John Oliver spent seven years cutting his teeth as a correspondent on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” covering everything from the political conventions to the royal baby.
But when the bespectacled British comedian’s own satirical current-events show “Last Week Tonight” debuts Sunday at 11 p.m. on HBO, there won’t be any roving “reporters” like on Comedy Central’s fake news show.
“It will be more about the news than pretending to be the news,” Oliver told The Post in a recent interview at HBO’s Midtown headquarters. Besides lacking correspondents, “Last Week Tonight” will also be different from “The Daily Show” because of its Sunday time slot, creating the challenge of covering — as its tagline cheekily says — “breaking news on a weekly basis.”
“I owe him [Jon Stewart] everything. If he ever killed someone, I will take the blame for it.”
- John Oliver
“Because we’re on once a week there won’t be quite so much of a sense of living in that 24-hour cycle,” says Oliver, who turned 37 on Wednesday. “It will be trying to take a slightly broader perspective on things and perhaps looking more internationally as well, because those stories are quite hard to cover in a daily turnaround.”
In his two test shows, news stories have included the General Motors recall, the gender pay gap and the CIA torture report — but dealing in topical comedy means much about “Last Week Tonight” is still in flux. Two weeks before the premiere, the set was still being built in the former space of Bethenny Frankel’s talk show at the CBS building on West 57th Street — walking distance from Oliver’s Upper West Side pad that he shares with his wife (a former Army medic) and dog.
The set will have a space for guest interviews, though the show has the flexibility to do these chats pretaped or live in front of the studio audience — or perhaps, some weeks, not at all — depending on the news, Oliver says. “That will depend on people having any interest in coming on it as well,” he adds self-deprecatingly.
Born in Birmingham, England, and educated at Cambridge, Oliver weaned his comedic sensibility on Monty Python and Armando Iannucci (“Veep”) before moving to the US in 2006 for “The Daily Show,” where he made a name for himself with cuttingly hilarious field pieces, like a series on gun control in Australia.
But it was his eight-week run filling in for Stewart last summer — which earned him rave reviews and interest from other networks — that made him realize he wanted to try hosting his own show, leading to his emotional exit from Comedy Central last December.
“I just wanted to stay. That was why it was so hard to leave,” Oliver says of his teary on-air goodbye. “Most of me just wanted to stay and work there forever. There was no reason for me to leave other than the fact that I should.”
Oliver credits Stewart with encouraging him to take the HBO offer, and still talks to his former boss frequently.
“I owe him everything. If he ever killed someone, I will take the blame for it,” he says. “He basically taught me how to walk, in a sense. It’s not so much one lesson as all of them.”