Tonight I Want to Talk About John Oliver, Part 1: The Shift in Late Night As Trump Rose

 

 

In the summer of 2013 Jon Stewart took a hiatus from hosting The Daily Show to make his directorial debut in Rosewater. While he was gone he entrusted John Oliver with hosting the show in his absence. Oliver had been a correspondent on the show for more than seven years to that point and while there were other cast members such as Aasif Mandvi and Jason Jones, Oliver got the job.

During that summer the show did a piece when Donald Trump, possibly for the first time, hinted he was going to run for President. Oliver whole-heartedly endorsed him, if not outright urged him to do so. This was not the first time The Daily Show had made that argument: Lewis Black had urged for it in 2011 and Jon Stewart had actually hoped for it to happen that December. No one was taking it seriously, certainly not Oliver.

In February of 2016 now the host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver did his first segment on Donald Trump. It was two days before Super Tuesday and Trump had already won the New Hampshire and South Carolina Republican primaries. He gave a twenty-five minute segment in which he made it clear to his audience how dangerous Donald Trump would be if he received the Republican nomination. He went out of his way to argue about the false narrative of Trump as a successful businessman, his argument for Obama’s being born in Kenya and the already dangerous statements he made well before announcing for the Presidency. All of these, I should mention, were public knowledge to Oliver when he had ‘endorsed’ Trump in 2013 but he didn’t mention that or indeed any of The Daily Show’s other ‘endorsements’ of him in the past. He concluded it by using the argument that Trump had changed his name from Donald Drumpf and argued that he had done so because ‘Drumpf’ was the name of a fraud. He then ended his episode arguing that potential voters should consider this before voting for Trump. Whether Last Week Tonight was actually being watched by Republican primary voters is an open question considering even by that point in last Week’s run Oliver had got out of his way to castigate not only Republican officials but conservative agendas. Needless to say, the attempt failed.

It is an understatement of epic proportions to say the world has changed immensely in the decade since Donald Trump became synonymous with the Republican Party. One of the smaller but notable ways it has changed is that late night television, which has been part of the medium almost since its creation is facing what may very well be a crisis point. When James Corden left CBS for the first time in thirty years the network didn’t have a traditional late night host and it is unlikely one will return. Jimmy Fallon, the last network late night host to have a full week of episodes, cut back to four episodes this fall. Ratings have dropped dramatically for every network late night show and it is an open question if they will continue past the time their current hosts are still on the air.

The world of television has been undergoing immense changes since the rise of cable and streaming the last decade but while I believe much of the fictional programing will evolve and survive this period, I think there is a strong possibility that late night television might die out not only in my lifetime but perhaps by the end of the decade. And while correlation doesn’t always equal causation I find a very strong possibility being the fact that ever since the rise of Donald Trump to a host, late night comedians across the board have decided that it is their solemn duty to make it very clear in a way that their predecessors went out of their way to avoid doing, that they have taken a side and it is against Donald Trump.

And as a direct result late night television may very well become a casualty. What’s more considering Trump has just begun his second term, it’s impossible to see what any of these hosts think they have accomplished by taking positions that are guaranteed to isolate at least half the country which includes potential viewers. And considering the precarious position of television in general during the last decade across the board, one wonders the wisdom of so many network and cable heads to take a position that would undermine their livelihood and the jobs of so many others at these industries.  Yet there is no sign even in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection that any of these late-night hosts have decided to back down from their positions. They are pot-committed even though their hand has long since proven to be a losing one for the values they claim to argue for and the business they work in.

So in this article I’m going to use both John Oliver’s methods and him as an example to explain how late night TV reached this precarious state. And let’s start with something that should be obvious from the example I used above: political insiders have an excuse for underestimating Trump and not knowing who he was. Hollywood has absolutely none.

Because for more than a quarter of a century before Trump deciding to run for President for good, Donald Trump was very much a part of the Hollywood scene. They have spent an immense amount of energy in the last decade going out of their way to tell everybody that they knew Trump was weird from the start. In the case of Mark Burnett, he later went out of his to express contrition for creating The Apprentice around him and leading him as a benchmark to power. Yet it can’t be denied that for all that period Hollywood was absolutely fine with Donald Trump being allowed to be part of their circle. They were fine with him having cameos in TV shows and movies, they were fine with him hosting SNL and singing on the Emmys. And they did so for one simple reason: they looked down on him.

I have no idea if the coastal elites in New York or Hollywood knew all of the horrible things Trump was doing as a landlord or a real estate developer; I find it impossible to believe that someone like John Oliver wouldn’t because he spent a decade in New York. But that’s not what they found distasteful about him or deserving of contempt. No, they didn’t think he had class. They thought he was a pretender, someone who had all the wealth and privilege they did but who didn’t have class.  The cartoon version of someone rich and famous, not someone actually rich and famous like them. The left has spent a lot of time arguing that Trump says the quiet part out loud when it comes to the views of Republicans. That’s also the reason they judge him so harshly even though I’m pretty sure many of them privately think and feel the same things he does about such things as immigration.

Part of the legend of why Trump ran for President is because he was angry about Obama choosing to make fun of his at a White House Correspondents Dinner. That’s ridiculous because Donald Trump has been a subject of far less subtle lampooning from late night comic  for more than thirty years before he chose to run for President. Phil Hartman was imitating Trump on SNL in the 1980s and everyone from Johnny Carson to Conan O’Brien had been joking about him as long as I’ve been alive. I suspect this is a legend comedians themselves have created over time because it plays into their own narrative about Trump being thin-skinned – a narrative that they never miss an opportunity to play on as long as he’s been part of the political landscape. All through his first run for the Presidency every late night host from Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Kimmel to Trevor Noah have read out loud his tweets on the air with the kind of contempt a bully would use on a third grader. They mock his tone, they mock his spelling, they mock his run-on sentences. They have no problem calling Trump a bully when he picks on everyone else. When Trump does it, it is the sign of monstrous behavior. But when they mock Trump -  often just saying word for word what he does – it’s speaking truth to power.

All of this goes against the major rule of late night that their predecessors followed: you make fun of everybody equally. The most popular comics have always been those who tried to speak to a universal audience and that meant making fun of Clinton as much as one would George W. Bush or Obama. There has always been a divide between comedians about being popular or ‘selling out’ – it’s why many of them feel Jay Leno gave a way ‘his edge’ when he became host of The Tonight Show. The fact that he had the highest rating for over a decade over the ‘edgier’ Letterman and Arsenio Hall did nothing to change that opinion as did the fact that during the 2000s and into the 2010s this was the pattern following not only by those comedians but also Jimmy Fallon and Jon Stewart himself.

When Stewart retired from The Daily Show in 2015 – a week after Trump entered the race for the Presidency -  the last of those kinds of late-night hosts were gone. And late night comedy entered what can only be considered a very nasty tone – that somehow never went with the Democrats the way it did the Republicans, particularly Trump. For all the very real sins of Hilary Clinton late night basically treated her with the harshness they did the GOP: Hilary’s sins were that of being an ineffectual candidate as well as an inevitable President. Everyone in late night believed everything the establishment did: Hilary Clinton was going to be the next President. And during this period late night became in truth what the far right had always accused of being: in the tank for the Democrats. They will say they treated both sides the same when it came to their taunts but as someone who watched The Daily Show during that period I know it’s not true. Trevor Noah never ran a bit saying “Don’t Forget Hilary Wants to Bang Her Daughter’ the same way he did disgustingly about Trump during that period.

During this period John Oliver managed to escape the same lens, partly because it was a weekly series hut also because he was mostly ignoring electoral politics. To his immense credit John Oliver has spent the majority of his show not dealing with American politics or even America but other subjects that late night didn’t even try. The vast majority of it, then as now, dealt with corporations though not so much in America but other issues. One of his earliest shows dealt with the corruption of FIFA, the organization behind professional soccer – and his episode caused such a stir that not long after the commissioner was forced to resign. Indeed much of Oliver’s work in the first two years seemed to show a late-night host determined to change the system – and amazingly, it seemed it was possible.

In the first years he ran an episode about net neutrality and why it was important and asks for his viewers to lead an online campaign for the Obama administration to support it. The outpouring was so enormous that the administration followed through. Not long after came the special on FIFA. In 2015 he ran a segment on tobacco’s spending in African nations and started an online campaign for putting ‘Jeff the Diseased Lung’ on ads in foreign countries. This sparked an online campaign that was successful. Later he did a special on debt in America, argued that the best way forward was to forgive it – and then bought up what amounted to 12 million dollars in debt and erased it on his broadcast.

But by that time it was also becoming clear that there were limits to Oliver’s reach. During the 2016 season he ran a show not long before the vote on Brexit in which he went into great detail on the flaws of the campaign and why it was so important to remain in the EU. However, for the first time we got a sense of Oliver’s true political leanings as it made it very clear that his attitude was that he thought remain was ‘the lesser of two evils’. This was true in the song he composed and had sung: “F--- you European Union” which ended with the chorus “but for all that, we really need you.” It was hardly the most whole-hearted endorsement for Remain.

The week after that episode aired Britain voted to leave the EU, something that clearly shook Oliver to his core. By that time Trump had clinched the Republican nomination for President. During this period another difference became clear between Oliver and his fellow hosts. Most of them were able to work up some enthusiasm for Hilary Clinton. Oliver’s shows particularly during the fall were entire against Donald Trump. This was clear when he ran a separate show as to why voters should not vote for either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. He made it clear he understood their frustration with both candidates but that it was more important that Trump not become President. Again, this was hardly a glowing endorsement either for the Democratic Party or Hilary Clinton.

Even at this point in Last Week Tonight’s run it was becoming increasingly hard to figure out if John Oliver was for anything: while he felt the Republicans and Fox News were evil incarnate it never translated to a whole-hearted endorsement of the Democratic party. Even now he was beginning to acknowledge his show could be something of a lecture more than an entertainment: it was clear that his show was about finding humor in all the broken things in our society rather than arguing for a way to fix it. Much of that would be lost in the tumult that followed Trump’s upset victory that November. The real reveal of his politics would be to come.

In the next article in this series I will concentrate on Oliver’s shows primarily during the Biden administration as that demonstrated even more clearly his politics then the four years that came before.