YMMV / Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

• Awesome Music:
  • John certainly considers the 1994 Radio Shack song to be this:
    John: If they had left that on air, they’d be the most powerful company on Earth today!
  • He also has this to say about Kenny G's "Going Home":
    John: …smoother than a mink coat in a tub of lube, like liquid velvet being poured into your ears.
  • "One Hundred Miles Across", an earnest plead to Congress to help Puerto Rico and its four million American citizens with its debt crisis, written and performed by Lin-Manuel Miranda
  • "Don't Use Our Song", a Protest Song against politicians using pop songs on the campaign trail without a license, often with the song's message being completely at odds with their political views. Not only is it catchy as hell, but it has a very impressive All-Star Cast, including Michael Bolton, Sheryl Crow, Josh Groban, Cyndi Lauper, John Cougar Mellencamp, Dan Reynolds, Usher, Nancy and Ann Wilson, and a cat walking on a keyboard, almost all of whom have had politicians steal their music in the past.
  • North Korean Polka (aka "Please Don't Nuke Us, North Korea"), by "Weird Al" Yankovic.
  • "Eat Shit, Bob", an extravagant musical number about outlandish, blatantly false claims about Bob Murray in response to all the Frivolous Lawsuits he slaps on his critics, and his general unpleasant character.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In "Trump and Syria", John mentions that over 100 ISIS prisoners had escaped captivity and no-one knows where they went … before introducing them as guests for that episode. The curtain opens, there are a few bits of junk and holes in the ground, followed by a Cluster F-Bomb and John regretting giving them shovels. The segment then carries on and it's never brought up again.
• Broken Base:
  • Based on YouTube likes and comments, his video on Online Harassment seems to be split into five major camps: those who completely agree, those who agree with his aim but felt that he shouldn't have cited Anita Sarkeesian (and Brianna Wu, to a lesser extent) as examples due to the polarization surrounding them, those who think John shouldn't have gendered the issue, those who agree with John's arguments but think he should have at least touched on improvements that have been made, and others that believe that the women named deserve all the harassment they get.
  • While his voting video (in which he argues that laws that require people to have IDs before voting are discriminatory, especially because of how hard IDs are to get) is just as highly rated as his usual videos, the top comments of the video have very different reactions. Some agree with his argument that it's indirect discrimination and with his position that it does nothing to stop voter fraud. Some say 'Wait, seriously? Americans don't all have IDs? REALLY!?', or somebody saying that the real problem isn't that IDs are required to vote, which is the case in nearly every other developed nation, but how nightmarishly difficult to get they are. Still others believe that not all people without IDs were victims of said difficulty.
  • The video about Brexit (whether the United Kingdom should leave The European Union), especially the sarcastic song "Fuck You European Union", about how even though the EU may annoy the UK, the UK still needed the EU. Many refused to accept that it was a joke, both on the EU side, who viciously insulted the show and the UK itself back, and people living in the UK who took the "fuck you"s at face value and crudely insulted the EU.
  • His segment on third-party candidates, where he discusses and criticizes the two leading third-party presidential candidates for the 2016 American election, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. Some felt John gave them both a fair shake and extra publicity. They applauded him for taking the time not only to bring attention to often-ignored candidates, but to explore their ideas for America and expose their potential major drawbacks. Others thought he exaggerated and even misrepresented various statements by the two, especially Jill Stein. Not helped by Stein's response in a town hall with The Young Turks, where she accused John of being a shill for Hillary Rodham Clinton instead of defending the policies John criticized. And still others believe, particularly following Donald Trump's eventual victory, that he didn't go far enough in explaining Johnson and Stein's drawbacks, and that he should have explicitly endorsed Clinton, as more people than usual ended up voting third party — Johnson in particular ended up receiving nearly 4.5 million votes, becoming the third-party candidate that most votes received since Ross Perot's third-party runs in 1992 and 1996 — probably playing a role in costing Clinton the presidency. (Although the notion this buys into, the idea of a "spoiler candidate," is also a bit of a broken base among political experts. Some argue this is a real concern, while others believe those who vote third party in elections would likely not vote if their choice wasn't on the ballot.)
  • His video on school segregation had some people accusing him of falling victim to political correctness. The White boy who wore Blackface to portray Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is also a major point of contention between those who think his innocence makes it no big deal and those who consider his intentions irrelevant.
  • His video on the 2017 French elections. As with the American ones, accusations of exaggerating and/or misrepresenting some candidates flew around, while others think he was quite accurate. Opinion varies, mostly depending on one's political leanings, which can make the ensuing argument fairly heated.
  • His ending segment on Wendy Williams and subsequently appearing on her show. Fans of Wendy were delighted that he was expanding his horizons to another goofball talk show host. However, those who disliked Wendy (related to her controversial mocking statements on celebrities and gay men) were upset that John was giving air time to who they thought was a trashy tabloid star.
  • John's support for single payer health care. While some praised his support for single payer system owing to its success in countries like the UK and Canada, others feel that he ignores how he omitted other countries like Germany and The Netherlands that achieved universal coverage without using single payer system.
  • John's critiques of 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden, such as his response to Biden's comments about police brutality on Black people in the episode about police and criticising the Democratic National Convention for being unappealing for progressives. Some appreciate that he focused on coronavirus-related news and avoided a clearly biased pro-Democrat narrative like the one he had during the 2016 election while still indirectly helping Biden by criticizing Trump. Others however are frustrated that John continued to take shots at Biden well into the general election, possibly undermining faith in Biden. John did eventually endorse Biden in the second-to-last episode before the 2020 election (about asylum, and more specifically about asylum under the Trump administration), and in the end, it didn't seem to affect Biden, since he soundly won against Trump.
  • The Darker and Edgier tone of Seasons 7 and 8 has been contentious. While some appreciate John for treating contemporary topics with the appropriate solemnity, others found this approach to be too depressing during an already-miserable pandemic. The show has never shied away from serious news, but the pandemic restrictions deprived it of both the studio audience and the elaborate stunts/pranks that provided much-needed levity to perk up the viewers, to the point some people questioned if the show counted as a comedy program anymore.
• Catharsis Factor: Can be applied any time John Oliver blows something up, especially a year everyone mostly agrees is disappointing or downright terrible. Probably the biggest explosion to date happened in 2020.
• Crack Pairing: In one episode, after declaring that America's only "national treasures" are Dolly Parton, Pedro Pascal and Cocaine Bear, John adds, "And I'll say what we're all thinking — threesome, when?"
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • John offending the royal families of the Netherlands, Kuwait, and Denmark, which have laws against insulting royalty. In Oliver's home country, lèse majesté is the national sport.
  • In the segment about Infrastructure, John talks about building the dams with brains, brawn, and the bodies of the Irish.
    John: Of course we did! They're good workers, and their corpses make a solid foundation material. That's an architectural fact.
  • The Doomsday video. The video itself is mostly tame, until you get to humanity's blooper reel …
  • John's take on the segment regarding the aftermath of the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, where one of the news reporters points out the procedure of moving the Confederate flag flown in front of the state's capitol.
    John: Yeah, it needs a two-thirds vote. They were originally going to make it three-fifths, but even they thought it might be a bit on the nose.
  • In the Season 4 premiere, John reveals that he's become so traumatized by all the things Trump did in his first few weeks as president that after one particular news alert, he actually said out loud, "Oh, thank God, it's just that Mary Tyler Moore is dead."
  • The satirical Warren G. Harding movie trailer features Anna Kendrick, as Harding's mistress, having sex with the life-size wax figure of Harding.
  • His list of things Roy Moore apparently did includes "kicking a panda in the balls" and "once calling Tom Hanks the N-word".
  • Santa Claus' cameo, where he reveals just what Santa does whenever it's not Christmas. The Reveal is followed by various Unusual Euphemisms and way Too Much Information, and the climax of the joke reveals that thanks to the elves teaching him yoga, he's learned to give himself blowjobs.
  • Since the UK prohibits the use of parliamentary footage in comedy, the Brexit update segment, which uses such footage, had to be replaced for the show's UK broadcast. As an alternative, Gilbert Gottfried reads from portions of the provisional Brexit agreement in his trademark shrill voice, followed by an excerpt of Bigfoot erotica. John threatens the UK with more Bigfoot erotica if Brexit isn't stopped (or at least the law about parliamentary footage).
    Gilbert: [A]nd between his legs swung what I can only describe as a glistening, furry forest log. Picture a mink biting an apple. My mouth instinctively dropped open in surprise, and if I'm honest, anticipation. This is going to be the Loch Ness Monster all over again!
  • The entire "Eat Shit Bob" musical number at the end of the episode on SLAPP lawsuits is full of outrageous, false, vulgar claims about Bob Murray. Claims that, as John and rest of the singers put, are way too weird to be considered slander and are all jokes which any reasonable person would not take as factual and any reasonable judge would dismiss a lawsuit against.
  • John's incredibly dark comment on Senator John Kennedy's (self-admittedly poorly sung) COVID-19 vaccine endorsement:
    John: Okay, I don't love that, and not just because it's the worst thing to come out of a Kennedy's mouth since the back of a Kennedy's head.
  • The September 12, 2021 show was the first with a live audience since the pandemic began 18 months earlier. How did John open the show? By assuring the viewers that there was a fully-vaccinated audience, and adding "one of whom, and I’m not saying who, has a breakthrough case. Not of Covid, though. Relax. Of smallpox. So it’s completely fine."
  • The credit reports video has some proudly off-color jokes about people undergoing mistaken identity in their credit reports.
    • One man was denied an apartment because he shared a name with three sex offenders. John points out that no man could plausibly pull off being three sex offenders at once … except Neil Patrick Harris. Not because he thinks he would, John insists, but because the man just has that much range, he could be a literal "triple threat."
    • John decides to give the three big credit companies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — an idea of what it's like to have your identity confused with someone horrible who shares a similar name. He made three websites for fictional companies with similar names who specialize in doing over-the-top horrific acts — Equifacks (who offer shelter animals to customers to lick peanut butter off their genitals, then immediately return them to the shelter), Experianne (who whisper passages of Mein Kampf into the ears of babies), and TramsOnion (who sell steaks made from dead orcas from SeaWorld). To make matters worse, the websites make it clear these hypothetical business practices are strictly For the Evulz (Equifacks also blinds animals with cosmetics, despite not selling cosmetics), and each page decries their equivalent credit scoring company as evil.
  • Some of the lines in LWT's Thomas & Friends parody that highlights all of the problems with freight trains:
    Narrator: So they both just sat there, and watched the children's hospital burn.
    (Henry's accident causes a town to be destroyed) Narrator: Sir Toppemhat had blood on his hands. But he didn't care, it wasn't his blood. And he could just wipe it off with all his new money.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat, who trended worldwide as an alternate cigarette mascot.
  • C-SPAN host Steve Scully, whose incredible poker face while listening to horrific rhetoric from both sides of the political aisle has earned him several segments as "the most patient man on television."
  • The Catheter Cowboy (Thomas Kopache), who John uses to teach Donald Trump policy issues, has become quite popular.
  • Lord Buckethead, an alien Evil Overlord presented as a joke candidate in the UK's 2017 snap election, with whom Theresa May was subsequently forced to share the stage while her party lost a net thirteen parliamentary seats (enough to lose its slim majority, the opposite of what it was intended to do), and was also alone in his willingness to call out her constant evasions about what exactly her plans for Brexit are. The show actually flew him to America to request he be made the official Brexit negotiator.
  • Staff writer Jill Twiss already had her fans for playing Janice from Accounting, and it skyrocketed with her being the one who actually wrote A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The common consensus was that while his first episode was good, it was also uneven and a lot like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report. His second episode, where he covered capital punishment, and gave the audience a video of tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos as a reward for getting through it, is what got him all the positive attention.
  • When the show started shooting without a live audience, just John in a white void, some thought that's when the show got really good, as the pacing wasn't slowed down by audience laughter, and 2020 just happened to be a year when three major events took place: George Floyd's murder, the COVID pandemic, and the 2020 U.S. elections, so he was able to give the subjects the seriousness they needed.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Considering his episodes are all about serious topics that will likely be exacerbated later on, it's not surprising that there will be many.
  • During his segment on the death penalty, John jokes that while the death penalty isn't a good deterrent to violent crime, it is a great deterrent to fishing without a license. Come his segment on mandatory minimums, where he talks about what a horrible, useless deterrent it is to give ridiculously high sentences for minor crimes.
  • In his segment on Migrants and Refugees, he talked about how Europeans should be worried about the "new face of Europe," showing first a pair of Muslim women, then two French-looking skeletons, revealing that he was actually referring to declining birth rates. Then the terrorist attacks in Paris occurred, and various far-right parties in Europe use the same rhetoric seriously.
  • The recurring "And Now, This" segments pointing out the "sexual tension" on CBS This Morning count as this, after anchor Charlie Rose was fired due to numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.
  • Another "How Is This Still a Thing?" suggests various other Italian people who could be used to replace Columbus Day, including chef Mario Batali. Then he was hit with several sexual harassment accusations.
  • In his segment on former Alabama governor Robert Bentley's sex scandal, Oliver pointed out that Roy Moore would preside over Bentley's trial, but only cited his infamy from refusing to give up a statue of the Ten Commandments (to show how everyone involved in prosecuting Bentley were themselves prosecuted). Moore himself would later be accused of being a sex criminal, being accused of five counts of sexual assault, including that of a minor.
  • During his cameo in the 2016 Puerto Rico story, Lin-Manuel Miranda likened the island's debt crisis to an impending hurricane. The following year, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria.
  • In the episode on Workplace Sexual Harassment, John discussed Anita Hill and her infamously poor treatment by the Senate Judiciary Committee after she accused Supreme Court Justice (then nominee) Clarence Thomas of harassment. John even interviewed Hill herself, who said that, although there is still a long way to go, she felt things had improved somewhat since that incident. Not two months later, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her while the two were in high school and received treatment which was widely considered even worse than what Professor Hill had faced. John lampshaded this when discussing the Kavanaugh hearings themselves, noting that the piece became relevant in the worst History Repeats way possible.
  • John's first episode on coronavirus becomes this in hindsight after the increased spread of the virus forced John to do his show without his audience and later at his home. Especially when one considers that someone who worked at the studio where the show is taped actually tested positive for the disease, forcing the show to evacuate the studio a little earlier than other late night shows did, and to tape the first show without audience from an undisclosed location before moving on a more permanent basis to John's home.
  • In the last episode of 2016, as John discussed Donald Trump's shocking win in the 2016 president election, he says "It turns out hindsight, much like the year we're all now desperately looking forward to, is 2020." As a final touch, John begins to list all the terrible things that happened in 2016 and was legitimately angry for giving humanity such an awful year from start to finish. As it turns out, 2020 would be an even more painful year. He even lampshades it saying that while 2016 was horrible in its own right, 2020 was enough for him to say "holy shit," and give him enough reasons to blow the year up like 2016 in his final episode for season 7.
    John: Just four years ago, I blew up the year 2016. As if that was a very bad year. And it was. It was terrible. But this year, Holy shit!
  • After all the show's montages portraying Steve Scully as "the most patient man on television," Scully apparently did eventually lost his patience in 2020; he was suspended indefinitely from C-SPAN after admitting to misleading about his Twitter account being hacked when confronted about an exchange he had with Anthony Scaramucci, in which he asked him if he should talk back to Trump at the (ultimately canceled) debate Scully was set to host.
  • After Trump withdrew U.S. troops from the Turkey–Syria border in October 2019, leaving the U.S.-allied Kurds in the zone exposed to attacks from the Turkish military, John denounced Trump's impetuous decision, saying "Imagine what he might do in a crisis not of his own making. That is one of the terrifying things about the prospect of a second term or, indeed, the remaining year of this first one." In 2020, the COVID-19 Pandemic took hold of the US, and Trump's administration handled it so poorly that over 400,000 Americans died by the time his tenure ended before he lost the 2020 presidential election.
  • In his second segment on Opioids in 2019, John enlists the help of Omar Little to read aloud the disposition of Richard Sackler, the leader of the big pharmaceutical company that deveolped OxyContin, a drug that was one of many that was responsible for the opioid epidemic of deaths by drug overdoses in America. Two years later, his actor Michael K. Williams died of a drug overdose himself.
  • John's episode about "Third Parties" in 2016 featured a then-little-known third party candidate for that year's U.S. presidential election: Joe Exotic. Yes, the same Joe Exotic who was the subject of Tiger King.
    • Remember when John jokingly endorsed Joe Exotic in the episode? ("Make America Exotic Again!") Yeah, it went directly into Joe's head. The documentary even shows clips of the show, pointing out how John unwittingly fed Joe's delusions by giving him airtime.
    • In particular, John's joke of Joe being the kind of guy you'd get drunk enough to try meth with is eerily close to what was going on at his zoo, where Joe convinced straight men into sexual relationships with him by keeping them high on meth 24/7.
    • In an interview with Seth Meyers, John stated that, when they got in contact with him, he kept ranting about a woman named Carole. Anybody with a passing knowledge of the show will know that Joe was referring to Carole Baskin, the big-cat activist with whom Joe had a feud with which was heavily featured on the show, which included him accusing her of having killed her husband (which led to her being harrassed after the show's release) and ultimately led to Joe being convicted of attempting to hire a hitman to kill her.
      John: And it would've been great if none of us ever knew why.
  • Deliberately invoked again, with John's description of Russia as "a country that will continue to be funny until it suddenly isn't." Whether, and when, the other shoe has dropped on this joke may depend on who you ask. Though most would point to their invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
  • The episode on May 2, 2021, about the COVID-19 vaccine, features a gag about Bill Gates' wife Melinda making a bizarre quasi-Suspiciously Specific Denial about the conspiracy theory that he's using the COVID-19 vaccines to plant microchips in people (saying that the technology for such a thing hasn't been developed yet). The very next day, they announced they were divorcing, to which the show's Twitter account even wondered if they were responsible.
  • In the 2017 season finale, after showing a clip of Fox and Friends in which its hosts declare that they've got the best audience, John retorted that the show that actually has the best audience is The Ellen DeGeneres Show, showing a clip of Ellen's audience getting incredibly excited as Ellen entered. This got awkward when, in 2020, it was revealed that Ellen DeGeneres was mistreating workers on her show, a revelation that might've factored in DeGeneres' decision to end the show in 2022.
  • Late in 2022, John covered Brazil's presidential elections with a focus on the controversies surrounding then-President Jair Bolsonaro. He noted the man's similarities to Donald Trump and the possibility of an uprising in the style of the January 6 riots should Bolsonaro lose (which eventually came to pass). On January 8, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters attacked the Brazilian capital in an attempted coup.
  • The episode about artificial intelligence in 2023 gained stronger subtext later that year as both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA went on strike to protest the aggressive push to use AI in entertainment among other issues. Thankfully, this show pledged to stay in hiatus during the duration of the strike out of solidarity to the show's writing staff.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • In Edward Snowden's interview, he's shown video clips of people on the street being asked who he is, with most having little idea or confusing him with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, raising the distinct fear that Snowden had been forgotten and his exile amounting to nothing. Five months after the interview, Snowden started a Twitter account that drastically increased his public outreach to over 2 million followers, and WIRED would proclaim him "the most powerful person on Twitter."
  • In his segment on mandatory minimums, John discussed the extremely unfair sentence that Weldon Angelos received for dealing drugs. In June 2016, Angelos was finally released from jail after thirteen years in prison.
  • His segment on WWE, which goes into great detail about how the company's virtual monopoly on the American professional wrestling industry enables their upper-level management to get away with treating their employees horribly, was released just a few months before WWE's upstart rival All Elite Wrestling really broke into the mainstream. Not only is AEW now generally credited with finally ending WWE's monopoly, the company has also gotten considerable attention for its efforts to improve the treatment of wrestlers (most famously when their CEO gave a full-time job to the widow of the late Brodie Lee to ensure that his family would be taken care of after his death). In fact: numerous wrestlers featured in that segment (including Jake Roberts and CM Punk) have since gone on to work for AEW, and are reportedly quite happy there.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: While most segments about other countries' elections often aren't very well-received in said country (for obvious reasons), the one about the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, which focused on controversial candidate (and later president) Jair Bolsonaro, whom John (among others) called the Brazilian Trump, really takes the cake. Like Trump, Bolsonaro has many vocal supporters who are notorious on the Internet for being out for blood should you criticize him. As such, the YouTube video is a rare episode (if not the only one) that has more dislikes than likes, and has inflammatory comments in both Portuguese and English lambasting John for criticizing Bolsonaro (although further into Bolsonaro's term more comments critical of Bolsonaro appeared).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • John founded Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, a church that exists solely for tax breaks. Some months after the segment aired, it was revealed that some people in Iceland had revived the Sumerian religion mainly for tax exemptions.
  • One of the people hit by the salmon cannon in the Season 1 finale is J. J. Abrams on the set of The Force Awakens, as he's having a hard time getting R2-D2 to listen to his direction. This is a pretty good explanation for why R2 spends the whole film in a Heroic BSoD until the end. There's also the fact that after getting hit with the salmon, Abrams puts a Screw This, I'm Outta Here and leaves. Abrams was later announced to return to the Star Wars franchise to direct The Rise of Skywalker.
  • The segment on public defenders had John saying he wasn't interested in spending time with children. Soon as the season ended, he became a father.
  • In his segment about Donald Trump's wall, he says "Things don't get bigger just because you're angry — if that were true, Alec Baldwin would be a hundred feet tall by now." Alec Baldwin would later go on to portray Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live.
  • While it is also Harsher in Hindsight, the segment on 2016 third-party candidates highlighted "Joe Exotic", who John then showed mocking support. As Tiger King showed, a quote in Exotic's campaign video ("I am broke as shit, I have a judgement against me from some bitch down here in Florida") is basically Foreshadowing what would get him imprisoned — he tried to hire a hitman to kill Carole Baskin, the owner of a big cat shelter who Exotic would have to pay $1 million in damages following a lawsuit — and John's assessment itself is featured, implied to have helped make Joe's delusional mind even worse.
    Last Week Tonight: CORRECTION: In our show on October 16, 2016, we raised the possibility that Joe Exotic might be "the perfect candidate" for the presidency. In light of subsequent events, we must regretfully concede that he was, in fact, the second-least-perfect presidential candidate that year.
  • Alex Jones complained about being featured on the show, adding that "your ratings are in the toilet". Not only is season 4 the most watched (only three episodes with fewer than a million viewers), but the episode about Jones and his InfoWars site gave Last Week Tonight its highest audience ever!
  • In the episode about Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, John noted that Kushner was rarely heard speaking in public, which he exploited by putting an old clip of him speaking, only to replace his voice with Gilbert Gottfried. Just a few weeks later, Kushner gave a press conference, giving the public the opportunity of hearing him speak, and if Internet reactions are to be believed, Gottfried wasn't too far off the mark.
  • After repeatedly joking about his resemblance to Zazu from The Lion King, Oliver voiced Zazu in the 2019 remake.
  • In "Psychics" John jokes about the situation by telling the audience about how "it's like learning that the second richest person in the world is this GameStop employee named Greg." Cue to the early 2021, and we see an sudden exponential increase in GameStop stock and basically made everyone who deposited their money gain even more in return.
  • Perhaps with a bit of Heartwarming mixed in, a year after John pegged hatred of robocalls as the one thing that still unites all Americans, both sides of the House indeed teamed up to pass a bill against them.
  • In 2018, John covered guardianship laws, detailing how guardians, such as a woman named April Parks, have elderly people declared mentally unfit, become their legal guardian and steal all off their money. In 2020, I Care a Lot was released, detailing a woman who is running the exact kind of scam.
  • In the episode about Vladimir Putin, John notes how Donald Trump (the episode being released roughly a month after Trump was sworn in as U.S. President) was nicer to Putin than to Meryl Streep (referencing Trump feuding with Streep on social media), "who I'm pretty sure is not an infamous autocrat, although you know what, now that I say it, if she tried it, she'd nail it, the woman is a tour de force!" Roughly five years later, John's guess was put to test when Streep played a boorish, narcissistic U.S. President, whom many viewers saw as a lot like Trump himself, in Don't Look Up.
  • John threw Biting-the-Hand Humor at the expense of HBO Max shortly after its launch, including complaining about why it's so purple. A few years later, the service would rebrand as just Max, with its color scheme overhauled to be blue instead of purple, as if they took his criticism to heart.
  • For his video on Water in 2022, John Oliver mocked the Governor of Utah for asking people to pray for rain, even dedicating his closing segment for the episode to it. Cue the following winter breaking snowpack records for the state. The state of California also broke records that winter.
• Ho Yay: In the segment on mobile homes, John plays a real commercial in which a woman buys a mobile home and shows it off to another woman. He later plays a parody of that commercial. The cheesy Sexophone soundtrack in both commercials doesn't help matters. It gets more explicit in the blooper reel for the parody commercial shown during the credits of the episode, in which one of the women reacts to the other baking a peccan pie by swatting it to the floor, only to get her hand covered in the pie's filling. The other woman in turn responds by licking the filling from her hand.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Janice from Accounting doesn't give a fuck. In reference to a character that first showed up early on in the show during a segment on for-profit colleges, and then returned later and was depicted stealing office food, several small islands in the East China Sea, and winning a pot for fantasy sports.
  • Everything surrounding Lord Buckethead, a joke candidate for the Prime Minister of the UK, especially after he openly insulted the rest of the candidates for not having any idea of what to do when they went into the negotiations surrounding Brexit.
  • Things John Oliver looks like — this started with seemingly genuine insults to John's appearance in online comments sections, but he's embraced it and he (and fans) enjoy coming up with increasingly elaborate, self-deprecating descriptions. Examples include, but are by no means limited to, "a nearsighted parrot", "sad Harry Potter", "a wooden marionette who wished on a star to be a real boy", and, most popularly, "a rat-faced bastard".
  • After the SLAPP Suits episode, which ends with an elaborate Broadway-style musical number filled with blatantly outlandish false claims about Murray, it became popular among fans to come up with their own absurd claims about Murray.
  • John's thirst for Adam Driver.
  • In June 2023, in protest of Reddit's new policies against third party APIs, top subreddits such as r/pics, r/gifs, and r/awww began spamming posts of John and the show. This would soon trickle down to other subreddits as well. John himself has voiced his approval of this.
• Memetic Troll: John's tendency to do extremely memorable stuff merely to annoy people he doesn't like hasn't gone unnoticed.
  • Jeff the diseased lung in a cowboy hat. Created to discredit cigarette companies, LWT set up billboards of him in Uruguay, sent shirts of him to Togo, suggested people to tag pictures of Jeff with "#JeffWeCan" and to post images of him in social media, so he'd be among the top results whenever someone searched "Marlboro" in Google Images. He even offered Philip Morris International full rights to use the character. Jeff became a major Ensemble Dark Horse and thus the message was spread across the world.
  • The whole Marlon Bundo affair. After hearing that Mike Pence's family was writing a kids' book about their pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo, John's team coincidentally also wrote a book about him, but with a surprise twist: their Marlon falls in love with another male rabbit. While the book is truly meant to be for children, John openly admits that it exists mostly to annoy the notoriously anti-LGBT Pence, released it a day before Pence's book was released, and all money they get from it goes directly to LGBT support groups. LWT's book crushed Pence's book in sales and reviews, and thus Pence now has the reputation of owning America's most famous gay rabbit. If reports are to be believed, Mike's daughter Charlotte, who wrote the original book, doesn't mind it at all.
  • In his segment on coal, John Oliver completely twists coal baron Bob Murray's story of the founding of his company (a squirrel told him to) into a man in a squirrel costume whose catchphrase is "Eat shit, Bob", in response to his part in the deaths of workers. Bob sued him, which only heightened the exposure of the squirrel and the entire segment, and the case didn't even go to court! After the case was finally dropped, LWT celebrated with an entire Broadway-style musical number at the end of their episode on SLAPP suits.
  • To combat the FCC's lack of action against robocalls, John records his own robocall and sets it up to call the heads of the FCC every 90 minutes.
• Misaimed Fandom: After John's video on pig butchering (a text message scam in which a fake wrong number text spurns a long-term communication to trick the victim into a crypto scheme), some fans developed a newfound interest in sending silly replies to these numbers (such as the "wee woo wee woo boner alert" text John references in his segment). However, John specifically says doing this does not help, because the person on the other end is most likely being forced to create these false accounts after being scammed themselves, possibly after being trafficked. Other fans have tried to strike a balance by posting screenshots of chats where they tried to signal to the potential victim on the other end that they were concerned about their situation (though this isn't a solution John recommends either, as engaging with these chats at all just confirms your number is active to more scamming).
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Invoked during John's segment on battles over tobacco regulation. He shows us plain packaging with cigarette brands on boxes being replaced with disgusting photos like a cancerous mouth or a diseased lung.
  • After 25 episodes of him openly mocking Russia and Vladimir Putin, John actually flies out to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden. He doesn't realize that they're booked in a hotel across the way from the former KGB headquarters (which currently houses the offices of the FSB) until he gets there. And they certainly know he's there. This is coupled with the fact that Snowden is more than an hour late to the interview, which makes John begin to quietly panic, though he tries to keep it funny. He is clearly genuinely scared.
  • In the episode about immigration, it featured a trailer for An American Tail in which the mouse protagonist had his tail cut off, was forced to work in a mousetrap factory, and in the end, got "trapped in the prison of his own mind". It's pretty depressing.
  • Coronavirus II: just John alone in a blank white void. No studio audience, no laughs, no city background because the normal studio apparently had cases present. Since most other late night hosts simply shifted to filming from their homes (or backyards), the blank background and stilted line readings makes the episode feel truly unnatural and unsettling — which was likely an Intended Audience Reaction, as John finds the pandemic so frightening and wants to convey that effect. It was eventually lampshaded in the final episode of season 7, which was indeed an empty void devoid of life and audience.
  • Solitary Confinement: The whole segment, really, but in particular, a twenty-second clip of the sounds heard in some of these facilities, which consists of constant loud banging and random screaming. As one YouTube commenter put it, it's the longest twenty seconds in the show's history.
    • Later in the segment is a former prisoner's testimony to Congress about how being in solitary has permanently harmed his health, including having random mood swings, only getting 2-3 hours of sleep per night, and crying nearly every day. Yikes.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Be careful if your name is Judy Thomas. You might just be mistaken for someone else.
  • In the season 8 premiere, he talks about the potential new pandemic that will ensue once COVID-19 is contained immediately or much later and that people needs to prepare for the worst as it will be likely be more lethal from start to finish. At the end of the episode, the new virus that John accidentally encouraged earlier declares it's going to be even more dangerous than COVID-19, including the ability to spread through Zoom calls. It then licks the screen.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Many of the problems that John explores on the show are frightening, simply because they are disturbingly common and can happen to anyone.
  • The bail system: If you are poor and can't make bail, it means either pleading guilty to get out and having a criminal record, staying in jail and possibly losing your job, or being forced to pay a bail bondsman, which means fearing that he'll send a Bounty Hunter — a profession that requires no prior education — after you.
  • Mandatory minimum sentencing means if you are found guilty of a low-level drug-related offense as a young adult, you can be kept in a prison until you are of retirement age.
  • The segment on Family Separation ends with a clip of a mother and her six-year-old son, who had just been reunited after spending more than a month apart in separate immigrant detention facilities, telling her that he doesn't want to be her son anymore and that he wants to go back to the detention facility because he felt safer there than with her. Jon is visibly angry at how the Trump administration willingly traumatizes children to serve as a deterrent to anyone who wants to come to the U.S.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Joe Exotic, the subject of the 2020 documentary Tiger King, was featured on a 2016 episode about third-party candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The documentary even shows clips of said episode, pointing out how the exposure Joe received from it went directly into his head and unwittingly fed his delusions.
  • In the episode about Washington, D.C. statehood, one of the kids in the children's choir who sings a "new" song about the 50 states is Caleb McLaughlin, who would go on to play Lucas on Stranger Things. This was lampshaded by the show itself when they shared the story again on Twitter on 2020 after the issue was treated again in Congress.
  • In the episode about Amazon warehouses, one of the employees in a parody of an Amazon ad shown at the end of the episode is played by Tarik Davis, who would later become best known for playing the "sidekick" role to Amber Ruffin on The Amber Ruffin Show.
• Squick:
  • The Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption church was shut down after they received multiple jars of what appeared to be semen through the mail, noting that while some of them were probably fake, others were quite convincing (for obvious reasons, they didn't investigate further).
  • The "Vaccines" segment features a news clip about anti-vaccine parents exchanging "used lollipops, saliva and pus-soaked clothing" to try to "inoculate their children the natural way".
  • The February 19, 2017, episode revolved around Vladimir Putin, mentioning two critics who were mercilessly harassed. One of them filmed a man climbing onto the hood of his car, pulled down his pants, defecated on the hood of the car, got off, pulled his pants back on, and left. This squicked John so much that, at the end of the episode, when they released a parody of a Russian pop song praising Putin which mentioned that incident, John interrupted it briefly to implore Putin and/or his supporters not to defecate on his car.
  • The Medical Implants segment there is both a visual moment and a descriptive one as to what badly made implants can do.
  • In the segment about China's One Child Policy, Donald Duck is redrawn to add the corkscrew-shaped penis real ducks have.
  • Brian d'Arcy James cameos as an HBO lawyer in the SLAPP Suit segment, where he vividly describes Bob Murray's … antics in an M&M shop.
  • In order to demonstrate Belarusian "President" Alexander Lukashenko's cruelty, John Sweeney, a balding old English reporter, decided to strip himself naked in a cold warehouse. The real squick part is that the camera then pans to him spread-eagled with his own rear end shown for everyone to see. Obviously, John wasn't having it.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: The show takes a deep dive into many niche topics with which its target audience is unfamiliar, such as the political processes of non-American countries or the complicated legal histories of products like timeshares, chocolate, or dollar stores. Like his predecessors on The Daily Show, he's often a gateway for those seeking more knowledge on left-wing politics. John is aware of this responsibility and often pokes fun at the fact his viewers treat him like school, while pointing out that the information he's sharing really should be widespread public knowledge.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The reason why the voting video (in which he argues that ID laws are discriminatory because poor and nonwhite voters have such a hard time getting them) is so controversial.^note Passports are significantly less common in the United States than in other countries due to the large amount of interstate tourism compared to international. To get a valid ID, you basically have to take an entire day off work to go to the DMV, which is designed from the top down as a miserable inconvenient experience. And that's your best-case scenario. In most other developed countries, IDs are required to vote and quite easily obtained. In fact, most of the top comments on this video are from people in other countries saying 'Wait, seriously? Americans don’t all have IDs? REALLY!?' In Britain (where John is from), IDs were not required for voting at all until 2023. Most people don't even make a big deal of this. The other point is that, up until some lawmakers decided to push that into practice, most American states didn't care for that either.
  • John's ire over a Danish zoo killing a giraffe in front of an audience with children was met with some debate from viewers from different nations, the typical response being that American viewers were horrified and disgusted, while Scandinavian viewers didn't get what all the fuss was about.

---