US comic John Oliver swipe at PM’s text saga

US TV comedian John Oliver has taken a cheeky swipe at Barnaby Joyce after the leaked text messages scandal erupted involving Scott Morrison.

John Oliver on the set of Last Week Tonight.

John Oliver once introduced a segment of Last Week Tonight by referring to Australia as being “70 per cent uninhabitable because of desert, and 30 per cent uninhabitable because of Australians”. Did the political satirist and former stand-up comic mean what he said?

“No, that is a joke and it is delivered from a point of love as much as it is delivered from a point of contempt,” Oliver laughs.

“I have a huge amount of love for Australia. My sister lived in Australia for four years in Melbourne, and you know, the Melbourne Comedy Festival is a big deal. I’ve loved doing stand-up in Australia whenever I’ve got to be there.”

But one of the Australians Oliver was referring to who makes Australia “uninhabitable” is Barnaby Joyce, and he has little love for the Deputy Prime Minister or, as it turns out, his boss Scott Morrison.

When informed of the scandal that had erupted over Joyce’s leaked text in which he called the PM “a hypocrite and a liar”, and his subsequent communications with Morrison, Oliver all but rolls his eyes.

“It’s really hard to root for a good guy in an exchange between Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce,” he says.

“That is the kind of exchange you would read on a phone and then want to throw that phone into the ocean. There is no group chat I would rather be on less than one with Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce. All you’d want to do is type ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘shut the f. k up, Barnaby’, as often as you could.”

John Oliver took a swipe at Barnaby Joyce on his show Last Week Tonight.

But it’s not just Aussie heads of state that get a roasting from the multiple Primetime Emmy Award winner. Oliver also skewered Donald Trump, saying that season 9 of Last Week Tonight will be “studiously ignoring” the lead-up to the US presidential election, which is still three years away.

“But in terms of what we’re completely done with – I don’t know if we’re really done with anything because I think the moment you decide you are done with something, it can decide that it is not done with you. Whether that thing is coronavirus or Donald Trump. I worry that there are yet variants to both the virus and the Trump presidency that may be in our future.”

When asked what he thinks of the Queen giving Camilla her future title of Queen’s Consort, Oliver says, “I don’t care. I don’t care about the royal family at all. They’re an ornament. You care (about them) like you care about a Christmas ornament. One drops on the ground, smashes, and you think, ‘Ah, I really didn’t give a shit about this.’ That’s how I feel about the royal family. The thing that I am interested in about the royal family is less about whether or not Camilla will get the title and more about what is going to happen to Prince Andrew? That is more interesting, to be honest.”

John Oliver on the set of Last Week Tonight.

Oliver’s take on global politics and culture is so influential it has been dubbed “The John Oliver effect”, because of its power to sway opinions surrounding US legislation, court rulings, and popular thought. And while Oliver dishes it out to others he’s a good sport about getting it back. A mayor in the US state of Connecticut once named a sewage plant after Oliver following his unfavourable description of the town – and Oliver good naturedly turned up to the opening.

But it was Russell Crowe who pranked Oliver the best. The Oscar-winning actor and the political pundit had never met when Oliver noticed Crowe was holding a “divorce auction” of personal movie memorabilia to commemorate his separation from Danielle Spencer.

“So we bought a number of items from the Russell Crowe Divorce Collection – chief amongst them, the proudest item being his jockstrap from Cinderella Man, which, to cut a long, meandering, borderline pointless story short, we were trying to donate to the last remaining Blockbuster Video store in the United States.”

John Oliver purchased Russell Crowe's leather jockstrap.

Oliver was delighted with Crowe’s response “because the popular culture understanding of Russell Crowe is that he’s a man who is not unaware of his temper and how to deploy it quickly”.

“So I was not sure how Russell Crowe would respond to that, but he took the money that we had spent ($110,000), and he donated it to Australia Zoo, to the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward. I mean, that’s a perfect joke. I cannot tell you how happy I was. Being alive in the world right now and over the last half a decade, you know, it’s not without being exposed to sadness. And genuinely one of the happiest moments of my life in the last few years was realising, hold on, Russell Crowe did what? He’s doing actual good with this, it’s incredibly funny. It’s literally the perfect execution of a retort and I have a lifelong respect for him for that.”

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