‘The Interview’: John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage - The New York Times
The Interview
John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage
Nobody is doing late-night comedy quite like John Oliver. Oliver first became known to U.S. audiences as the senior British correspondent for “The Daily Show,” bringing a keen outsider’s eye and observational humor to American political dysfunction. But since 2014, he has been hosting his own show, “Last Week Tonight,” on HBO, winning 30 Emmys and the respect of a devoted audience for his very funny, meticulously researched deep dives into subjects that few would consider obvious comedic fodder.
Listen to the Conversation With John Oliver
The host of ‘Last Week Tonight’ talks about what he’s learned in the ten years of making the show and why he doesn’t consider himself a journalist.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
The show opens with a short riff on the news of the week, but the main event is that detailed spelunk into a single, often pretty nerdy topic. This season alone, Oliver has talked about state medical boards, corn and deep-sea mining and has made the case for universal free lunch in American schools. This is comedy married with moral outrage, and the show’s work has even led to real-world change (called the John Oliver effect).
In this tumultuous moment, when we’re all inundated with low-quality viral takes and misinformation posing as news, Oliver’s fact-based-for-laughs approach (“It’s only funny if it’s true,” he told me) has blurred the line between entertainment and journalism. All of which made me curious about how Oliver sees himself and his work 10 years in, during another bitterly fought election. We first spoke the day after the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
This is your first time in the New York Times building, right? It is my first time in this building, yes. I saw the red staircase, and that really is the main thing you think of when you walk through. It’s empty right now, though. We’re here quite early. So it’s less bustling than you would want a cartoon newsroom to be.
We are busy here normally. This is not an accusation that there’s basically nothing happening here at The New York Times. Just as it happens, if you were looking for people throwing balled up pieces of paper at each other and yelling about deadlines, that was not my experience.
Not yet. [Laughs.] You have said you’ve never wanted to cover a debate on your show. Yes.
Is that still true, even though President Biden had this unbelievable debate in June that caused the race to upend itself? And the most recent debate with Kamala Harris and Trump — I mean, they’ve been pretty consequential. Yes, I guess the Biden-Trump debate was pretty consequential because Biden isn’t the nominee anymore, so it’d be hard to push back on that. It’s very hard to say how consequential it is in real time, isn’t it? That’s the problem. And so I don’t know what we could add to the commentary on those debates that isn’t widely available everywhere else. It feels like to a certain extent, our show has moved into an area where we are very much slow cooking, and so there’s not much there for us. Also, those debates tend to be pretty uninspiring to me. As a form of entertainment, yeah, you could definitely be entertained by what happened. And I guess, however much better it felt to watch it, it is depressing that it’s this close. That’s my aftertaste from it. That it’s still this close when everyone can see what you can see in that debate. It’s hard not to find that somewhere between depressing, infuriating and outrageous.
“Last Week Tonight” has been on the air for 10 years, and that maps pretty neatly onto the Trump era. When you look back, what are the biggest ways that you think the show has changed? When we first began, we were doing our main story in one week. Then it became clear that was a crazy thing to do, because we would come up with the idea for a story, start writing; three days later, research would come in, which would wipe away everything that we’ve just written. So now you’re trying to write the show in two days, and that’s not a good idea. So the answer to how our show’s changed is that we write those main stories in six weeks, so we’re writing six stories at one time. That doesn’t really relate to Trump’s role in the last 10 years, but in terms of the development of our show, that is the most critical part of it.
It’s funny going back to the first season as a viewer. I found it to be remarkably similar. There’s a consistency there.
[John Oliver makes a face.]
I mean it as a compliment! I was literally wincing both inside and outside.
I saw you wincing. I don’t do many interviews about myself, so I am kind of emotionally in a defensive position, and I think, unfortunately, it’s translating to my face. [Laughs.]
It does seem as if you understood what you were up to quite early on. I think we learned some big lessons early on. It might have been in the first season, we did one story called “Prison,” and it was about 16 minutes, and that seemed like a long time at the time. And I think what we gradually learned was, it is crazy to try and talk about all the problems with prisons in 16 minutes, especially if two of those minutes are going to be a song with “Sesame Street” characters at the end. So, since then, we’ve basically come back and redone that story in 20 different ways. We’ve talked about prison labor, prison phone calls, prison recidivism, prison re-entry. There are so many different aspects to criminal justice. You can’t just slap “prisons” on it and say, “Oh, we’ve done it now.” I look back at that and do slightly wince.
You say you don’t do journalism. I do see you as a sort of an opinion columnist, though. Your show seems like an extended, very pointed, very deliberate crafting of an argument that you want people to understand. Does that resonate for you? Maybe. Certainly by the end of the story — like, the last few minutes of the story is opinion, right? Whenever we’re saying, “So, what can we do?” Everything up to that point is, it is what it is. We’ve so rigorously fact- and legal-checked everything up to that point. There’s no real opinion or wiggle room in that.
Opinion columnists also get fact-checked. I guess what I’m getting at though is, not that facts are mutable, but you can choose the kinds of arguments that you put forward. And so you’re crafting a narrative about certain issues. I guess why I’m instinctively pushing back a little bit on this — I’m not saying you said it like this, but: This is justopinion. Of course you’re right that how we feel about a story is pretty important. It’s probably present in terms of how we research it, but I really can’t stress enough how much work goes into making sure that we are totally right on the facts.
What are the stories that appeal to you the most? That’s a good question. I’m blanking. There was something that we did recently that had [the showrunner] Tim Carvell and I bouncing in our chairs a little bit.
Hospice care? Hawaii? R.F.K.? [Laughs.] Why are you going to hit me with hospice care? Hospice care was interesting. But I don’t know it was that. In general, it will be ones that feel really challenging but that we can bring something to — with directing this machine that we built, directing it at a complicated, perhaps superficially unappealing story and getting something palatable and fun out of it. Either that or I guess the really honest answer is something very, very dumb.
How much does your view of the topic change over the course of the story? Does the process confirm, strengthen your thinking, or does it challenge it? Oh, it can definitely shift it. One of the slightly dispiriting patterns you can find in researching these stories is some of the data that is most commonly passed around by activists can collapse. There is some real garbage data passed around where it feels like: Well, you’ve inflated this by 15 percent, and it really did not need to be. There’s a perfectly usable stat that’s slightly less than what you’re saying, which you can actually stand on rather than this one, which is just nothing. That can be pretty annoying when foundational stats collapse under relatively minor scrutiny. But things are generally, with some of these systemic problems, worse than you thought when you start looking at them. It’s relatively common that at some point in the story process, I’ll walk into Tim Carvell’s office, and we’ll look at each other after we’ve just learned a certain part of a story and say: “Burn it down. Burn everything down to the ground.”
You feel rage? Yeah, because things are so much worse than you thought they were, and you thought they were pretty bad. Then you have to work through that. Because nihilism is completely useless. The coward’s way out. So you work through that. And I have found, generally, that the light at the end of the tunnel — albeit that light might be smaller than you would like it to be ideally — is that there are activists making small, incremental progress on the ground, and that progress is really, really important.
How do you not give in to nihilism? Because you delve into these very disturbing, bleak, some would say almost dystopian topics. Classic comedy-show fodder. I mean, the thing that’s exciting about the show is that we have these resources in a time when expertise has been absolutely put through a sausage grinder. We are very, very fortunate to have researchers who have access to great experts in a field, whatever that field may be, from criminal justice to deep-sea mining. They will talk to us to make sure that we get something right. It is such a privilege to be able to find something interesting and then send a researcher away to talk to great experts in the field to get an answer. It’s having a machine for your own curiosity that is like the internet, but it brings back reliable results.
Do you know what else it’s like? What?
Journalism. Well, let me say, with the journalism tag, it’s a little tricky, right? I am not a journalist, right? I did not train as a journalist. We do have journalists working for our show. A lot of them.
I’m glad someone’s hiring journalists! Unfortunately, it might just be us. So, yes, I am not a journalist. But they are, for sure.
But don’t you think saying that you’re not a journalist or not acting as a journalist allows you to elide some of the accountability of journalism? Oh, that’s interesting. I really hope that we don’t elide that responsibility. I don’t think I’m a journalist because I really think I am not. I could send my researchers away for six weeks, and I think they’ll come back saying, “Yeah, you’re not.” But in terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact-checking because we want it to be right. Our stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. We recheck it to make sure it’s accurate or that it hasn’t changed. But we’re building this to make jokes. It’s just we want the foundations to be solid, or those jokes fall apart. Those jokes have no structural integrity if the facts underneath them are [expletive]. So that’s what’s important.
How do you define yourself? Do you see yourself as a liberal? Oh, I was going to say, “Rabid impostor.” That’s really how I define myself. But as a liberal — what does that mean? Probably, of course, in the general sense. I just don’t know what those labels in America mean. Like Trump called Harris a Marxist during the debate. I think at that point, the label “Marxism” means absolutely nothing. So I just don’t know. It’s in the ear of the listener, right? When you’ve got Kamala Harris being called, in anger, a Marxist, Marx, if he was watching that, I think would understandably be pretty frustrated. “No, this is not what I was talking about at all. From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs is not, well, there needs to be a robust private sector in health care.” I guess the short answer is, I’m liberal. That is such a broad term; I don’t think it really means much.
Are you trying to make the world a better place? Because some people would say, “I just want to make people laugh and entertain them.” You seem to have a much bigger aim here. The most important thing to me — and to lots of people at the show — is to do this in service of writing really funny, weird jokes about interesting things. So that is our outcome. It’s not necessarily to make the world a better place. I’m not sure that comedy can do that. To a certain extent, sometimes it’s fiddling while Rome burns.
It seems to have made you uncomfortable that I’ve accused you of trying to make the world a better place. [Laughs.] This might be a hangup of being British. British people took a real stab at, if not making the world a better place, making it a more British place, and it didn’t go too well. So, yeah, you don’t want me involved in that.
Your segments now go on YouTube after they air on Sundays. But this season for the first time, HBO is delaying putting the episodes on YouTube by four days. I assume this is to encourage people to subscribe to Max, the streaming service? I assume that too, yes.
I take it that that’s frustrating to you. Yeah, it’s massively frustrating to me. I was not happy with it at all.
Are you worried about the method of distribution? I mean, we know that cable TV is changing a lot. YouTube is exponentially growing, and it’s a place where a lot of different types of people come to get their content. What I love about having the show on YouTube is that we can reach beyond HBO subscribers. That feels really important to me. I really, really appreciate the fact that they do that. I would rather they did it straight after the show the way we’ve always done it, but I’m very grateful that they are willing to still do it at all.
Do you see your show in the same format 10 years from now? I mean, I hope so, if I’m still alive.
You look healthy. I’m going to have to have that statement sent through this building’s fact-checkers, and I don’t think either of us are going to like the answer that comes back. “You look healthy”? You have to add some qualifying language to that: “for a 47-year-old man with two children who’s been through a pandemic recently and a stressful job,” albeit that stressful job isn’t that stressful by general standards.
“Last Week Tonight” was renewed for another three seasons last year. What would make you feel done with the show? That’s a good question. I don’t know. I worked with Jon Stewart for a long time. I saw him get exhausted. So I know what that looks like. I saw him reckoning with, “I’ve done this in every possible way that I can do it.” And he was right about that. Like, he can’t really do it any better. I’ve not hit that point yet. I still absolutely love making the show. I get excited, like, to your point, of bouncing up and down in the chairs when we feel like we’re onto something with a story, or we’ve worked out something really dumb to do. It’s so fun. I can’t believe that we get to ram stories down people’s throats that they might not naturally want to hear and that they will watch it, and I can’t believe that we get to play with HBO’s resources and do dumb things on fiscally irresponsible scales. So I guess my answer is that point might come. I don’t feel like I’m there yet.
Do you now remember the episode that had you bouncing in your chair? Yes. Before that: We spent a long time talking about the label of journalism, and I didn’t want you to feel like I was dodging it there. I guess just to be completely clear: We really don’t elide the responsibility of that term. And I guess the thing that I wanted to get to the bottom of — because this comes up quite a lot, and this kind of conversation feels like it might be a good time to get to the bottom of it — is, I was wondering why it’s so interesting to you? How would you feel if I said yes, that I am a journalist? Because my sense is you’d feel, “No, you’re not.” Rightly.
I think the reason it comes up a lot is because there is a sense that you are a news source, but you don’t have the constraints that journalists have, right? You can, for example, take a topic that is very complicated and difficult and put in a lot of jokes to make it arch or funny, to sort of move the audience in a particular direction. And so I think there is this sort of dissonance that happens when journalists like myself are engaging with this. We’re curious about how you view yourself. I mean, it’s not a knock! It’s more just trying to understand how you view yourself and your show and where it sits in the ecosystem. That’s it. And I guess that is where much of the show would be, to that first comparison you made, it would be more editorial, right? When I recoiled at being described as an op-ed, that was not wanting the worst version of that to be applied to this show.
OK. Do you remember which episode it was that got you bouncing in your chair? I do. And it was an episode recently because I remember the literal bounce. We were working on an episode about the West Bank, and I think what I was so excited about was the challenges that were ahead of us and the material that we were gathering and the opportunity that we had. And it really felt to me, like, Oh, this is the point of having a show where you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. This is kind of using that incredible opportunity to do something hard.
It raises this question for me about something you said: that you ultimately see the show and the stories you focus on as a vehicle to write jokes. And I can see that logic when you’re doing a piece about corn or U.F.O.s. And you don’t see the logic applying to something that’s more complicated?
You don’t do a half an hour about one of the most contentious issues in the world because it’s comedy gold. Do you? I guess comedy is the way I handle the world. So in the darkest moments of my life, I still find myself compelled to try and make jokes either to take the weight off some of what’s happening or sometimes to feel what’s happening a bit more. I find people employing comedy at moments of tragedy incredibly meaningful. I know some might find it glib or offensive. To me, it is the absolute opposite of that when done well. I still think one of the best moments in late-night comedy over the last decade was Jimmy Kimmel talking about his son Billy’s heart surgery. It was incredibly generous to be so emotionally honest and raw. It was incredibly brave to be that honest, knowing that people were going to ask him how his son was every day for the rest of his life after that. And this is the most important thing to me: It was really funny. And the fact that he was telling jokes while choking through tears was the thing that really meant something to me. It was more sincere because he was communicating through jokes.
Explain that to me. I love comedy so much. So, I do not see a distinction between how could you joke about this? For me, it’s more how could you not? How could you not tell jokes about a situation that is absolutely absurd? Darkly absurd, but absurd. And that would apply to the West Bank, too.
Do you think it also gives people access to uncomfortable emotions? Probably. Look, I’m British, right? So my ability to deal with my emotions has been limited at best. The very fact that I’m telling you, Yeah, I find it better to laugh at things rather than, you know, feel them sincerely as a human being says something. What I found so meaningful about Jimmy’s thing was — our first child’s pregnancy was really difficult. And I just couldn’t talk about it in general. I certainly could not do anything as generous as deciding to talk about it publicly so that the people who would also experience situations like that could feel that their experiences were being reflected back at them. I didn’t have the emotional ability or even the comedic ability to do that.
Has being a parent exacerbated that “burn it down” feeling that you mentioned about some of the ways the world is messed up? Or the opposite? I remember after the Brexit vote happened, looking at my baby son and thinking, Oh, this is sad. Your horizons have slightly contracted because, you know, he would have been able to have a British passport, which would have been an E.U. passport, meaning that he could live or work anywhere in the E.U., which for young people in Britain was a massively consequential thing to have access to. And so I will say there was a selfish side of me thinking, Oh, your world got smaller. But in general, my feeling of let’s burn it down when we’re at a point of researching a story where things seem utterly hopeless, that’s probably pretty consistent. I don’t think the kids have really changed my disgust with the political process and my hope for better.
Are you going to talk about that with your kids at the dinner table? Are you going to be that dad? Oh, God. I mean, that’s a really fair use of “that dad.”
I mean that actually in the best possible way. Am I gonna say to them, “Things are unfair”?
Just sit and talk about the state of the world and have them be engaged in it. Yeah. I’m probably going to be that dad.
My husband’s like that with our daughter, and she loves it some days and hates it others. Of course. I think that feels like an utterly human response. There’s a time and a place for this, Dad. Can we please talk about something else now?
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Director of photography (video): Leslye Davis"
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