Watch John Oliver Talk ‘Awful’ Election, Humanizing Edward Snowden
Fresh off of Last Week Tonight‘s Emmy win for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, host John Oliver stopped in to CBS This Morning to talk about the presidential race, his epic Edward Snowden interview and – in an awkward moment – inform viewers that Trevor Noah has not been fired from The Daily Show.
“The election is clearly the gift that you ideally would like to stop giving, but it does keep giving its gifts to our face,” Oliver said of the presidential race. “I don’t think at the end of this election, anyone can reasonably say, ‘You did a great job, everyone.’ I think as a species, we want to call for the breakup of this election … [it] has been a series of banana peels, mouse traps and trap doors. It has been awful, by any rational metric, this has been a disaster.”
Oliver also talked about his now-legendary interview with former Central Intelligence Agency employee Edward Snowden, wherein the host deftly compared the U.S. government’s complex surveillance program to an explainer about dick pic privacy. “He’s an incredibly smart guy but doesn’t necessarily have the skills to communicate that to a wider group of people than experts like him,” Oliver said. “We were just trying to find a way to communicate some of the most complicated stuff in that material in a way that would land.”
Oliver’s interview on CBS hit an awkward moment when talk host Charlie Rose (incorrectly) informed Oliver that Trevor Noah, the current host of Oliver’s old stomping ground The Daily Show, had been fired. “Unless you are firing him live on TV now, which is an amazing scoop,” Oliver said jokingly. “Please don’t fire me in real time as well.”
After a month-long hiatus, Last Week Tonight returns Sunday to HBO.