A rare peek at the genesis of John Oliver‘s late-night career has been unearthed.
60 Minutes aired footage from Oliver’s 2006 audition for The Daily Show Sunday night as part of a profile of the now-Last Week Tonight host, revealing the young comic bantering with host Jon Stewart in what would become one of his last moments of pre-TDS fame.
As Oliver recounted in The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History, his audition came about after Ricky Gervais suggested his name to TDS producers, who had decided to look overseas for potential new correspondents.
“I checked in to the Hudson Hotel and the next day walked to the Daily Show office,” he said. “I ate at Applebee’s, thinking it was kind of a local diner, and then read a couple of chats in the studio with Jon.”
As shown on 60 Minutes, one of those chats found Oliver (name mispelled as “Jon” Oliver) credited as a “Vice-Presidential Firearms Mishap Analyst,” reacting to the news that then-vice president Dick Cheney had shot his friend in the face while quail hunting.
60 Minutes unearthed footage from John Oliver's 2006 Daily Show audition for its profile of the Last Week Tonight host last night. pic.twitter.com/JqomH7HCRZ
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) February 24, 2025
“I’m sure those right now those birds are laughing maniacally at us in one of those little coveys of theirs,” Oliver rants in the tap. “Whatever it is that they do: warble, tweet, coo” he corrects. “They’re cooing us right now, Jon.”
Oliver’s lines were from a segment that originally aired on The Daily Show months earlier, with correspodent Rob Corddry in the Oliver role.
“I never really thought this was going to end up in anything other than a free day trip to New York, which seemed good enough for me,” Oliver says in the TDS oral history. Instead, they offered him the job on the spot.
“Afterward, Jill Katz spoke to me and said, ‘You should call your agent because you got the job,’” Oliver recalled. “I called my manager and he said, ‘Well, you need to sign a lease for somewhere. Don’t sign anything longer than four weeks, because you’ll get fired.’”
Oliver went on to spend seven years on The Daily Show, including a breakout summer in which he served as guest host—and was even Jon Stewart’s top choice to replace him upon retirement. Oliver wound up departing the show in 2013 to host Last Week Tonight for HBO, which just began its twelfth season.
