HBO’s John Oliver says Trump was not good for late-night comedy

Oliver and his New York-based staff each week mount a journalism program disguised as a comedy show, or the other way around. (Upon granting a Peabody award to the series several years ago, organizers at the University of Georgia lauded Oliver’s flair “for bringing satire and journalism even closer together.”)

Episodes last season drew as many asa million viewers on HBO upon their debut Sunday nights and could pick up 10 million views or more on social platforms — suggesting that in a relentless news cycle, late-night might function best not with daily installments or free-floating streaming shows but in the sweet spot between of a weekly telecast.

The pandemic has sent Oliver into the “blank void” — remote productions far from his usual live audience and in-studio antics. But the show has maintained its relevance, in the fall winning the Emmy for outstanding variety talk series for a fifth straight year. Oliver, who ended his seventh season in November by “blowing up” 2020, returns with a new season Sunday. The Washington Post talked with him by Zoom. (The conversation has been lightly edited for brevity.)

So it’s been a quiet few months since you last had a show.

Run of the mill, really.

What did you think as you were watching the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6? Besides “I wish I was on the air right now.”

It was kind of the opposite of that, actually. I was really glad not to be on the air. Because sometimes it’s nice not to have to fiddle while Rome burns.

What did cross your mind?

The initial reactions along the lines of “this just seems unimaginable.” Which just seems … not accurate. It’s not just actively imaginable — it was literally predictable. “It’s unimaginable” comes from a place of such naive, willfully blind comfort. It’s dangerous to think “this could not happen here” when we all watched in real time the buildup to exactly that.

Are we equally naive then in your view to think we’re out of the woods now [in terms of unrest]?

Of course. The dangerous thing is the optimistic reaction Biden tends to have a lot, which is “this is not who were are.” You understand why he says that because it makes people feel better. But it probably makes them feel a little too much better. Because the tenth time you say “this is not who we are” it might be a little bit who we actually are.

Some suggest with Trump out of office a time of disquiet has passed. Yet in many ways it feels like it’s just beginning — the contretemps over Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments recently, for example.

There’s going to be a long tail to that process and I think it will become clearer and clearer the extent to which he [Trump] has set a new course for the Republican Party. It’s not just Marjorie Taylor Greene — there’s plenty of other people with very dangerous views. But the idea that we’re closing a chapter of American history — that’s just not how history works. Those chapters tend not to exist in [expletive] isolation.

What’s going to be your approach on Trump now — do you want the show to lean in to anything he does? Or is it your belief that will be giving him what he wants?

That was always the internal calculation you made with him as president. He’s a guy who wants attention more than anything else. So it’s working out “when is it irresponsible to give him that attention” and “when is it actively irresponsible to ignore him.” We managed to keep the body of our show intact from him most of the time. We spend weeks on our main story. So for us there were key calculations in “do we still do what we’re planning to do or do we respond to what he’s just done?” The majority of time was let’s keep going. There were definitely moments when it was “no, we’re going to throw that show out.” A really visceral example was his reaction to Jamal Khashoggi being murdered. It felt like there was nothing else that week.

I think the calculation will be similar when he’s out of office. When is it a good idea to ignore him? Which will be a lot of the time. And when would it be reckless not to address what just happened. But I’m hoping he’ll be a significantly diminished figure — [I hope] that both as a human being and as someone who writes comedy.

It’s funny, I asked Steve Bodow, your former colleague at “The Daily Show,” about what it would mean for late-night comedians not to have Trump in office, and he said they’d not only be “politically and patriotically happier, but they’ll be comedically happier.” The idea that late-night wants what Trump provides, he says, is a myth.

It’s a complete myth and it’s kind of genuinely insulting. [Laughs] Wow, how little do you think of me? Because partly it comes from “oh, it must’ve written itself.” Really? You [expletive] think that? You try injecting poison into your body every week and get a joke out the other side that Twitter hasn’t already come up with. The happiest I was at the end of last year was we finished our final show and started working on our new list of shows. And it was just great to be able to think about wonky stories.

Trump so much wanted to make every story about him. He’s often not the key part of every story; the systemic problems underneath were there before him and will remain after him. That gets to your point — it’s the danger of thinking we closed that chapter. Not really.

What might some of those problems and wonky stories be?

The long gestating problems this virus has shone a spotlight on that have been ignored for a long time. Human history has shown we’re pretty adept at choosing to forget about them again as soon as it’s convenient. So I think the virus will be an interesting hook into some interesting stories this year.

Because it touches on everything — health care, racial inequity, class inequity.

And even our division. What a virus needs more than anything else is a collective effort, and at the best of times America has an individualistic side, which is not particularly suited to that. And right now it’s, of course, even worse because it’s being politicized. The virus touches every side of human life and has exposed all the weaknesses of American society.

From an entertainment-consumption standpoint, what’s something you think will be very different at the end of this? Or are we going to go back to exactly how things were?

It’s so hard to project, because to go back a year is to go back to a different world. I haven’t seen my staff in nearly a year. I haven’t heard human laughter since mid-March. The thing I can’t imagine is being in front of an audience. I can’t imagine how that’s going to feel. But it’s so hard to project what the other side of this will look like. Especially because systemically and politically, a return to normal is not what we should be aiming for.

You blew up 2020 in your last episode in November. Are you ready to blow up 2021 yet? Or give it another month?

Give it a chance, give it a chance. If you had asked me that about 2020 this time last year I’d probably have said, “yeah, maybe.” But I wouldn’t have known why yet. It’s the finding out why you’re angry at a year, that’s the joy, isn’t it?