John Oliver has apparently never been especially comfortable with the tasteful side of Emmy campaigning. On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, he found a workaround: guns, snakes, tentacles, blood, an explosion, a horse with a human hand, and The Fonz wielding a pickaxe.
The HBO host closed this week’s episode with a ten-minute tribute to Ghanaian movie posters, the wildly imaginative hand-painted art form that grew out of Ghana’s mobile-cinema boom in the 1980s. As Oliver explained, local entrepreneurs would travel from village to village with TVs, VCRs, and generators to screen foreign movies, but because large-scale printing was difficult under the country’s military dictatorship, artists were commissioned to paint their own posters—often on repurposed flour sacks.
That led to posters that were, let’s say, spiritually adjacent to the movies they advertised. Oliver showed examples including a Ghost poster with Whoopi Goldberg’s head bursting through Demi Moore’s body, a Jurassic Park poster featuring a golfer, and a Star Wars poster that somehow included a car crash, exploding torsos, ants, a feral Yoda, and a werewolf.
Naturally, Last Week Tonight wanted in.
Oliver revealed that the show had commissioned a Ghanaian movie poster artist to create an Emmy “For Your Consideration” poster for Last Week Tonight. The show sent over a few images from the past year—including Oliver trying to force his way onto a soap opera, his “wife” Wanda Jo (Rachel Dratch) helping him open a med spa, and a photo of Fuzz E. Mammoth—but otherwise left the artist to improvise.
The result, painted by Ghanaian artist C.A. Wisely and unveiled on the show Sunday night, features Oliver holding not one but two guns, plus a chainsaw slicing through tentacles, snakes, blood, an explosion, the wooden cabbage man statue from the show’s AI slop story, and Henry Winkler’s Happy Days character standing by with a pickaxe.
“I love this painting so much,” Oliver said. “I think we can all agree, it’s an ad for a much more entertaining show than the one you just watched.”
HBO is playing along. Oliver said the network has agreed to put the poster on its digital billboard over Sunset Boulevard this month—but only from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., which he called “the funniest possible time for it to be up there.”
Fans can also buy the poster for themselves through Deadly Prey Gallery, which is dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and continuation of hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters. Archival giclée prints are being sold for $50 at HangJohnOliver.com, with proceeds supporting Ghanaian artists and community-led charities across Ghana.
According to Deadly Prey’s listing, 50% of profits will go directly to the artists the gallery works with in Ghana, while the other 50% will go to the Ghana Community Impact Fund through GlobalGiving.
Watch Oliver’s grand unveiling of the painting from Sunday night’s Last Week Tonight below:
I love your show.
I can’t seem to figure out how to get this poster. Please send me information on how to get it.
By the way as proof I just watched this episode. ” Hi I’m Earl and i in 14 days I’ll be 75 years old ” Keep up the good work 👏