The John Oliver Effect

(Democracy Chronicals/Creative Commons)

One of my guilty pleasures is curling up with my laptop or phone and binge watching episodes of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. There is something about him that I instantly like; maybe it's the British accent or his glasses. It looks like I'm not alone in liking him, either. Even though the show is only two years old, 4.6 million people tuned in to watch his show every week in 2015, according to an HBO press release. The show's Youtube channel alone has 4,185,191 subscribers with 902,822,519 million views.

And maybe that's the beauty of it. When it comes to late-night talk show hosts, interviews with celebrities, comedy bits and performances are just as important to the shows as the host's own commentary and content--both satirical and serious--on social issues and current events. News satire shows such as The Daily News Show with Jon Stewart  and The Colbert Report had already popularized the genre before HBO started airing Oliver’s show each Sunday, but Oliver--who was a writer and occaisional stand-in host for Stewart--has gained some celebrity in his own right based on the content of his shows.

“Comedians mock our cultural and political institutions on TV all the time.” Victor Luckerson wrote in an article for TIME, “But it’s not every day that a comic’s jokes crash a government website or directly inspire legislators to push for new laws.”

The typical Last Week Tonight episode goes as follows. Oliver recaps the week, laced with snarky jokes and humor (example). Then Oliver delves into the main part of the show that focuses on a particular issue such as the death penalty, the legitimacy of scientific studies and doping. Although the topics Oliver focuses on are sometimes grim and controversial, Oliver still manages to bring sketches, jokes and analogies that tastefully lighten the mood and dispels negative emotion through laughter.

One example of this was in Oliver’s opening moments of a segment on abortion, in which he addressed Americans who were against abortion under all circumstances, “Frankly, you are excused from watching the rest of this, but do rejoin us at 11:29 because once I’m done talking about this we’ll all be watching a video featuring a bucket of sloths and I promise you it is almost violently delightful.”

During the segment Oliver ran soundbites and referenced stories about the difficulties of state abortion laws, many of which were meant to invoke a sense of sadness or anger as a way to persuade viewers on paying attention to abortion policy issues going on in the country. Yet, not only did Oliver mock politicians for their policies, he delivered on his promise at the end of the show by showing the sloth video and showing a real sloth in the studio.

Humor has always been used to give social commentary (“Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon,” Lady Augusta Blackwell chided in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “Only people who cannot get into it do that”). The humorous appeals Oliver makes to offset the tension or heavy emotion in his segments might be a bit ridiculous, but that just makes Oliver seem that more appealing. He’s able to appear like he knows the issues and his sense of humor lightens the mood and makes audiences more open to what he has to say.

With that in mind, having such a command over his audience has led to what Luckerson called “The John Oliver Effect.” This effect was felt when the FCC website servers crashed after Oliver urged them to engage with the regulatory body regarding net neutrality. About two days after Oliver criticized Miss America Organization assertion that it is the largest provder of scholarships for women, one of the organizations John Oliver mentioned, the Society of Women Engineers, received $25,000 in donations. When Oliver established his own church to exploit how easy it is for televagelists to take money from people, he received $70,000 from “church-member” contributions that he ultimately donated to Doctors Without Borders. Luckerson also attributes Oliver’s segment on civil forefeiture as the reason why Attorney General Eric Holder would enact limitations on the law.

Even though Oliver’s show is news satire, the reach and impact of some of his shows--such as where he roasted Trump and “Donald Drumpf” became a popular search term--is the kind that many journalists aspire to have. Many of the segments on his show are well-researched, as well; according to NPR he has four researchers on his team with journalism backgrounds.

But as Oliver said himself in that same piece, he has a firm opinion on whether his work can actually be considered journalism:

No. There's a pretty simple answer to that. No, it is not. No, we are a comedy show so everything we do is in pursuit of comedy. ... It's confusing to me somehow the fact that this is often the line of questioning. ... It almost makes me feel like, when people say: "This is journalism," it almost makes me feel like: Am I a terrible comedian? ... Is it like looking at a sculptor and saying: "Well it's not art, so are you trying to build a wall? What exactly are you working on here?"

As a journalism major, I don’t consider his work as journalism in the traditional sense, where many of his presentations, it can be argued, are skewed with a liberal bias. I do, however, know that what journalism looks like changes all the time (in the old days, for instance, a journalist would write “this reporter” when referencing himself or herself, but today it’s acceptable to use “I” and “me”). Perhaps Oliver's brand of comedy will become an acceptable way of receiving the news, especially now that newspapers are undergoing massive changes...and much for the worse.

But while his work isn’t traditional journalism, it seems to me that Oliver’s show puts a slightly higher emphasis on “news” in “news satire” than some of his contemporaries. Instead of merely reacting to the week’s news cycle, Oliver delves into issues and hosts a show that gives at least the impression of being extremely well-researched. And regardless of Oliver’s intentions, the result of mixing an in-depth look at journalism with humor makes people more open to taking in the information and reacting to it--which they are, to the tune of millions each week.

Perhaps I should take a class on how to be a comedian. “The Carreon Effect” has a nice ring to it.