i find him funny, i ended up watching most of his pieces on youtube

....................... uh.................

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

i think john oliver is a swell guy. you know he's gotta be a bit libtarded to be a daily show guy, but i think deep down somewhere he's got british imperialism/monarchy in his roots so in the end he's one of the queenie's subjects and he knows and loves his place! FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY!

the other advantage to his show is that unlike the daily show that is, well, daily for 4/5 weekdays JO's got a weekly show where he can cherry-pick the best stuff from the whole week and go with their top material filling up a 30min show. get some good writers and have some #swag like all those kids yelling BASED [NOUN] on 4chan and you'll get the job done.

i have to admit that the one thing i didnt see coming is that each episode's big 5-10 minute topical segment ends up being some !!!! OMFG DID YOU SEE JOHN OLIVER JUST WENT OFF ON [TOPIC] ??? stuff on boards like this and certainly places like facebook and reddit where "original content" goes on a journey usually only experienced by two mirrors staring at each other until teh end of time.

so yeah, jolly good show, mr. olivier.... oh sorry, don't mind me i've just got the HFB aka the handsome french bloke aka olivier giroud on my mind. he's been in fine form this season and he's recovered nicely from that one time last year when he was caught with a big ol tranny looking hooker in his hotel room @ 3AM on the morning/day-of a 1245pm kickoff @anfield against liverpool, where the mighty arsenal ended up losing 1-5. #WhatsTheOppositeofNEVARFORGET??? #FORGET??? #NEVARREMEMBAR? idk.

xo yeah TLDR = i think his show has more material to cherrypick from to have overall better results than teh daily show, and his 5-10min topics are great and trendy/viral for this day and age.... and even tho i'm sure the guy is a lefty i dont get the feeling like he's trying to indoctrinate me like jon stewart is. it's a weird feleing man.... kind of like when daniel tosh wants to indoctronate you to v-necked undershirts because the oldschool male model turned comedian wants to show off thee ol corporeal form. #CestLaVie aka #LikeHashTagsWorkOnTheCSFMB.... #ImJustSayin...........#TonysDeli

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Really? I think it's the complete opposite -- well, depending on which iteration of Jon Stewart you're looking at, I guess. I'm looking at the one we've been in since Bush left office, where his concentration has been on the sound and fury of cable news channels and the toxic culture they create (Colbert did this too, no duh, but by reducing it to absurdity), and how it'd be nice if we could all just act like grown-ups and use our inside voices to tell the truth and keep all the gears turning. John Oliver's tone is more along the lines of "holy shit, bad people in high places are doing really scary things, and here's how we can at least take some symbolic jab at them to show them that we're not just taking it lying down." I don't think Bush-era Daily Show ever got to the second step: whenever shit got too real, Jon reliably defaulted to "don't look at me, I'm just a comedian." It's a good niche John Oliver made for himself: instead of doing the mad-as-hell Olbermann thing (again, sound and fury signifying nothing), he's able to take the tack of the incredulous outsider and judge the whole fucked-up system as someone who hasn't been completely beaten down by it yet. As a matter of fact, just try to count the times he comes out of a clip with his eyes bugged out saying "HOLY SHIT" or "WHAT THE FUCK?" or some other combination of aghast and profane.

I absolutely think he and the producers have some activist aspirations that Stewart either didn't or couldn't have, and I'm glad they do. Back when Conan O'Brien got fired from the Tonight Show for not being funny, he gave some dopey speech about not being cynical, which I thought was total bullshit because cynicism is the backbone of comedy and satire. But I think Last Week Tonight has finally found the right kind of earnestness that can be funny and meaningful.

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What does this mean? Certainly Oliver seems to revel in getting social media campaigns going, but is this really activism?

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It's slacktivism, which is really about as good as it's gonna get for most people these days.

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I dunno, I think there are more young people participating in progressive organizing today than at any other time since the 70s. We're firmly entrenched in a new age of earnestness.

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Sure does feel that way. I don't know if I like it. I feel more like a jaded cynical Gen X-er than a bright earnest Millennial.

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CH, i have to be honest here and say that i'm going to default to going with your opinion because i was quite honestly talking a bit out of my ass a bit concerning john oliver here. i've only seen like 2 or 3 episodes of his new show and i was trying to make a sweeping generalization about the guy to prop up my 3/4-baked thoughts on jon stewart who also is someone who i've watched dramatically less and less of over the last few years (colbert ruined the daily show for me because stephen colbert is the fucking man. those first ~4 years of the colbert report stand up against/above anything ever put out on latenight television... i mean, dude, colbert is simply put (once again) THE FUCKING MAN. the way he takes these kids' dumbass bullshit and forcefeeds it back to them while he's not just kicking their asses with words and thoughts but also dancing circles around their heads is just like... fuck yeah! why cant tv always be this good? (....even tho i'm not naive enough to believe these are 100% legit interviews... prolly 80-95% but idk if i'd go as far as paid actors to be stereotypes for the teevee. i found ketchup's youtube page and she seemed like an actual person so * crosses fingers * HOPE-N-BELIEVE)

AHEM. wow i'm on a TLDR ramp*age today and im sorry.... but yeah see i came into this conversation as a stone cold colbert guy (i mean for fuck's sake he has red WRISTSTRONG bracelets that belong on the right wrist not only because he broke his right wrist (leading to the rush/vicodin bit =) but he also put out a bracelet that called BOTH lance armstrong and republicans jagoffs while raising $$$ for charity and all the jokes were subtle and inside and never formally declared. * standing ovation *) --- AHEM. and he's really the only one where i can objectively say what he did or didn't do/say/imply/make-me-feel during his run, and even then i faded away from him over, say, the last 2-3 years just because i got bored of seeing the show continue on at like a 66-75%-quality-of-the-first-4-years clip because it had to be watered down for more en masse consumption. i mean, look at how many celebrities he could pull out of his ass when daft punk was blocked from doing his show.... that bit wasn't happening in 2006 and thus those writers and colbert had to go and hustle to go out and earn the cred/respect/popularity that would eventually allow them to have celebrity orgy segments to show off how "over" stephen colbert is nowadays (to use a wrestling term)

btw, i found it a quite poignant comparison between the colbert report and the nightly show with larry wilmore that on the first episode of the former stephen introduced a new word (truthiness) that organically caught on and was declared an official word by merriam-webster and etc etc (and colbert couldn't resist trying again later with "wikiality") and rah rah rah blah blah blah. larry wilmore's show, trying to fill colbert's shoes as literally as they possibly can, went out and gave us #KeepIt100... a fucking desperate-as-hell twitter hashtag in the year of our lorde 2015, like it's the new truthiness. and seriously that's what the powers that be want you to think. it's kind of sad cuz i wanted wilmore to succeed and all that, but when you try to recreate the GOAT with a fucking twitter hashtag it's just transparent and once again sad,

AND NOW IT'S TIME FOR GERMANS WHO SAY NICE THINGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok so having accomplished my sub/conscious desire to talk about stephen colbert, let's actually get back to the topic at hand. i reckon i'm not the best person to say that jon stewart is [this] and john oliver is [that]... but to put it simply in terms of >MUH FEELINGS (which are paramount in our society.... oh hell and they're paramore too cuz good god hayley you go girl i know its lonely in the fast lane out in LA.... but life is awesome and sooner than you know it you'll be saying "aint it fun" cuz you'll always sell enough records cuz everybody at least secretly wants to nail the pink haired chicks of the world. and by "chicks" i mean "born-women under 150lbs" =) ---- yeah i guess i just suppose that i felt like jon stewart was doing a show for "we" and "us" whereas john oliver was doing a show against "they" and "them" --- that's the dichotomy i spose... and in the end it doesnt matter cuz i dont think you'll ever get any legit activism out of any daily show/derivative.... i remember that rally they did in DC a few years ago when jon stewart was summing up the whole event by saying something similar to what you said when you said "and how it'd be nice if we could all just act like grown-ups and use our inside voices to tell the truth and keep all the gears turning" --- what i really remembered was while he was saying that they had the videoscreens showing a bunch of cars merging into a lane to go into the lincoln tunnel or something, and for a long time i've thought that one of the coldest things you could call someone was a pedestrian. traffic. that subtle implication of YOU'RE IN MY WAY.... and giving that unilateral message of nothing/ness that hearkens stewart's mantra of "well jeez... i'm just a comedian! lighten up!" by literally saying "hey look people of all denominations come together to become one lane of traffic" was just..... wowzers. i couldn't believe what i was seeing because he was basically just calling us little worker ants/bees or something and the message was "know your place. do your thing" and it's like "wow, the whole point of this rally is that there is no point so we might as well not be assholes to each other"

and go figure the brother of the president of the NYSE or whatever is up there (jon stewart = jon stuart leibowitz. i forget his brother's first name but he uses his birth name) on a stage telling us that we're all traffic and yeah.... man that was just fucking cold when you consider everything.... but then again the "message" of the whole rally was that hey *shrug* it is what it is so let's all have a few smiles and jokes and just merge into the tunnel.

it's kind of like when facebook asked me for my political beliefs and i wrote "republicans vs democrats is like coke vs pepsi: either way you're drinking soda" --- except in this case it was unilateral as opposed to bilateral because we're all traffic merging into that tunnel so accept it and deal with it accordingly.

oh well... i just wrote all of this dumb shit and i dont think i actually said anything of actual value. wanna take bets on whether it's RFDC, redskingreg, DENNIS THE MAN, or the field that someone takes that and makes it their signature quote? =P

TLDR = CH is right and is more knowledgeable about this topic than me, but >MUH FEELINGS dictate that i think jon stewart talks about "we" and "us" as opposed to john olvier talking about "they" and "them". oh and colbert is 500 times better than both of them combined. duh.

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I think it's funny that you cut me for brevity.

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i knew my post was gonna be bad so i was trying to minimize the damage, cuz you know its like here comes my 5+ paragraphs and i figured your post was right up there and the only people actually reading our long/er posts will know what you said anyways.

nothing personal or meant to be a juxtaposition, just that life's been a bit consuming lately and i've been a bit bottled up and holy shit i need a vacation... which is suitably hilarious since my life is technically one big long vacation.

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Oh no, it's quite all right, just thought I'd be preemptive because someone was gonna catch it. Yeah, February is the worst month, I agree.

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When Conan spoke during his final time as the host of the Tonight Show about not wanting his viewers and fans to become cynical, I think he was referring to how his stint as Tonight Show host abruptly ended after 7 months. I don't think his comment was regarding the art of comedy.

I don't know about that one. Conan's comedy lacks a certain sort of weariness and bitterness. The guy's signature bit is a masturbating bear.

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The best comedy is transgressive, but that doesn't mean it has to be bitter or cynical or vulgar; it can just be weird. Conan's mellowed significantly since he moved out of the 12:30 time slot, but his best bits, now as always, are basically just weird for the sake of being weird (this is doubly true for Letterman).

And not for nothing, but Conan was a major influence on the best years of The Simpsons, and personally wrote two of the five best episodes in the show's history. I think his weary/bitter cred checks out.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

I loved his Simpsons episodes ("Marge v. the Monorail" being one of the top five, I presume? I agree wholeheartedly), but he never did much for me as a talk show host. The Team Coco bullshit closed the book forever.

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Obv. "Homer Goes to College" is the other one.

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The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

The NCAA got it tonight.

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i recently went on a binge of the show so i can see a lot of what CH pointed out about it during the earlier conversation. i hadn't seen anything since the world cup, and yeah it's a good show that i'd way rather watch than the daily show

that said, despite a wonderful show last week i still decided to celebrate the closing segment with a cigarette because no half-dancing fully-wheezing dilapidated cancerous lung on stage next to a dancing jon oliver is gonna get me to give up my cigarette! people used to put snakes on flags to communicate the same mantra of my friend's old timeless backpack button that read "let's piss everyone off and have a cigarette"

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Enjoyable to watch.

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Interviewed Edward Snowden and explained the US surveillance program through what would happen if they pulled everyone's Dick Pics that were sent through text/email.

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That took some balls to go to Russia.

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

Yes it did. Sadly, that is the type of analogies needed to get your average American to pay attention to what the government is doing. However, relatively few people actually watch this show.

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It was a good episode. I was surprised that he didn't have some type of hash tag that would have helped bring more attention to it like he has
in the past.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Solid segment on patent trolls today.

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I thought it was okay. The last two weeks have been a little down from the highs of the ones on tobacco, infrastructure, and Snowden. Michael Bolton singing about the IRS really left me feeling nothing.

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The Bolton song had me laughing a bit.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

The joke went on way too long, then Oliver kept butting in. I'm not sure whether he felt he had to save it or what. It was a slog.

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Patent Troll issue was good, but I dont really care that Samsung feels threatened by a trolling company. They charge lots of money for products to defend these patents and sniff out trolls that try and extort them. The small companies that do fall to this scam, should go to the state for help, but is the Patent trolling really an urgent issue. Not that the bit was bad, but not on the level of which this show has been lately.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

Another just average episode last weekend talking about low cost clothing distributors. The best part was probably him going scorched earth on
Dr. Oz prior to the main story.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami