It’s Been a Busy Week
You remember when you prayed to the ticking classroom clock that the teacher wouldn’t call on you to give your oral book report because not only hadn’t you not read The Red Badge of Courage, you weren’t even sure what war it was about? But then they did, and so you desperately and incoherently filled your allotted time with vaguely off-topic stammering and the odd, half-finished personal anecdote in hopes that either the teacher will take pity and just tell you to sit your unprepared ass down, or that there’ll be an earthquake or some other conveniently time natural disaster?
Well, imagine you’re a candidate for the highest office in the world, and you’ve built your three presidential campaigns on nothing but pandering to racism-fueled, internet-addicted white bigots who will swallow any nonsense you give them as long as you attack the people they hate and/or are terrified of. And further imagine you’ve accepted an invitation to a Q&A at an organization—say, the Economic Club of New York—that you just know is going to be expecting coherent, well thought-out policy agendas for issues they care about. You might reasonably expect a question about your proposed administration’s child health care plan, right?
As John Oliver showed on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, the resulting completely off-the-rails word goulash that Donald Trump came out with on that very occasion was so egregiously nonsensical that Oliver warned his audience ahead of time that he was going to play the whole cringe-worthy disaster in its entirety. And then he did. Noting the smattering of applause after Trump shuddered to a stop like a poorly maintained carnival ride, Oliver said that the chilling sound was like “the public speaking equivalent of an audience faking an orgasm,” and it truly was almost that humiliating for all involved.
All of this is to say that John Oliver continues to agree that the current Republican Party is a refuge for half-bright weirdos who, when tasked with relating to anyone outside of the GOP’s MAGA bubble of seething hatred and self-delusion, turn into babbling bing-bongs who sound like A.I.’s first attempts at infiltrating humanity with deeply offputting robots.
Oliver, having taken a few weeks off, couldn’t let Trump’s chosen Vice Presidential synth-bot’s excruciating trip to the world’s least-impressed donut merchants or his similarly embarrassing attempt at fist-bumping “regular folk” on a AUW picket line pass Last Week Tonight by.
He did, however, dig up a clip of Vance trying his hand at stand-up comedy, showing the woefully unconfident Vance warming up a sparse crowd with the promise of “a joke I heard that I thought was pretty funny recently” before his killer “Kamala Harris is a shrew” punchline. Talking shop, actual comedian Oliver helpfully suggested scrapping the prosaic build up and “mak[ing] sure that what you say next is funny, and also an actual joke.” Sadly, even Oliver’s lead-in about those viral “I voted” stickers couldn’t erase the soul-crushing thought of anyone voting for either of these wholly weird people, even if one little kid’s awesome lizard man drawing gives it the old lizard-man try.
Our Main Story Tonight
Speaking of awful, embarrassing, potentially psyche-scarring things that happen at school, Oliver’s main story took on school lunches.
No, not the only half-apocryphal memories of mystery meat, rectangular pizza slices that are both burned and somehow cold, and—Oliver being British—presumably some manner of jellied organ meat pudding. Instead, Oliver took on school lunch as ideological battleground between those who feel that children forced to attend government-run schools should be entitled to some sort of free or low-cost sustenance, and the Republicans who think it’s socialism to make sure poor kids get something in their bellies.
Before getting into the meat of the matter (see what we did there?), Oliver first took to task those all too willing to take potshots at the hard-working school lunch employees whose freezers are necessarily stocked with frozen, sometimes pre-made meals. People like celebrity chef Jamie (somehow no relation) Oliver, whose out-of-touch outrage at the spectacle of industrial walk-ins filled with admittedly unappetizing-looking ingredients (John) Oliver could only cringe at while asking, “I know I have a British accent, and my name is almost his name, and I have a show where I essentially tell America that it’s doing everything wrong, but—am I like that? Please tell me that I’m not like that.” As Oliver continued in mocking elitists’ calls for underpaid, overworked, underfunded but caring school lunch workers to whip up hundreds of government-scrutinized meals each day from only the finest of locally grown, handmade ingredients, “Reality is a hell of a sous chef.”
The thing is that John (not Jamie) Oliver, while labeling his show as It’s Always Something, With White Urkel, isn’t in the business of easy jokes at easy targets. No, this Oliver is in the business of making very funny, pointedly mean (sometimes easy) jokes directed at real issues while providing first outrage and then practical ways forward. (That’s how you win all those Emmys.) And for Oliver, the statement “Feeding children is good,” is both self-evident and illuminatingly complex in practice.
Delving into the way that both state and federal governments’ seemingly arbitrary thresholds under which kids can receive reduced cost or free lunches predictably run up against very real human needs and suffering, and how the reasons why some families avoid participating in such reduced-cost programs are many and complex, Oliver kicked things off with some signature public shaming himself.
Weirdly (and there’s that word again), most of the lawmakers railing against the creeping decency of food for kids come from one political party. (See if you can guess which one! The answer… will not surprise you!)
There’s North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx (of “Shut up about us trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election!” fame, shown claiming that the by-any-measure wildly successful pandemic-era rules allowing all students access to school lunches should be rescinded. As Oliver noted, Foxx’s dead-eyed complaint that “aid should be targeted and temporary” sounds like what a Ronald Reagan action figure says when you pull its string. (Alongside, “Ketchup is a vegetable” and something, something “welfare queens.”)
And then there’s Minnesota’s Steve Drazkowski, who is shown campaigning against current Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’s widely-lauded gubernatorial policy of giving free lunch to all school kids by claiming he’s never met a single person who was hungry. (John Oliver calling Drawkowski “Chris Parnell’s evil midwestern twin ” will live on long after the right-wing lawmaker’s career ends.)
Naturally, Oliver being Oliver, simply wagging a finger at Republicans (oops, gave away the answer there) for trying to paint their delight in trampling the disadvantaged as adherence to their pinched and stingy vision of American exceptionalism isn’t the whole point of the story. (It’s fun and accurate, sure, but he’s got bigger fish to fry.)
Oliver brought research showing that all this “we should provide food to children we’re forcing to spend eight hours in a place they desperately don’t want to be” provides tangible benefits for kids (who perform better when they aren’t starving), teachers (who teach more effectively when kids aren’t starving), and caring school personnel who, in several heart-wrenching testimonials, related having to tell their students that the pandemic-enacted free lunch laws were going to expire.
Since we’re calling out Scrooge-like Republicans, Oliver gave equal time to a St. Paul, Minnesota teacher named Mandi Jung, whose story of watching her students realize they were no longer guaranteed something to eat each day is as heartbreaking as Oliver’s assessment of how kick-ass a teacher Jung is is spot-on. (You just know her field trips mean you’re going to get to touch some dinosaur bones.)
Oliver also took time to state unequivocally that those “a five-year-old raised money to erase classmates’ lunch debt” human interest stories aren’t the heartwarming anecdotes vapid local newspeople keep insisting they are. “I mean, it’s amazing,” conceded Oliver of the smiling little girl who begged for donations so her friends could eat without shame, “but she shouldn’t have to do it.”
Oliver did some further shaming himself, targeted at the very concept of “school lunch debt” policies that see hungry poor kids given substandard alternative meals, being put to work at menial labor to earn some food, banning kids from school activities, or even having their flesh stamped to signify that their family can’t afford daily school lunches.
And then there’s the Wyoming Valley West School District, which sent letters to families threatening to have their kids put into foster care because of accruing lunch debts, overt threats that the school committee’s head reluctantly admitted (when put in front of news cameras), “could have been toned down a notch.” As Oliver noted with a helpful graphic, the district’s computers could have benefitted from some sort of automated warning program whenever officials there were about to put something cartoonishly heartless out into the world.
(Oliver also cited a Massachusetts study showing that a large percentage of school kids there passed on accepting free meals they were entitled to if they knew that classmates were being excluded. Sometimes it’s clear that we do not deserve the kids we have.)
As far as solutions go, Oliver noted that we already have one. And while the concept of “universal free meals” (like the one signed into law by Tim Walz) sends Republicans screaming “Socialism!!” like it’s the imaginary Mexican boogeyman living under their beds, Oliver explained that we’ve already enacted it.
Out of pandemic necessity, all students got free lunch, nobody was tasked with proving they “deserved” to eat, and nobody got stigmatized for getting a complimentary meal. Test scores went up, kids’ stress went down, and no educators were forced to explain to a hungry kid why their Republican lawmakers don’t think they deserve some damned chicken nuggets.
Are there costs? Sure. This is good old capitalism, after all. But Oliver cites experts’ conclusions that the benefits far outweigh the expenses, both in reduced administrative expenditures and in refuting the idea that poor kids are destined to perform worse academically because if God wanted them to eat, their parents would be rich.
John Oliver is never more convincing that when he gets pissed off, and the sight of hungry children provided fuel for his succinctly stirring closing. After suggesting that we should consider school lunch as essential a school supply as subsidized desks and books, Oliver’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:
In speaking to experts for this story, many said that before 2020, they thought universal free meals would be incredibly beneficial—and it would also never happen. America just doesn’t do that sort of thing. But then it did happen. And seemingly overnight. And in this one particular area, Americans got to experience what is was like to have the federal government be responsive to the needs of the vulnerable. And once you see what it looks like to help kids, you kind of can’t un-ring that bell. In fact, you should keep ringing it so f**king hard, the rope comes off in your hands. Because we have the power to ensure that no kid in this country is hungry when school gets dismissed.
See, that’s what happens when you do the reading.
And Now This…
In the ambitious meal that is each Last Week Tonight main story, John Oliver always provides a silly little sorbet to help the harsh truths go down. There were two interstitial stories plucked from the chattering depths of TV programming tonight, with the first centering on a guy on the former Home Shopping Network (“HSN?” C’mon, you’re not fooling anybody) named Steve Little whose shall we say colorful life seemingly involves a truly alarming number of violent traffic altercations. Even more alarming, said run-ins with a school bus, lobster truck(?), and “the only hill in Florida” have left Little reusing his personal traumas as sort of home shopping catchphrases. Presumably, buying the products he’s selling will help Little get the help he needs.
Last Week’s Tonight‘s graphics department had some fun with the final segment, where local news anchors took bold stances on whether or not it’s too early to put up those massive plastic skeleton Halloween decorations.
Some said yes, some said no, but the staunchly pro-decoration voice-over made its feeling clear, responding to one skeptical weatherman’s pooh-poohing opinion with the caption, “Just do the f**king forecast, Brad!!”
Oliver was soundly pro-decoration, as evidenced by his desk suddenly appearing festooned with every manner of plastic bat and pumpkin the props department could find. Fun size candy bars for everyone!
Cardus Endus
The final credits card tonight was dedicated to Anna Sorokin, sorry, Anna Delvey, the pseudonym chosen by the infamous scammer whose exploits infiltrating New York’s upper crust under the false pretense of being a wealthy European trust fund socialite have made her a star. Sorokin/Delvey’s story was told in the Shonda Rhimes-produced miniseries Inventing Anna, while the real(?) Delvey/Sorokin will compete on the next season of Dancing With the Stars. The moral: Crime may pay, but you’re going to wind up on reality TV.
Last Lines Tonight
“You can’t just move up Christmas to distract from your sh*tty politics. You’re not Hobby Lobby.”
On Venezuelan dictator Nicolás maduro trying to distract from his stolen election win with a holiday stunt
“I’m not sure I’d describe any part of JD Vance as ‘rock-hard.’ Unless of course, he was in a West Elm showroom.”
On Trump refuting the “weird” label by referring to himself and his VP pick as “rock-hard”
“Kids are picky. Whole new foods are created to combat that. Go-Gurt only exists because some kid was like, ‘Over my dead body will I eat yogurt with a spoon. I’d like it to come out of plastic esophagus,” and the market complied.”
On the eternal griping over the contents of school lunches
“Kids clearly should not be refraining from eating for financial reasons. They should be refusing to eat for one of the multitude of standard kid reason such as, ‘That food looks weird,’ ‘It’s too hot outside,’ ‘It’s too cold outside,’ or, ‘I saw a bird.'”
see above
“Anything is more appealing if you know there’s gonna be food there. A work meeting, a wedding, even giving blood. You think I’m doing that out of altruism? Where else can a grown man drink apple juice and drink little cookie packs free of judgement. Drain me, Nurse Gwen. Drain me, but keep the Lorna Doones coming.”
just some solid wisdom right there
