In Conversation: John Oliver

The Last Week Tonight host swears he’s only kidding.

- David Marchese, photos by Martin Schoeller

With Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has found himself in the curious, and enviable, position of hosting a satirical news show that frequently makes news. Whether by setting up a fake church to show the flimsiness of religious tax exemptions, urging viewers to overload the FCC website’s servers with angry comments as a way of calling attention to the end of net neutrality, or snagging an interview with Edward Snowden, the 38-year-old Oliver, whose show just began a third season on HBO, has displayed a knack for getting attention with comedy that feels a little like activism. (Though he swears,repeatedly, that the latter is not the point.) Over two long interviews at the show’s offices on Manhattan’s far West Side, Oliver, an intensely self-deprecating (that is, English) and far more low-key presence than his righteously aggrieved on-air persona suggests, talked about what he’s learned from his old Daily Show boss, Jon Stewart; being an outsider in America; and the simple pleasure of calling someone a dirty word.

This interview was condensed and edited from two conversations, the first conducted on January 18 and the second on January 28.

I hear you’re a new father to a baby boy. Congratulations. What’s his name?

Hudson.

I guess you can see the river from your office.