if i do, then that s fair game for comedy too. john oliver has come out of the jon stewart mold of a very specific sense of humor. he does cover a lot of week s topics from his point of view then turns the show into one topic. which is kind of great. because no one is doing one form like that. our main topic tonight terns concerns debt. i would like to talk to you about drugs. our main story tonight is income in equality. a good way to figure out which side you re on is to figure out if you re paying for hbo or stealing it. comedy is way to tell people s attention while you tell them important truths. i m not saying the irs is an likable organization, but not everything important the solution. but not everything important is popular. you need that thing working together or everything goes to [ bleep ] real quick. the comic has become the person who pulls back the curtain to shot world that
monologue jokes about the front page. it s whatever dave wants to do. sometimes it seems like a cable access show, like why is he throwing a watermelon off the building? i think that s an important consideration for all of us. and believe me, ma am, you ve come to the right place. you don t tune into letterman to see what s going on in the country today. would you have tuned into jay to see that. that s the difference. character and personality, then a great joke teller. if you don t like who dave has on and you don t like who i have on, now you can click around, why don t we go back to jay? gee, here s something i might have missed. i found they both evolved their style. they came out of the carson thing and first instinct is to kinda sorta do it like that and then their personalities emerge and they did their own versions of it. the host plays with the structure. but you need the structure. without it, you don t have comedy. people like when they know what the rules are. th
well, they i m a interpretation. a comedic interpretation. to be informed. they actually think that they re coming closer to the truth with your now that s different thing. that s credibility. he was able to show you and make you hear what you wish you would have thought of. oh, man, why didn t i think of that? or, that s hilarious, i never thought of it like that. he grew a stronger and stronger conscience then felt a responsibility i think to carry it out. but he always slammed a huge joke in there. nothing will change with the same people, the same policy that is got us into this status quo. another latin word, status quo, and it stands for, man, the middle class, everyday americans are really getting taken for a ride. that s the kind of talk you normally hear right before the pharmacist says, ma am, you ve got to leave the walgreens. it wasn t really about politics, it was about moral outrage. that s what made the show so
institutions, and that s why it s important for you to do your show tonight. can we be funny? why start now? it was that saturday night we decided, okay, you know, we re going to be able to do this again. and they slowly brought us through it. i think it s one of the finest moments in snl history. live from new york, it s saturday night! right after 9/11, i had to fly to new york to roast hugh heffner for comedy central. and we didn t know what was going to happen. the question becomes, how do you go about joking again, right? you re living in too-soon territory. the one and only gilbert gottfried. tragedy and comedy are roommates. if you joke about a tragedy, you re kind of beating the tragedy away. so i did a joke, i said, today
how do you begin deciding you re going to be different? make no mistake about it, i will be fired from this job. it s just matter of how long it will take. i don t know, i don t really i don t think you can invent anything altogether new. i m sure you ve heard angelina jolie filed for divorce from brad pitt and of course all the celebrity gossip magazines are claiming victory. you know they broke this story. they broke the story every week for the last 11 years. over and over and over again. there are certain things that i don t think will ever go away. people are always going to want to hear jokes about the news of the day. this is very exciting for me. i didn t really watch late-night television before i started doing it. then i didn t watch it when i was doing it. i just did things to entertain myself. it s a great day for america! one of the real problems with broadcast television is trying to make a show, you know, which was a broadcast, which was okay for everybod