
can do for international news what Stewart and Colbert have done on the
domestic scene, well, the already-crowded Sunday night DVR queue
just took on an extra half-hour.
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