It’s Been a Busy Week
But then again, aren’t they all busy weeks now?
That’s part of John Oliver’s theme in this, the final Last Week Tonight episode of 2024. For those who’ve come to rely on Oliver and his crew for an improbably hilarious source of truly terrible news big and small, the realization that we’ll be without the show until February 2025 hit hard. After all, there’s nobody better than John Oliver at distracting you with exuberant nonsense while simultaneously jabbing you with painful but necessary information.
And yet here we are.
Oliver, perhaps sensing that loyal viewers needed something a littlelighter to cap off a season in which he did eight main stories about the now inevitable dangers of a second Trump presidency, merely nodded toward the week’s big Trump news. You know, how the incoming president has been fishing his cabinet nominees out of a festering sewer so deep and disgusting that tomorrow’s news will more than likely see Pennywise the Dancing Clown named Secretary of What’s in Your Closet.
There’s RFK Jr., the dangerously worm-brained anti-vaxxer idiot poised to supervise all medical science and healthcare. There’s evangelical buffoon Mike Huckabee becoming Ambassador to Israel, despite his open enmity to Palestinians and his staunchly held belief that Israel is only necessary for his end-of-the-world prophecy to sweep it into hell. There’s the Homeland Security pick Kristi Noem, presumably preparing drone strikes against your dog for not bringing your slippers fast enough. And the Fox News B-teamer whose documented history of paying off sexual assault accusers, white supremacist tattoos, defending war criminals, and denigrating LGBTQ+ and women service members all vied for Trump’s favor with the fact that the now Secretary of Defense pick routinely smooched Trump’s butt through the tee-vee.
In the blighted aftermath of an election where the single worst human being in America was elected president—again—by a distinct (if shrinking with too-late vote counts) majority of American voters, it’s tough to credit TV satire with having much impact. After all, John Oliver and his late-night colleagues have all, to a greater or Jimmy Fallon degree, spent the last decade coming up with humorous ways to remind viewers that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy. Plus: a twice-impeached traitor, an obvious Russian asset, a legally determined rapist and credibly accused sex creep dozens of times over, a lifelong grifter who’s somehow managed to bankrupt several businesses whose entire business model is “the house always wins,” and a laughably narcissistic clown whose role in the Bo Derek-starring erotic drama Ghosts Can’t Do It remains the 426th most embarrassing thing about him.
And then there’s Matt Gaetz, former Florida congressman, pal to Holocaust deniers everywhere, and Trump’s pick for Attorney General. Oliver stresses the “former,” since Gaetz this week resigned his position right before a House Ethics Committee report about his drug-addled career as a sexual predator of underage girls was scheduled to some out. As an aside, a system of justice sucks when the subject of an investigation can just pop an escape hatch whenever the heat is about to come down.
Yes, Gaetz is the guy that Donald Trump, surveying all of the greatest legal minds in America, decided should be in charge of the nation’s law enforcement. Naturally, Trump’s “family values” supporters in and out of Congress have derided Trump’s choice and called into question their thrice-divorced, serial adulterer leader’s judgement and—naw, just screwing with you. House Speaker Mike Johnson has scrambled to suppress the report (which someone in Congress should be leaking… now).
All this leaves the departing Oliver to once more flog a scoundrel with nimbly delivered insults. Noting that Matt Gaetz in high school was voted “Most Likely to Not Be Allowed Within 500 Feet of Here” is a good burn, but it’s not as worthy of possible HBO legal interference as Oliver not—and he repeats not—claiming that “Matt Geatz is just Jeffrey Epstein if he went to sh*ttier beaches.” Still, even Oliver had to bow to one environmental spokesperson claiming, “Luckily, all our environmental laws are older than 18 years so Representative Gaetz shouldn’t have much interest in them.” Damnn, environmental group spokesperson.
Our Main Story Tonight
Instead of delving down into that aforementioned sewer of Trump sycophants and encroaching authoritarian farce, Oliver did one of his main story pivots, revealing that his last main story of 2024 would take on TikTok. Now some may question why the app, with its viral dances and undeniably riveting videos of chocolatiers making what until the last moment appear to be giant chocolate dicks did to earn Last Week Tonight‘s 2024 capper.
Well, as Oliver notes, the move to ban the immensely popular (especially with the under-30’s) video platform by the U.S. government is a thorny, complicated, and especially telling indictment of everything from tech industry double standards to political hypocrisy, to plain old racism. There’s nobody John Oliver likes to expose more than Arkansas Senator and “persistent piece of sh*t” Tom Cotton, which he did here with a clip of Cotton badgering impossibly restrained Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about his national origin. Because all Asians are Chinese? Because all Chinese people are evil? You’d have to hack your way through Tom Cotton’s headful of bigotry and stolen valor to find out, and nobody has that sort of time.
Yes, TikTok’s parent company is Chinese. And while Oliver notes that there are definitely concerns about a one-party dictatorship being beholden to the whims of an unstable leader who may wake up on the wrong side of the bed and order the government ot enact illegal, capricious vengeance on his political enemies, well, thank god that could never happen in America, right? (Oh, Donald Trump, who signed an ultimately overturned 2020 executive order unilaterally banning TikTok now says he’s the app’s biggest fan, since young voters love it and because, as he puts it, “I’m now a big star on TikTok.”)
But seriously, Oliver notes that the bipartisan Senate bill ordering TikTok to either sell or be shut down in America (with a January 19, 2025 deadline) addressed concerns that the app was both tracking users personal information (IP address, location, facial and voice recognition, contacts) to an insidious degree and that its alarmingly sophisticated algorithm was using that information to feed users propaganda. Sounds pretty scary.
Except (and there’s always a damned except with you, Oliver), TikTok’s data-gathering is exactly as pervasive as that used by literally every American company from Facebook to Instagram to Google to YouTube to freaking Doordash, which leaves American lawmakers looking more than a little xenophobic in their rush to frighten the public with tales of Chinese boogeymen snooping through their freely posted videos about Sonic the Hedgehog’s feet. And as for that spooky algorithm, Oliver shows how anticipating users’ likes and dislikes and feeding them tailored content is online platforms’ bread and butter. Or cookies, if you will. Delicious, insidious bread and butter cookies.
As an aside, Oliver implies that the plethora of young female TikTok users proclaiming that the algorithm correctly sussed out their gayness or bisexuality even before they did might have creepy resonances in a governmental body whose members are being outed for preying on young women. Oliver noted that the app providing content tailored to users’ implied sexual preferences equates to “speed-running people’s sexual awakenings,” thus skipping “years of therapy or an entire episode of Xena:Warrior Princess.”
But back to the China of it all, while Oliver did note how researchers have discovered that topics critical of or controversial to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (Tiananmen Square, Tibet) have been banned or deemphasized on TikTok, he also noted how all-American apps like Facebook and YouTube are equally subject to foreign interference and manipulation. Or, you know, domestic interference, as Oliver reported how Facebook/Meta was caught planting anti-TikTok stories online in an attempt ot pump up its own, far less lucrative TikTok knockoff, Reels. As Oliver put it regarding Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation when caught, “If you get caught shoplifting, the best defense isn’t usually, ‘Hey, that guy did it too—and he’s Chinese!'”
So, racism. hypocrisy, censorship, and good old greed are factors. But what about TikTok’s deceptively innocuous online ubiquity really has U.S. lawmakers so gung-ho to ban their kids’ favorite app? Well, they totally know, but they’re also not going to tell the tens of millions of TikTok users, as Oliver played a montage of politicians assuring us that “classified” information that only they know is behind the looming ban.
The problem with that is that nobody trusts politicians, and with bloody good reason. So much so that teenage TikTok users have been actually using their phones as phones and physically calling their representatives, an act as telling as barnyard animals getting all jittery before an earthquake. “Teens hate doing that,” Oliver noted, “If you ever need to scare one, just hand them a ringing phone and say, ‘It’s for you!!'”
As Oliver concluded, there are lots of questions, and what answers are to be had are tangled up in a xenophobia, corporate and governmental secrecy, money, quick-trigger public hysteria, political opportunism, and probably something to do with Sonic’s feet again. As Oliver notes, Last Week Tonight has a TikTok page, but he himself doesn’t. Partly because he doesn’t fully trust the app, and partly because he is “very old.” It’s an oddly inconclusive way to close out 2024, although with all the ugly certainties we’re facing as part of of post-election daily life these days, maybe sending us off with something to mull over isn’t a bad parting gift.
And Now This…
Speaking of cheering viewers up, the last “And Now This” segment of 2024 reveled in a true douche being sad. Yes, Fox News’ resident (if hardly only) bigot and failed comedian Jesse Watters won’t be coming home for Thanksgiving this year, since his family hates his smirking, insufferable little guts. (Watters brags that he used to make his mother play Rush Limbaugh’s show as she drove him to school, which explains so, so much.)
Now, nobody is saying that taking delight in a genuinely repellent little twerp’s pain at being rejected by his own mommy is noble. But then again, maybe? As Watters told guest after fidgeting guest how it’s totally fine that his family has pointedly not invited him to Thanksgiving this year, it is undeniably fascinating to try to pluck some sense of human regret or sadness from Watters’ perpetual mask of insufferable condescension and contempt. Especially for those of us dreading the prospect of navigating the annual holiday season’s mandatory get-togethers with blood relatives whose views and actions suggest they were switched at birth with particularly bigoted demon-babies.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Cardus Endus
“Johnus Goneus,” indeed, Last Week Tonight.
As noted, perhaps our reliance on clever late-night comics to process the news for us is part of the problem. Maybe we’ve been lulled into a false sense of calm by the ability of people like John Oliver to make us laugh at the absurdity of hatred, bigotry, injustice, and unfairness—and thus to assume that the rest of the country is laughing too.
But screw it. John Oliver’s a damned necessity, if for nothing else than his ability to make the unthinkable not only understandable but also improbably hilarious. Better than any of his peers, Oliver, with his half-hour weekly format, can craft a thoughtful, funny, and deeply human take on issues all too often dispensed with in glibness and misspelled social media posts.
As Oliver noted while wrapping up Season 11 in front of an ominous glowing red countdown ticker reading “Days Without Incident,” bad news never stops. And under a second Trump administration, the clock is going to be reset with soul-fraying frequency. (“Rudy Giuliani named to Supreme Court” is one proposed headline causing Oliver to slam the big red reset button, a fake story just plausible enough to leave viewers on edge.) Perhaps sensing that, Oliver left us with the reassurance that he will be back, and so will Last Week Tonight.
Not that you don’t deserve a rest, you cheeky British weirdo, but do hurry back.
Last Lines Tonight
“I honestly don’t think a machine has been responsible for more sexual awakenings since The Iron Giant. And I’m not explaining myself. I’m not doing it. He’s an objectively hot robot. He’s tall, has kind eyes, he’s objectively great with kids, and I’m sure has a vibrating setting—don’t be weird about this!”
I mean, he’s not wrong
“It’s true, TikTok could be banned by January 19 because it’s a security threat. Which sounds frightening even if those claims were made under footage of this orange furball going to town on its own feet. We cannot let the Chinese get their hands on our private data, like how Dr. Tunafish here gives himself the full Tarantino.”
On the juxtaposition of alarmism and Tiktok’s usual content
“Yeah those are some strong words. Because well know that Congress will not stand by and watch someone pointing a metaphorical gun at Americans’ heads. Actual guns? That’s a complicated issue for some reason. But metaphorical violence will not stand.”
after one lawmaker’s hyperbolic and telling warning about a thing that does not shoot bullets
“And I am not giving TikTok a pass here. I’m just pointing out that its behavior is pretty consistent with Silicon Valley’s own, very sh*tty standards. Think of TikTok as a soft drink company in the 1800’s. Sure, it’s product is mainly cocaine, but hey, show me a child’s beverage that isn’t.”
on the absurdity of singling out one unnervingly invasive online entity over the rest
“Mark Zuckerberg, seen here looking like the chef from Ratatouille trying to pivot to bitcoin…”
on a Tiktok competitor lobbying donald Trump to not look into his own house
“It sounds like Kidz Bop for adults where all the swears are intact but there’s still a deep, lingering sense that music was a mistake.”
On Zuckerberg and T-Pain doing an inexplicable, folk-y cover of Lil John and the East side boyz’s “get Low,” which seems like the only appropriate closing theme to 2024
