Tonight I Want To Talk About John Oliver, Epilogue
So What Can We Do?
The best way to end this article, I feel, is the way John Oliver would end each episode: “So what can we do now?” For the last several years his answers have essentially been pie-in-the-sky ponderings of the Loony Left he occupies. Unlike him I have some answers, and they may actually be practical.
For the Democratic Party the answer is the simplest, though it is no doubt counterproductive to the ones most of the loudest voices are giving. The Democrats need to start winning back the working class voter, primarily the white working class voter — which has been bottoming out on them for the last three elections — but across the board. And that can only be aided by cutting as many ties as possible with Hollywood. If you’re arguing the GOP is the party of billionaires, that argument loses its clout when it is being made by George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey. As I’ve said before, there’s never been any evidence they can convince the electorate one iota and now it’s time cut your losses. Don’t worry, they’ll get over it.
For late night, there are some signs that at least some entertainers have realized that spending your opening monologue and much of your show calling the Republicans names is not an audience grabber. John Mulaney’s new late night show for Netflix seems to be going back to an older format where politics is far less important and it has already become a critical and ratings success. It’s also encouraging to see Jon Stewart back at The Daily Show after more than a decade and it is very clear in his first year back that he has decided to go back to the old format of making fun of both sides. This has earned him the enmity of the left, but part of the reason we loved him in the first place was because he never gave a damn about that. Future hosts might do well to try and remember it going forward.
And as for John Oliver, well, I can only speak for myself. But to do so I’m going to use a method he might very well do so and use a different form. I will paraphrase Aaron Sorkin, a writer who for decades has been considered by the right all that is liberal about Hollywood and who know is considered by some of the actors on his own show as too conservative in his approach.
In the climatic speech of The American President Andrew Shepherd tells the press corps: “We’ve got serious problems. And I can tell you Bob Rumson has no interest in solving them. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, my friends, is how you win elections.” Sorkin was writing this in 1995 but he could have just as easily been describing any Republican over the last thirty years. It’s an ugly game but it works.
John Oliver acknowledges serious problems but he has no interest in solving them either. He is interested in two things and two things only: telling you who’s to blame for it, and telling you there is nothing that you or anything else can be done to fix it. That is the method of the deconstructionist of which Last Week Tonight essentially is a model of that program.
This is a model that has a very select audience: usually wealthy, educated and white. They inhabit the world of academia, liberal magazines and quite a few entertainers. Their numbers have included Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, Michael Moore and George Carlin. John Oliver is just the most recent to join their unhappy band. The deconstructionist has, it should be mentioned, the same low esteem for the electorate than many in world of Fox News and MAGA do. The main reason they have contempt for Trump and his ilk is because he’s convinced those same voters that the solution to their lot in life is to vote for Republicans. The deconstructions like Oliver think these people are deluded because they think anything will solve their problems. Their idiots not because they think voting for Trump will improve things hut because they think anything can.
And as I’ve written in previous articles people like the ones I listed above have gotten very rich arguing that capitalism is destroying everything and famous for saying that public figures are not to be trusted. John Oliver is no different in that. Last Week Tonight has made him a millionaire many times over; he’s won seven consecutive Emmys and a couple of Peabodys and he has become one of the most signature faces of HBO. Despair, melancholy and pessimism have been very, very good to John Oliver.
That leads me to my decision. I’ve decided that, at least for the foreseeable future, I’m not going to watch John Oliver any more. This is a sacrifice on my part — as I’ve said he is incredibly funny and very informative. But it does nothing to change the fact that is a humor steeped in the kind of nastiness and nihilism that I’ve come to associate with so many people on the far left these days. I’ve spent a lot of time cutting ties with some of the most left-wing thinkers online and in other publications; I see no reason why I shouldn’t do the same with John Oliver.
The thing is, I know he’ll be fine. He is, like all the previous examples I gave above, a rich white man. And as he’s been more than willing to tell us over and over on Last Week Tonight, things tend to work out pretty well for rich white men in society.
Maybe that’s why I take a special contempt when, in a appearance on another late night show, he was asked if he planned to leave the country, like so many left wing people are. “No,” he said. “I’m going down with the Titanic.”
Now I’ve made it clear that I have a very low opinion of the kind of people who’ve said for years that if the election went a certain way, they would leave America. Not only does that show the kind of elitism and wealth they have as opposed to the people they’ve expounded a lot of time and energy will be the victims of Trump, it makes a strong case that they never really cared that much about their suffering at all. This is not something that the majority of Americans — particularly the ones who will be the likely victims of this administration — have the option to do and that they are considering leaving America as they would move to a new neighborhood shows just how little the problems they advocate for have really touched them.
But for Oliver — who is an immigrant to this country, who has spent the last decade advocated about the suffering of others in so many ways, about all the inequities about it, all the real problems and frequently sounds sincere — can look at America and compare it to one of the most tragic disasters of all time as a joke bothers me still more. Because it shows his own callousness and nasty humor which honestly, isn’t that much different from the kind of lines you’d hear at CPAC.
The sad part is that he may very well go down with a bigger institution — late night. One of the proudest and oldest institutions of television that has lasted as long nearly as long as the medium. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic and it will survive the kind of comedy that Oliver and his colleagues have considered entertainment over the past decade. But if it does, he will be a vital part in what helped killed it off. He may not care about that — after all, he’s a rich white man and things have worked well for them, and he’s also a deconstruction so he’s never cared much for institutions including Hollywood.
But the fact is, he needs to understand it wasn’t Trump that killed it off. He and his entire band of entertainers have spent the last decade waging a war against a man who they had more in common with then the majority of the people who voted for him. They didn’t have any real ammo to beat him with but they thought they did. So they used their shows as soapboxes isolated half the country, kept at it for more than a decade and now it is on the brink of collapse.
And what did they get? He still won. He won in 2016 despite their warnings. He won again in 2024. They’re still fighting against him. They still won’t acknowledge that he got the better of them. And they long since stopped trying to be entertaining or even funny doing so. They can’t understand how a guy who can’t take a joke is having the last laugh on them. What they never understood is that they were no funnier then he was and they never commanded anywhere near the audience he did.