Funny / Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Season Three

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• On his segment for abortions, John notes how there has been a 0.00073% chance of death related to an abortion, compared to a study finding the chances of a colonoscopy-related death being 0.007%.
  John: Let's agree, by the way, all of us. Death by colonoscopy has to be one of the worst ways to die. Right after having your mother catch you masturbating, and while you're trying to pull your pants up, you fall and hit your head. So your dad has to carry you pantsless to the car to take you to the hospital. And the girl next door you have a crush on tries to help, but she's laughing so hard at the size of your penis, that she closes the door on your hand, startling your mother, who slams her foot on the gas, dragging you behind the car for several blocks. While your father yells "Your TV show is derivative and you'll never escape the shadow of Jon Stewart!"
• When New Zealand politician Steven Joyce was hit by a dildo, he decided to Tweet John preemptively, figuring John would make a story of it anyway. John took this as a challenge and made a spectacle of it, including a choir, an image of Joyce's head being hit by by dildos from every direction, two dildo mascots on wires, and New Zealand native Peter Jackson waving a modified New Zealand flag depicting the exact moment Joyce was hit by the dildo.
• The "How is This Still a Thing?" piece on Hollywood whitewashing is one of the most immensely, justifiably angry segments in show history; as such, it's also pure gold, tackling everything from white actors playing different ethnicities, to how the stories of people of color are often told with a White Male Lead as an Audience Surrogate, to the Double Standard of "half the country [going] apeshit" whenever a traditionally white role is differently cast.
  • The icon used to depict whitewashing at the very beginning is just Fisher Stevens as Ben Jabituya / Jahrvi in Short Circuit.
  • On Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings, and his comment that he needed known Caucasian actors to bankroll a big production:
    Entertainment Reporter: Director Ridley Scott told Variety Magazine he can't mount a $140 million film "and say that my lead actor is Mohammed So-and-So from Such-and-Such. I'm just not going to get it financed."
    [cut to Joel Edgerton looking very silly in bronzer and a shaved head]
    Narrator: Yeah, you needed the white-hot star power of whoever the fuck this guy is.
  • On the possibility of Idris Elba being cast as James Bond:
    Narrator: Yes, if you're black, even if you're an actor who sometimes dresses like French Waldo, people will still say you're "too street."^note In reference to one of the James Bond novels' writers claiming that Elba was "too street" to be cast as Bond.
  • On Tom Cruise as Nathan Algren in The Last Samurai:
    Narrator: This guy is the last samurai? [shows Cruise in Cocktail] This guy? THIS guy's the last samurai. [shows Cruise's infamous dancing scene in Risky Business] This guy, this guy is the last samurai.^note The makers of the film insisted that the title "The Last Samurai" does not refer to Tom Cruise's character, but to the Japanese character Katsumoto and his samurai followers though. [Beat] Fuck you.
• After detailing Donald Trump numerous failings and basically proving that he'd be a horrible president, John calls back to a moment where he mentioned a tweet from Trump basically mocking Jon Stewart over changing his last name (while claiming that "he should be proud of his heritage"), while also noting that the name "Trump" has a kind of power to it from how it sounds, which is a problem when it comes to dis-empowering that name. Then he reveals Donald's hypocrisy over the previous tweet by noting that Donald's German grandfather changed the family name to "Trump" from "Drumpf" (which is much less dignified to English-speakers), not only highlighting Donald's hypocrisy, but then proceeded to run with it, encouraging his viewers to "Make Donald Drumpf Again" and troll Donald Trump by calling him by his family's original last name.
  • While talking about Trump's penchant for Frivolous Lawsuits, John says "'I'll sue you' is Trump's version of 'Bazinga!' It doesn't really mean anything, but he says it all the time."
• When talking about some cheeky fellow from Egypt setting up an eBay page to sell "One slightly-used Field Marshal" (current Egyptian president El Sisi), John remarks that it's not the stupidest thing ever sold on Ebay and puts up a picture of someone selling "Possibly the World's Largest Raisin Bran Flakes" for over a hundred dollars while speculating on what idiot would want to buy that.
  John: And let me just say....[picks up the frame holding said flakes] That idiot is very happy with his purchase!
• The unexpected return of the "place you think about so little" Running Gag, in the middle of a video they filmed with a bunch of California school kids for a contest.
• After an episode about how Apple is just barely keeping ahead of all the people trying to hack into its products, we get a more honest commercial of the tech crew freaking out about a virus and trashing their office. The slogan: "Join us as we dance madly on the lip of the volcano."
• The alternative to Trump plan to build a wall around the Mexican border: buying waffle irons for every American citizen. It will cost less, do nearly as much to keep out immigrants and drugs, won’t harm the US relationship with a major trading partner, it's only racist towards Belgians, "and unlike the wall, this makes fucking waffles!"
  John: So come on, America! Let's ask ourselves, what kind of country do we want to wake up to? One that spends billions on an impossible, impractical symbol of fear? Or one that smells like breakfast? Exactly!"
• The segment on fundraising culminates in John drinking out of a Long Island wine bag with congressman Steve Israel.
  John: What better way to end a bittersweet career than with the bittersweet taste of Norfolk chardonnay?
• In response to New York Yankees COO Lonn Trost saying the premium seats' buyers were uncomfortable sitting next to fans who scored tickets for a fraction of the face-value cost, the show offered Yankees tickets right behind home plate to their audience for $0.25 on the condition of dressing like "you have never sat in a premium location". Winners included guys dressed as Ninja Turtles, girls dressed as unicorns and sharks, and two guys dressed as dragons.
  • The following week's "And Now This" is devoted to the news reports on the fans, ending with a rather poorly researched one that calls John "HBO's Jon Stewart". The audience is suddenly caught between laughing, cheering, and groaning disgustedly. (John also feels it's awkward, to the point it takes a while for him to start the main segment...)
• During the segment on Lead Poisoning, John brings out some Sesame Street characters as a follow up to a song lesson they did about the same issue 20 years earlier. Which among other things leads to this exchange after Oscar the Grouch complains about the Strawman argument on the costs of cleaning it up:
  John: Wow, that is an astonishing level of economic insight coming from someone who lives in a trashcan.
  Oscar: Hey, this can is rent controlled. I've had it since the 60s.
• The segment on Scientific Research is filled with Take Thats ("There is no Nobel Prize for fact checking. Incidentally, 'There is no Nobel Prize for fact checking' is a motivational poster in Brian Williams' MSNBC dressing room."). But the best one regards a scientist advocating hugs for oxytocin:
  John: First of all, don't call yourself Dr. Love. That's the name a tabloid gives a dentist who ejaculated on his sedated patients. And second, there's no way I would be happier giving eight hugs a day. I'm English! That's four lifetimes' worth of hugs.
• The segment on 911 call centers ends with an "Honest" 911 PSA featuring Rob Riggle.
  • A particular highlight is when the dispatcher discusses how some places have better systems than other. The kid with the grandma in Maine is fine. The one with a grandma in Georgia?
    Dispatcher: Ooh, she is fucked.
• In the episode about doping in sports, a real commercial for Subway is shown, with Michael Phelps swimming in a pool:
  Announcer: To perform your best, training's gotta be a lifelong passion.
  Debbie: Michael!
  Announcer: Fueled by a foot-long passion. That's why Debbie Phelps is always there for her son Michael, (Michael Phelps gets out of the pool and takes the sub that Debbie's holding) with his favorite flavor packed, fully-jacked foot-long subs.
  John: STOP. Because first, no professional swimmer wants a sandwich in the pool. And for the record, there is nothing more viscerally upsetting than a woman feeding her soaking wet, nearly-naked adult son something called a "fully-jacked foot-long".
• Describing the 2016 election as:
  • The Clowntown Fuck-the-World Shitshow 2016
  • America's Fucktastic Cirque de Dismay 2016
  • America's 3D IMAX Shit-Fit Dumpster Fire 2016
  • A Horrifying Glimpse at Satan's Pinterest Board 2016
  • Uncle Sam's Rock-Bottom Yankee-Doodle Suicide Pact 2016
  • Lice on Rats on a Horse Corpse on Fire 2016
  • The Holy Shit, Please Make It Stop Trash Fire Two Thousand Fuckteen
  • America's Shit Salad Fuckstravaganza 2016
  • The Fiery Two-Party Pileup on the Hellbound Fuckspressway
  • The Shit-Filled Cornucopia That Just Keeps On Giving 2016
  • Lady Liberty Convenience Store Robbery Gone Wrong Descending into a Hostage Situation and Now She's Demanding a Chopper 2016
  • Oh, I Get It: We All Died, and This Is Hell, and Satan Has Cursed Us to Live Out This Nightmare for All Eternity 2016
  • The Electoral Equivalent of Seeing Someone Else Puking So You Start Puking and Then Someone Else Is Puking and Pretty Soon Everyone Is Puking 2016
  • What Did I Do to Deserve This? I Always Tried to Be a Good Person Is This Because I Stole Candy Once in 4th Grade Please Stop Punishing Us 2016
  • I Honestly Don't Even Know If I Can Make It Another Two-and-a-Half Weeks I've Been Drinking a Lot and Lashing Out and Frankly My Family Is Worried 2016
  • I Don't Even Believe in Past Lives, but I Must Have Done Something Really Fucking Terrible in a Past Life to Deserve This I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry 2016
  • Of Course Election Day Is on November 8th — the Last Possible Date the Election Could Fall On. This Must Be the Universe Punishing Us for All the Masturbating We've Done, and It Was a Lot 2016
  • I Thought I Wanted It to Be Over But Now That It's Over I Wish It Was Still Going On Because It Turns Out the Ending Is Even Worse Twenty-Fucking-Sixteen
• John says the sheer absurdity of the savings plan for the show's employees actually made Janice in Accounting give a fuck.
  • John calls his show "Johnny O's Sad-tastical Circus of Misery and Math".
  • Given a savings plan advertisement had escalating dominoes, once the show does their take on said videos staring Billy Eichner, the last domino accidentally crushes fellow guest star, Kristen Chenoweth. Naturally, the segment ends with a statement that No Kristen Chenoweths Were Harmed.
• John asserted that not even death would stop Donald Trump from tweeting, and provided a sample future tweet in which Trump says he's unimpressed with God's beard, and His inability to lift a rock that He himself created (a reference to the omnipotence paradox), finishing with a one-word sentence: "Sad."
• "Fuck You, European Union", an anti-Brexit ad produced by John which insults every country in the EU while also asserting the importance of remaining a member. Sung by a child.
  • During the same segment, when a UKIP member says the one kind of person she doesn't like is "Negroes," and she has no idea why, John calls it official proof that not everything sounds smarter with a British accent.
• John considers Lance Armstrong to be a Consummate Liar. Why? Because he said biking was cool and "we believed him".
  • After we have to watch an entire video of an Olympic athlete chaperone having to watch him pee, John pipes in with "That is the look of a man who is questioning every single decision he's made in his life."
• After playing the clip of Khizr Khan's speech about the constitution, John describes what he just witnessed.
  John: Oh, shit! That was an American founding document being inspirationally used as a middle finger! I did not know that was technically possible!
• When the American Petroleum Institute used the show's opening style (font included), John produced a new opening based on one of their previous ads featuring Rebecca and Andy, who use the time to insult API for its practices. They also mention that its logo looks like it's being penetrated by a polar bear's dick, complete with animated graphic... which they show for an uncomfortably long time, with both actors staring at it thoughtfully.
• The web segment on birds. "FUCK YOU, BIRDS!" Penguins get a pass, though.
• While covering Wells Fargo and their fraudulent accounts, John discovered an old ethics video shown to Wells Fargo employees ten years ago, complete with cheap prop comedy comparing ethics violations to a rubber band that would snap back and hurt you if you stretched them too far. When the show's team tracked down the man who starred in the video, they were quite surprised to find he's one of the show's own writers, who was quite happy to do a new video, complete with comparing their ethics violations to putting a dildo boomerang, as it would inevitably come back to "fuck them in the ass."
• Four Fox News reporters all cringing as Donald Trump brings up his fat-shaming comments completely unprompted, and just keeps going on about them.
• In Guantanamo, one of the ways for the soldiers to torture prisoners is to blast loud music at them. Unfortunately for the soldiers, one of the prisoners really liked the song (Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again"), so he sang along. And then John compares it to the band's usual Intercourse with You...
• The return of the Most Patient Man on Television.
• John taunting Donald Trump with the Emmy Last Week Tonight won.
• When Anthony Weiner's scandals bring the Hillary Clinton email investigations back into the public and thus shake the election further, John has no choice but to admit to the danger. Carlos Danger.
• When talking about scandals from both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, he notes that the Clinton Foundation is the only charity that inspires more visceral anger than Kars 4 Kids.
  John: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! WHAT IS THIS CHARITY!? YOU'RE KIDS, YOU CAN'T FUCKING DRIVE! WHAT MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME ARE YOU OPERATING!?
• In the episode about Police Accountability, John notes that one shorthand that many police departments abide by about shootings is "lawful, but awful", adding, "which, I believe, is also the legal definition of Woody Allen’s marriage.". When the audience groans, John asks "Who are you angry at?".
• In School Segregation, John shows a clip from the film Halls of Anger, about a group of white students going to a school mostly attended by African-Americans, with the boys lewdly calling one of the girls "vanilla ice cream". As terrible as it was, John manages to make it funny with this:
  John: OK, that is clearly horrible. But on a side note, using the terms chocolate and vanilla is actually the best possible argument to bring races closer together because what happens when you combine chocolate and vanilla? I'll tell you what happens. Fucking Fudgey the Whale happens! And it is superb!"
• On his episode about multilevel marketing:
  • After discussing how multilevel marketing companies are blatant pyramid schemes, John shows an especially damning clip of a spokeswoman for one of them at a convention, where she outright says it's a pyramid scheme early in her spiel. John then keeps interrupting to ask her to go back to the part where she "definitely said pyramid scheme."
    • That "pyramid scheme" quote comes in the context of the spokeswoman outlining a future dream scenario, which ends with this:
      "...and the lady [at the bank] is gonna say, 'Will that be checking or savings?', and you're gonna say, 'Eh! I don't really care, I get [checks from Youngevity] all the time!'"
      John: And then the lady's gonna say, "Haha, that's fantastic, but I actually need to know which account this goes into", and you're gonna say, "Makes no difference to me!", and she's gonna say, "But I can't deposit this unless you specify which account, it's policy!", and you're gonna say, "It's all gravy!", and she's gonna say, "How about checking?", and you're gonna say, "I'm loving it!", and she's gonna say, "Do I need to get security?", and you're gonna say, "The account ending in 8424, please."
  • John explains that MLM companies have hierarchies of distributors, which are climbed up typically by selling product at a sufficiently fast rate; Kyani, for example, has ranks named after gemstones, with one particularly high rank being named "Double Black Diamond", which John points out is also skiing terminology for very dangerous trails. Later, while showing MLM events in other countries, he shows an Herbalife event in Mexico where CEO Michael Johnson slings a Mexico flag around his shoulder while greeting the audience, calling it "douchebaggery at a double black diamond level."
  • His response to and mocking of an excerpt from an interview with Johnson in which Johnson expresses pride in working with the Latino community, more specifically stating that "the Latino—the blood, if you will" runs in the company and "it feels great":
    John: [imitation Johnson's voice] "Oh, I love the blood of the Latino community, I just wanna bathe in it! I wanna bathe in your blood, Latinos! How's this sales pitch going? I feel like it's going bueno!" [returning to his normal voice] You know what? Now might be a good time to point out that when someone says, 'Their blood is in me and it feels great,' that is what a fucking vampire says!
  • His brief tangent on cocaine:
    John: But second, why would anyone in the 80's seek Herbalife to lose weight? They had cocaine! Come to think of it, we also have cocaine. The point is, cocaine is an effective weight-loss option. It's not where I thought I was going with this, but it is where we have ended up.
  • John's response to a Telenovela that had an Enforced Plug for a product of a multilevel marketing company, wondering about how much drama there must be in the commercials.
    John: "Aaahhh, Meester GEICO Lizard, I want to save 15% or more on car insurance, but how can I, when you are sleeping with my wife?"
  • John closes by asking the viewers to send the episode to five people, with instructions for each of them to send it to five others, just like the MLM companies do. And as it was revealed that thanks to the magic of exponential equations, such a strategy theoretically reaches every single person on earth in just fourteen cycles — "to the point where we need to start fucking to create more people to watch it" — he takes the opportunity to say hi to Beyoncé.
  • The closing segment is made even more hilarious when John reveals that, since MLM companies target mainly the Latino community, he also made a version of the video with Spanish subtitles and with the closing segment being done in Spanish by Jane the Virgin's Jaime Camil (who was also one of the stars of the Telenovela that featured the MLM product plug), which is almost exactly the same, complete with Jaime dressed exactly like John (glasses and all) and him also saying hi to Beyoncé, except for one part: When John introduces Jaime in the original video, he commends Jaime for looking like a much better "me" (as Jaime looks like a classical Latin Lover), to which Jaime responds with a confident "Yes." When Jaime presents John in the video with the Spanish language segment, he tells John in Spanish that, indeed, he's a much better-looking "you", to which John, with a confused look that seems like he didn't understand a word of what Jaime said but does understand that it wasn't flattering to him, blurts out a "Sí."
• In his last pre-Election Day segment on the 2016 Presidential election, John shares an Old Shame — a clip of him on The Daily Show a few years previous, actively encouraging Donald Trump to run, because he thought it'd be hilarious.
  John: In my defense...I have no defense for that, and was hoping to think of one before finishing this sentence, which oh shit it's over.
  • Moments later, he follows this up with another clip, of him stating that the Chicago Cubs will never win the World Series. The episode aired just days after the Cubs did just that.
• The season finale ends with a "tribute" to 2016, which was a terrible year in general. It mostly consists of people talking about all the bad things that happened, then ends with a montage of people raising their middle fingers and shouting "Fuck you, 2016!" Well... most people.
  "Weird Al" Yankovic: 2016... Ffffffffffalls well below my standards of quality! (raises his pointer finger instead of his middle finger)
  • And, to reiterate, most people, as even the dog picked to represent Merrick Garland (whom Republicans blocked from the Supreme Court for almost a year) is shown barking "Fuck 2016!"
• The "actual audio" from both Barack Obama's meeting with Donald Trump, and Trump appearing to realize for the first time just what being the president entails: the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. John then states that's the new national anthem.
• In a segment about The Japanese Military when he mentions the Japanese people comparing their Prime Minister to Hitler he says he feels bad for Tojo
  John: He must be like: "oh come on, you needed a mustachioed WW2 war criminal at a japanese protest and you go with Adolf? I attacked Pearl Harbor. What do you have to do to be a shorthand for evil, it's not fair, I earned it."