A New Season of Last Week Tonight Launches

Relieved to be free of Trump, John Oliver returns for a new season of comedy and critique

While keeping the entire world on its toes with his ever-unpredictable behaviour, Donald Trump was always assumed to be a comedy goldmine for hosts of late night comedy shows. But when John Oliver returns to television for his eponymous satirical news show’s eighth season, the U.K.-born comedian is relieved to mine laughs from, frankly, anything but the former president of the United States.

“To be honest, he was more of a comedy sewage plant than a goldmine,” says Oliver. “He was a guy who desperately wanted attention all the time.” While it may have appeared like Trump was the sole cause of many of the problems facing America, Oliver is keen to discuss how these issues are far more deep-rooted. “We know that simply removing him, institutional problems remain,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to almost not having the constant distraction of someone taking all the oxygen out of the room, and instead being able to focus on what I think we do best as a show, which is do stories that haven’t had a great deal of attention.”

For Oliver and his writing team, the past four years have been a constant struggle of how to maintain the integrity of the show they had been producing for a week in the wake of Trump’s actions, which would constantly upend their plans. “It was making a constant editorial decision about when to engage in his bulls*** and when not to,” he says. “A lot of the time it was best not to. We spend weeks on our main stories, so most of the time we could protect that story from him.”

Often, the Last Week Tonight team would make a decision to address the former president’s antics at the top of the show, before moving on to their planned lineup. “Occasionally, it felt like it was irresponsible not to put what we were planning on hold because what had happened,” says Oliver. “Like, pulling out of Northern Syria felt like something that felt important to tell people—that while every decision in that particular situation is difficult, he’s managed to make the worst possible one.”

In addition to allowing a man who wants to be talked about all the time dictate what everyone is talking about, on a more personal level, the dilemma for Oliver was how it affected the nature of his comedy. “How do you write comedy from absolute despair?” he muses. “The challenge going forward honestly feels much less like a challenge and more like an opportunity. I don’t think even the most optimistic person is assuming that Biden is going to have the scale of the solutions required to address the scale of the problems that we’re facing. I really look forward to being able to attack that instead.”

With a mission to entertain as well as educate, Oliver is still tickled pink by his team’s random discovery of rat erotica in the previous season, which provided both viewers and creator with a much-needed levity. In hindsight, the timing of the segment was fortuitous. “It was right at the start of the lockdown and there was part of me that, if I’m honest, was worried. Those moments of immense joyful stupidity that we engage in are sometimes my favourite things to do. It felt like, as the death count was climbing, was it going to be possible to do that kind of stuff anymore? How would you motivate it?” recalls Oliver. “But then you could justify it, as we’re all watching a lot of TV right now and you might have run out of things to watch. ‘Here, we can watch this thing together.’ It was an incredibly ridiculous thing to do, obviously. It just felt like such a gift. I will say, the most optimistic I’ve felt was, if we can track down a piece of 1980s rat erotica, surely we can get a vaccine.”

But just because Oliver felt hopeful about this bizarre treasure hunt and a possible cure for COVID, don’t call the TV host an optimist. “Any optimism I have is pretty couched, to be honest,” he says. The pandemic has, however, proved to have an upside… of sorts. “I guess the optimistic side of me would say that the virus has exposed certain systemic issues that has been very convenient for people to ignore for a long time,” he says. “The pessimist, or I would argue realist in me, thinks that, historically, society’s been pretty good at forgetting about those issues at the first available opportunity. If this has provided anything, other than a series of nightmares, it is holding a variety of issues right in front of people’s faces saying, ‘You can’t ignore this anymore.’ My worry is that when, as the virus dissipates, so will people’s attention. I think it’s going to be absolutely critical not to let that happen.”

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver airs Sundays on HBO Canada