Emmy winner John Oliver: Campaign is both a "gift" and a "disaster"
When John Oliver took home the Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series Sunday, he did it with his comedic flair, asking the band to “please play me off” after his acceptance speech.
“Whenever you see award shows growing up, the playing off is always the fun part,” Oliver told “CBS This Morning” Thursday. “It was an amazing thrill to have a band suddenly strike up to remove me from the stage.”
His show, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” tackles serious topics with a satirical spin, especially politics. The British host may not be able to vote, but he sure does not stay quiet about the presidential election -- which he calls the “gift” that keeps giving, but also a “disaster.”
“How disappointing it’s been on almost every level. I don’t think at the end of this election, anyone can reasonably say, ‘we did a great job everyone,’” Oliver said. “I think just as a species, we might want to pull some breath off of this election and look at what we’ve done.”
Oliver also ripped Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial tweet, in which he compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles.
The talk show host said it’s not only emotionally an “awful thing to say,” but also mathematically “incoherent.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Oliver said. He then referenced a time when former Arkansas Governor and then presidential hopeful Michael Huckabee “tried to pull of the same nonsense,” comparing the refugees to poisonous peanuts. Oliver and his team disproved Huckabee by actually doing the math.
Oliver said the greatest challenging in mixing politics into his comedy was finding the right way to ‘frame the story,” especially amid the toxic election cycle.