In Conversation: John Oliver
With Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has found himself in the curious, and enviable, position of hosting a satirical news show that frequently makes news. Whether it’s by setting up a fake church to show the flimsiness of religious tax exemptions, urging viewers to overload the FCC website’s servers with angry comments as a way to spotlight declining net neutrality, or snagging an interview with Edward Snowden, the 38-year-old Oliver, whose show just began a third season on HBO, has displayed a knack for getting attention with comedy that feels a little like activism. (Though he swears, repeatedly, that the latter is not the point.) Over two long interviews at the show’s offices on Manhattan’s far West Side, Oliver, an intensely self-deprecating (that is, English) and far more low-key presence than his righteously aggrieved on-air persona suggests, talked about what he’s learned from his old Daily Show boss, Jon Stewart, being an outsider in America, and the simple pleasure of calling someone a dirty word.
I hear you’re a new father to a baby boy. Congratulations. What’s his name?
Hudson
I guess you can see the river from your office.
It was either Hudson or Window. It didn’t occur to me until recently actually that my son is going to have an American accent. Because I guess in my head that’s never how I’ve heard my child speak, and I think it’ll be odd that I’m going to sound different from him. And he’ll hear me have to change my voice for automated machines. You probably don’t have to do that. On the automated phone lines, all the time — “No. 4.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.” “No. 4.” “I don’t understand that,” and I have to say “No. 4” like a kind of a sedated John Wayne. And it feels like such a defeat. There’s almost a smugness in there: “Ohhh, No. 4.”
“Why didn’t you just say that! Speak American, not English, dummy.”
It really is like that, and it is a really, really powerful way to break someone down. But Hudson’s going to be just able to say “No. 4” and be understood. He’ll belong here, whereas one of the things that I like the most is that I don’t really fit in, and there’s a kind of comfort in that. If you’ve never felt like you fit in really anywhere in your life, as you grow up, it’s almost reassuring to go somewhere you definitely don’t fit in. Like America.
You came to the United States to work on The Daily Show almost ten years ago without ever having been here before.
Yeah, almost exactly ten years.
I came here from Toronto almost exactly ten years ago, too. This probably speaks to my own cynicism more than anything else, but there’s always a level of personal engagement with American politics that I can’t quite get. It’s like someone who doesn’t get along with their stepdad being forced to listen to that person and thinking, “You’re not my real dad!” So I’m curious what caused you to become so engaged.
Well, as a citizen of the world, you tend to have a basic understanding of the mechanics of U.S. politics — because you’re on the receiving end of it. I definitely had to do a bit of a crash course for the first few months. There would often be times in writers’ meetings when something would be said and you’d be writing down, “Okay, so that’s the thing I need to look up later.” I had to kind of quickly paper over the gaps in my knowledge of personalities and process. But The Daily Show2 is an immersive experience. There is no better way to throw yourself completely at U.S. politics than that particular job.
cont'd
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-c-v-r.html
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