-Our first guest tonight is the Emmy- and Peabody-winning host
of HBO's "Last Week Tonight."
You can stream the seventh season s--
seventh season on HBO.
John, I'm going to show you the cue card Wally wrote.
He wrote "season" twice. On HBO Max.
Please welcome back to the show our friend John Oliver.
-Hello, there. -Give me that card, Wally.
John heard that and I want him to see.
Now, again, I should have known not to say "season" twice,
but I do want you to see.
-Sure, but you went full Ron Burgundy, and we just --
The only thing you're guilty of is trusting Wally too much.
[ Laughter ] -It's true.
-And on that point, you are guilty of murder.
[ Laughter ]
-How are you, my friend?
-You know, alright.
-You're in, again -- I talked about how jealous I am
that you cracked early on to shoot your show in a void.
-That's right.
-And then we all came back and you stayed in the void.
-Nope. -You love the void.
-I love it. I love the emotional
antiseptic atmosphere that this void provides.
It also lets nothing in.
Nothing -- Nothing from my life.
It's just a completely sterile environment.
-You did have a fantastic season finale.
You blew up 2016, four years ago.
-Yes. Yes. -And then this year,
you blew up 2020, which, arguably, deserved it more.
-Yes. -Which is hard to believe.
-Which is why we went with a significantly bigger explosion.
-And how does it go -- how does it come about
when you're trying to figure out how to have a bigger explosion?
-Well, it was -- literally, it was just asking
explosives experts, saying, "How would you make this bigger?"
And they would kind of go, "Hmm, I don't know.
I guess a lot of gasoline." That makes sense.
[ Laughter ]
I'm not even sure you needed to be an expert to say,
"Just more gasoline," and that's basically it.
That's how explosions work.
But yes, we went and did that in a quarry in New York,
and it was absolutely amazing.
It was an utterly staggering --
I was a little bit cocky, having done it four years ago.
I said to the guy -- He said, "Look, this is going to be
really big and it's going to be loud."
I said, "Yeah, you said that four years ago
and it wasn't that bad."
And he looked at me with total contempt and said,
"Yeah, this ain't four years ago."
[ Laughter ]
So then it happened, and he said, to his credit, he said,
"Look, this is going to -- it's going to feel very hot
and then for about a second and a half,
you're going to feel like you're on fire."
[ Laughter ] And he was right about that.
And that second and a half felt long.
Because you get to a second, you think, "I definitely feel --
I don't have a point of reference, but this,
I feel pretty on fuego right now.
And then they were all really, really impressed
I didn't flinch, to the point that they were so surprised,
it became actively hurtful.
Just one after one, "I can't believe it!
I can't believe --" not even -- not even --
They even went to the monitor afterwards, saying, "Look!"
They're gathered around. "Look, he didn't! He didn't!"
As if -- I guess when you present as a coward so much,
it leaves you with a lot of upside
for courage because people expect so little.
They were all on the edge. It's like, "I expected you
to just curl up, like, in a fetal position.
You didn't cry once!"
[ Laughter ]
"Like the child we anticipate that you are inside."
-I was very impressed as well.
Knowing you were physically there, I was very impressed.
-It was loud. I was very brave.
I deserved a "wollipop" and I didn't get one.
[ Laughter ]
-I might have -- I might have gone fetal,
and I'm embarrassed to say it, if we were about to embark on
four more years of covering a Trump presidency.
And we texted a little bit.
You actually got to be the first show post the election call,
which was on a Saturday. -Yeah.
-And you got to do that show --
-When we were texting, I was about to go and do rehearsal.
And yeah, you said to me something like,
"I honestly haven't thought about what I'd do if he won."
And I had not -- Until you sent that text,
I hadn't thought about it either.
And it really was -- There is no more joyful feeling than
the sound of a bullet whizzing past your ear, is there?
[ Laughter ]
-How was it? Was it --
-Everything smells better, food tastes better, yeah.
-We've talked in the past about how people will say,
"Oh, my God, the Trump era, the comedy writes itself," which...
-Mm-hmm. -...neither you or I would --
-They do [bleep] say that, don't they, Seth?
[ Laughter ] -They still say it.
-They do [bleep] say that. They do say that.
If they were trying to hurt you, it wouldn't matter as much.
Then you would internalize, say, "Oh, you want to be me.
You said something that you know distresses me.
Congratulations."
It's the genuine question that pisses me off far, far more,
and you know it's coming a lot now.
-Well, you do seem well-equipped for the next era because --
And I mean this sincerely.
You've done such a good job of finding
insanely depressing things that have nothing to do
with Donald Trump over the years.
-Yeah. There's so many of them.
-And there's still plenty of that.
-There are so many gigantic systemic problems
that I cannot w-- we had genuinely one of
the happiest moments I've had this year, as being --
at the end of last week, we were talking to research,
and we were going through stories for the upcoming year,
and there was such a smorgasbord of human misery,
just a bunch of subjects that no one in their right mind
would try and make comedy out of.
And I just felt great thinking, "This is -- This is --
Look at what we're going to be able to --"
it's -- I think that's why it feeds into how frustrating it is
when people say, "This must have been fun writing for Trump."
Because it's basically like saying to the residents of
Elm Street, "You're going to miss Freddy Krueger, aren't you?
What are you going to dream about now?"
I don't know. Anything else! [ Laughter ]
Literally, my imagination can run
the gamut of human experience.
No, I'm not going to miss Freddy, you [bleep] [bleep]!
[ Laughter ]
-We'll be right back with more from John Oliver.