John Oliver Recaps 5 Months of News in 13 Minutes in First ‘Last Week Tonight’ Back After Strike

October 2, 2023 @ 7:41 AM

After roughly five months off the air due to the WGA strike, John Oliver had a whole lot of news to catch up on during his first new episode of “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday, and while he opted to do a bit of a speed run, the Emmy-winning host got a bit hung up on congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

To kick off the show, Oliver first homed in on Senator John Kennedy’s reading of an explicit part of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” during a book-banning Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, marveling at the seriousness Kennedy maintained while doing so.

“Look, I know you might be wondering what are they going to talk about when they come back? What is so important that it has to be the first thing they bring up? Well, it’s this!” Oliver joked. “Since the moment the phrase ‘strap-on harness’ careened out of Senator Foghorn Leghorn’s mouth, it was always this.”

He added, “It’s a truly sublime 25 seconds if we didn’t have so much to catch up on tonight. I would play it on repeat for the rest of this show.”

From there, Oliver moved onto the Supreme Court’s dismissal of affirmative action, as well as the three indictments Trump received after “Last Week Tonight” went dark for the strike.

“One of which gave us this mug shot, in which he looks like he’s struggling to find Waldo on a crowded ski slope,” Oliver joked.

Of course, there was no chance Oliver was going to ignore Lauren Boebert’s antics, and despite his best efforts to cruise through them and onto a more serious topic, the HBO host kept circling back, particularly bewildered by the fact that it all happened during a production of “Beetlejuice.”

“I’m not saying it would be appropriate to engage in high-school freshman-era hand stuff during a production of any musical,” he mocked. “I just want to be clear, this wasn’t one of the more sexually explicit ones like ‘Spring Awakening’ or ‘Rocky Horror’ or ‘Cats.’ This was ‘Beetlejuice.’ A show that’s quite loudly about death.”

He added, “I’m just saying, if you’re gonna get your nipples tweaked and your pipes squeaked, you save that s— for ‘Fiddler’ like a goddamn adult.”

Eventually, Oliver did move on, talking next about Senator Bob Menendez’s indictment for bribery. And though Menendez maintains his innocence, Oliver definitely wasn’t buying it, considering Menendez searched “how much is one kilo of gold worth” on the Internet.

“Yeah, not great Bob! That is pretty incriminating. No one casually Googles ‘how much is one kilo of gold worth’ because they are bored,” he said. “They Google ‘Do butterflies feel pain when they flap their wings?’ ‘Just how little love can a person live on,’ and ‘What exactly is a Travis Kelce?’ ‘How much is one kilo of gold worth’ is an inherently incriminating Google search. It’s right up there with ‘Can you snort Adderall’ and ‘how to get bloodstains out of your wife.’”

Finally Oliver arrived at the end of his recap, explaining that he’d have liked to tell these jokes when they happened, but that the writers were on strike for a good reason, and noted that he’s “immensely proud” of the deal that was secured.

You can watch Oliver’s main segment from this week’s “Last Week Tonight,” about prison health care, below.