The night after accepting an Emmy award for his weekly satire show Last Week Tonight, the British comedian John Oliver appeared on a chat show hosted by one of his vanquished rivals. Jimmy Kimmel, a nominee in the same category (Outstanding Variety Talk Series), asked him if his win at television’s most prestigious awards was likely to be a big deal at home in Britain. “No,” replied Oliver, 39, with trademark directness, “because no one knows who I am. I failed in England.”
Who’s John Oliver? He’s a formerly slightly shambolic Edinburgh Fringe act, whose first trip to America was for his successful audition to be a writer-performer on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. He’s the roving correspondent who, in 2013, hosted the show for three months while Stewart was off directing a film. “Once you do this,” Stewart told him, “once you fly the plane, you cannot go back.” And so it proved. The following April Oliver began his own weekly series for HBO. He was told there would be no censorship, no agonising about ratings: just get on, look into issues, get laughs.
Job done. On Sunday, the 80th episode of Last Week Tonight will broadcast in America, to a greater fanfare than ever before. “The funniest man in America right now,” declared Esquire this week, after the show won four of the five Emmy categories it was nominated for. Oliver has become the byword for sharp, inspiring, sometimes pioneering satirical comedy. He has a supreme knack for making complex issues graspable and funny - which is why, to his apparent annoyance, some people take him for a campaigner more than a comic. He frequently denies this. “It’s not journalism, it’s comedy,” he told the Daily Beast. “It’s comedy first and it’s comedy second.”
He has a sense of authority about him as a comedian these days. He tries to play it down - “the British accent is usually worth about 80 per cent more authority than I actually have” - but, hey, he’s a limey, he can’t help being self-deprecating.
