That is kind of you. I will take a look, but 35 minutes of John Oliver is a big ask. Last time I watched him -- years ago -- he spent the entire segment in 10

That is kind of you. I will take a look, but 35 minutes of John Oliver is a big ask. Last time I watched him -- years ago -- he spent the entire segment in 100% outrage mode with a sledgehammer wall-of-sound style rhetoric in which nuance and empathy were entirely absent from his sequence of cherry-picked outrage nuggets. But at the same time, I didn't find him very funny. Sam Kinison was also a loud outrage comic, but he was funny. But Kinison's yelling had an emotional honesty that Oliver lacked, since you can't really be too honest if you are doing politics on TV, especially partisan politics for the PMC class - a large amount of Oliver's material (that I saw) was basically mocking the beliefs of working class people. But perhaps he's changed. George Carlin was probably the one who made political comedy work the best, but he was deconstructing ideas that people have, and specifically ideas that you, the listener, had, often without questioning. That's what made people go "hmmm, that's interesting" when they listen to Carlin. Nobody says "Hmm, that's interesting" when listening to Oliver, they say "Boom! Nailed it! He's got their number!!" Subtlety, balance, making an honest effort to portray the complex world as it really is -- that was completely absent. It was all about caricaturing people or institutions as being unreasonable or suitable for mocking. Real life tends not to be like that. I do wonder why people refer to Oliver as a news source or use him in arguments, it's basically the same thing as citing Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was actually much kinder -- sure, he also cherry picked examples to make his opponents look like fools, but he usually treated them as confused fools ("young minds, full of mush") rather than malicious actors. Limbaugh was also often self-deprecating and was able to change tone so that it wasn't all full throttle attack mode. But still I wouldn't cite one of his shows as evidence to support my point, as that's clearly a partisan show that is meant to be entertainment for those who agree with him rather than any kind of reasoned investigation. Update: So I watched the first five minutes, and it's the standard grievances. Take the Elgin sculptures, which Oliver says Elgin stole from Greece, and as proof, he says that they were sawed off -- with a picture of a man wearing a wig hat entering a bedroom window in the background. Then he claims to show a rebuttal by the British Museum which isn't the official rebuttal at all. Here is the actual rebuttal: https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/parthenon-sculptures/parthenon https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/... Here is a Smithsonian article on this, feating both pro and con views: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-much-debated-elgin-marbles-ended-up-in-england-180979311/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-much-debated-... What no one disputes is that Elgin bought the right to remove those sculptures from the Government at the time, which simply didn't value them as we do today. Nothing was stolen. What is disputed is whether it was "fair" to buy the sculptures -- both the government that sold them and the buyer have been criticized. Unfortunately for the Greeks, this was the Ottoman government, because Greece was ruled by the Ottomans for four hundred years, and no one knew that twenty years after Elgin bought the sculptures, Greece would wage a successful war for independence from the Ottomans, finally ending that reign. Bad luck for Greece. However, does that mean that they should be "returned" to Greece, because the later rebellion somehow invalidated the sale? You basically need to go through this process of Oliverification for all of his points, and maybe some you'll agree and others you wont, but then you still have to step back and ask "Are these representative?" and more importantly "Have the important issues been discussed at all?". Also note that while all of these cases are controversial, Oliver is not presenting both sides, and when presented the British Museum side, it wasn't actually their rebuttal but something that made them look foolish. That should tell you something about the reliability of the show. I'll let you decide whether you think you are better informed or misinformed.