Couldn’t find a thread for this outstanding HBO show with John Oliver doing The Daily Show thing with no commercials and able to say “fuck” as much as he wants. I love it so far. “The death penalty is like the McRib!”
MJ: Whose idea was it, if you recall, and whose penis did you use?
JO: Okay, those are two excellent questions. The first one, I’m not sure, and it might help to just [go with] collective responsibility. I don’t want to go with a sort of “I am Spartacus” moment but I think plausible deniability might be useful at that point. The second is the much more interesting question. And that is that, of course, you do need to cast a penis. And to do that you have to be presented with a selection of penii—I don’t know if that’s the collective term. And so then what you’re looking for—it’s amazing—when you look at then you start judging them for the purpose, because you want something that is funny but not sad. Because, you know, a sad penis does not help the comedy. No, it makes you think about the person the penis is attached to. So really, you just want a representative old man penis. And I’m not sure that sentence…has ever been said out loud before…We got to one that we liked, and the owner of that penis was generous enough to model it for us.
Yeah, I’m totally on board with this show. His slightly more serious and in-depth style is really working well with me. His bit on the death penalty is what won me over.
Last night’s episode was the funniest one in a long time, I thought. Ever since he’s been forced into the Trump vortex, I feel like the show has gotten less funny, even though it’s still covering important issues. It was nice to get away from Trump this week and the jokes all really landed for me.
Yesterday’s episode was pretty eye-opening. I admit I’ve never heard of these Crisis Pregnancy Centers before.
Also, it was pretty funny that he actually went up and looked up craigslist to follow through on Scott Pruit’s claim that he got the going market rate for his apartment. I didn’t hear anyone from the actual media do that on Friday when it was on the news. Scott Pruit’s lifelong friend from Oklahoma was on NPR saying he paid the market rate and the media was being so unfair to his good, honest friend. And there was no pushback from the interviewer.
The whole UK censorship of Parliament, I found very amusing in yesterday’s episode. I was picturing @Ginger_Yellow watching the episode, and not being able to see that whole segment because of the laws there.
Just to confirm, as broadcast here in the UK, the last segment was indeed 5 minutes of Gilbert Gottfried reading out 3-star Yelp reviews, with John Oliver occasionally interrupting to correctly chastise us for our stupid laws. The same kind of thing used to affect The Daily Show iirc.
