10 ms·

It's a good show (he's funny and you learn stuff) but it's way too preachy. He gets just a little too excited about things that are basically impossible for any

• thegp 10y ago
  Which things do you mean? And excited as in happy or as in rage?
• ThomPete 10y ago
  Thats the reason why I stopped watching it too. No doubt it has something but it's just too one sided IMO. It's bashing from a very specific political angle. I.e. it always possible to know what side of critique he is going to fall down on, and that for me isn't interesting.
  • aexaey 10y ago
    Yep. Same here. He wasn't nearly as judgmental in The Bugle, while being as funny as ever. [1] [2] [1] http://podcast.timesonline.co.uk/rss/thebuglemp3.rss http://podcast.timesonline.co.uk/rss/thebuglemp3.rss [2] https://soundcloud.com/the-bugle https://soundcloud.com/the-bugle
    • bsandert 10y ago
      Love that podcast. Really a shame he's stepping down from it.
  • bayesian_horse 10y ago
    Somehow, comedians falling on the "political right" side of the argument are rarely funny or insightful...
    • defen 10y ago
      I disagree. I don't know Jerry Seinfeld's personal politics but I would argue that Seinfeld was a deeply reactionary show...
    • scotty79 10y ago
      Milo seems good.
    • fixermark 10y ago
      Dennis Miller was quite good back in the day.
    • jandrese 10y ago
      Maybe Nick Offerman? He has a distinctly libertarian bent to his comedy.
  • obiouzera 10y ago
    I don't know american media that well and I can see where you're coming from. However, I'd be interested to learn which shows you'd say are more balanced, but still take on political or maybe controversial topics.
• bedhead 10y ago
  You took the words out of my mouth and I'm glad someone else feels the same. It's a difficult thing to articulate but I think he crosses a line into unbearable preachiness and pandering. It's a bummer because I think the guy is a riot, but I just can't take the lectures anymore, and yes, given that this is almost a Daily Show spinoff, it's not terribly surprising to see a heavy left-leaning slant to everything...that's how you get a built-in audience I guess.
  • Justsignedup 10y ago
    It is very preachy but the problem is that often he talks about highly abused topics. - debt collection - voter identification and voter fraud - abortion clinic laws - trump And he doesn't ever state things as "fact" when it is speculation. He only specifies facts when they are facts. And he never tries to push opinions into sort-of-kind-of factual sounding things like most news sites. How would you talk about a topic where voters are being forced to show identification in such a way as to exclude most minority voters and even have people state on camera that is the goal? These are blatant abuses of power that should be heavily exposed. This is why I have respect and don't feel he's too preachy.
    • lujim 10y ago
      Not saying I do or don't agree with him, but you don't have to be wrong to be preachy. When you're a comedian you need to be at least 80% funny. If you're 50% funny 50% preachy I'm not going to bother. Southpark use to danced this line pretty successfully.
      • zymhan 10y ago
        People used the "You're a comedian so just tell jokes" line against Jon Stewart for years. There's absolutely no reason someone has to adhere to some arbitrary ratio of comedy to seriousness (edit: or preachiness, etc).
        • lujim 10y ago
• amalag 10y ago
  The only person I loved was Stephen Colbert. I can't stand the left-preaching Daily Show and spinoffs.
• lujim 10y ago
  Totally. Always loved John Stewart and Steven Colbert because they were comedians first and educators/activists whatever you want to call it second. Even when you didn't agree with them politically you still got a laugh and saw what might be some ridiculous holes in your own beliefs. John Oliver was pretty funny but he has just become a left wing slacktivist at this point. Larry Wilmore doesn't seem to be a comedian at all as far as I can tell.
  • mattnewton 10y ago
    Is it really fair to call him a "slacktivist"?
    • lujim 10y ago
      Yeah I think so. Using 60k of someone else's money to buy some token debt and announcing it to the world on a TV show isn't exactly saint status. His take on the refugee debate also seemed to wreak of holier than thou preachy hot air.
      • scrollaway 10y ago
        Jesus. The guy creates and hosts a weekly political comedy show, researches topics, has a network spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on those topics, and you think it's a fair comparison to someone whose activism extends to "clicking the Like button on facebook". And you're the one calling his attitude "holier than thou".
        • lujim 10y ago
          Ok slow down there. They don't SPEND hundreds of thousands on those topics, they MAKE hundreds of thousands on those topics. Comedy Central/Viacom is not UNICEF and John Oliver is not a career humanitarian. They entertain people. When that is too hard they just pander to the most prominent demographic to gain viewership because that's how they generate revenue.
• onion2k 10y ago
  Clearly pandering to the young, left crowd. John Oliver was on UK television a lot before moving to the US. He was doing the same sort of material back then - left-leaning, political, and insightful. He isn't pandering. He (and his team) is broadcasting what he actually believes.
  • Alphasite_ 10y ago
    The US is a lot more right in many regards than the UK, so it likely co Es across as more extreme there.
    • atomi 10y ago
      The US is not more conservative. Our conservatives are just louder. The right has lost on every major social issue since roe v wade, including gay marriage, marijauna legalization, and universal healthcare. And now they're being attacked on gun rights. The largest problem the right has is mass delusion.
• vas123 10y ago
  Its a good show to watch on and off. I already know what his stance will be on any given issue so I mostly watch it for the comedy aspect which tends to get repetitive.
• bko 10y ago
  My main problem with John Oliver is that he often chimes in on subjects he doesn't know anything about with folksy common sense logic that is often wrong. I remember him mocking some system for using tapes for storage on the belief that a technology that is so old cannot possibly be useful in modern technologies. In his latest clip, he mocks information being passed by Excel. How does he think things happen? Some magical global technological system with perfect information and transparency? Perhaps he should try to build such a system. By critiquing a system that he knows nothing about makes the criticism ring hollow.
  • KayEss 10y ago
    For trading debt I would certainly hope that the actual contracts under which the debt was agreed where included. Yes that would be difficult, but it ought to be a minimum requirement.
    • bko 10y ago
      The problem is that this debt is for very small amounts, often a few hundred dollars/thousand dollars traded for pennies on the dollar. This is a risk the seller/buyer is willing to take since the cost is so low and it isn't even worth taking the time to review the contract in depth for such a small payout.
      • bayesian_horse 10y ago
        But because these cases aren't reviewed, debt is often created out of nothing. For example if the debt has expired or was even paid, the debt changes hands, and they file a law suit somewhere, there is the real chance the debt is brought back to life in full. And if it doesn't work that time, the debt is just sold off to the next collector to try it again.
        • bko 10y ago
          Yes, he spoke about "zombie debt" in his segment. "Brought back from the dead" is true only if it was dismissed or past the statute of limitations for collection. It's not "brought back from the dead" if you had collectors calling and then they stopped calling and now they continue calling. You still owe that money and you're responsible. Do you ever wonder why somebody would extend you a 30 day unsecured 0% interest loan (credit card)? Or a 15-25% interest unsecured rolling loan to someone with little or no credit history? You can choose to make policies that make it harder for creditors, but you can't pretend that won't impact the borrowing rate or the access of credit to many Americans. The idea that you can't buy and sell receivables seems silly. I agree that some of the reasons people collect debt is unfortunate and unjust. But people need to be responsible and we need reasonable laws that prevent harassment.
• deleted 10y ago
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• saint_fiasco 10y ago
  >He gets just a little too excited about things that are basically impossible for anyone to get excited about That's what's so great about the show. He can make boring stuff like net neutrality, patents and fashion funny.
• cloudjacker 10y ago
  yeah one time he was talking about intra-state groups that talk about and harmonize laws between states. of course, on HIS show he was talking about why that is a bad thing, and how this shadowy conspiracy organization was influencing democracy. All the children on reddit gobbled it up of course, despite never having had a business dispute themselves that was hampered by incompatible laws in states.
• oneloop 10y ago
  It was really heart breaking for me an interview with him that I watched where the interviewer asked him something like "You combine comedy with high quality in-depth journalism. Do you consider yourself a comedian or a journalist?" to which he said "I'm obviously a comedian. I'm not a journalist." Sorry to disappoint you John Oliver, you're not a good comedian, you're just not funny enough. However you're extremely entertaining. Better start telling people that you're a journalist who uses comedy to get the attention of people into important subjects that they wouldn't otherwise pay attention to.
• azaxacavaba 10y ago
  There is a lot of ranting in this thread which is very unlike HC without any example of where he was biased/opinionated or where he was wrong. I am genuinely interested in knowing if he was ever wrong on any of his 'main stories'. I personally think his team is doing pretty good work in putting together very interesting real issues that do not have a lot of visibility otherwise. I will be happy to be corrected.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  >> He gets just a little too excited about things that are basically impossible for anyone to get excited about. That's his point. He does this deliberately so as to bring important subject to the front that would otherwise be ignored by his audience. Case in point, look what he did with net neutrality. The government got the message on that one ("I am not a dingo"). Honestly, his rant about Harper brought out enough apathetic voters that I think he may have swayed the last Canadian election. No Canadian outlet had put together the clips to show exactly how nuts harper had become in recent years. Those who otherwise didn't care about the parties were rallied to at least send him packing. That sort of realworld impact is something over and above what Stewart ever accomplished with his more populous approach.
• jklinger410 10y ago
  This reminds me of the way South Park feels sometimes when (in my opinion) they're off the mark by a bit. The show is really funny until you're on the wrong side of the one of their jokes. Or when they oversimplify something you know a lot about. Preachy is the appropriate word. I really wish he (and his writers) would watch that. Somewhere in the rumor mills there is a story about John Stewart disagreeing with his writers because of how left and preachy they were as well.
  • kiruwa 10y ago
    > Or when they oversimplify something you know a lot about. In fairness, I've literally never seen an accurate media report about one of the topics I know far more deeply than the average technically educated person (a particular NASA project, a certain narrow specialization in physics, and a language/culture I have spoken/lived-in for much of my life). Not even "oversimplified". They are literally always wrong or misleading.