One of my favorite bits from this Sunday’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver was his fake attack ad against Mitch McConnell, which is embedded above and SUPER MEGA-DEGA NSFW, unless you work somewhere where you’re allowed to just, like, stare at weird wrinkled penises all day. (Urologist’s office, maybe?) Because that what pretty much the whole clip is: a close-up of an actual “old white dick” — that sometimes wiggles — that is meant to represent Old White Dick Mitch McConnell. It’s completely juvenile and silly, and I couldn’t love it any more even if it were wearing a Boyz II Men t-shirt and bringing me pizza. The clip, I mean. Not the old, wrinkled penis. Although if it can figure out how to carry a whole pizza, I guess I’d come around on the penis, too.
But anyway, point being: Mother Jones caught up with Oliver to ask him about the process of casting and selecting a wrinkled old penis for your big fancy HBO show, and his answers did not disappoint:
JO: [Y]ou do need to cast a penis. And to do that you have to be presented with a selection of penii—I don’t know if that’s the collective term. And so then what you’re looking for—it’s amazing—when you look at then you start judging them for the purpose, because you want something that is funny but not sad. Because, you know, a sad penis does not help the comedy. No, it makes you think about the person the penis is attached to. So really, you just want a representative old man penis. And I’m not sure that sentence…has ever been said out loud before…We got to one that we liked, and the owner of that penis was generous enough to model it for us.
MJ: How did you get to one you liked? Like, what is the process of “getting” penii?
JO: We went through photos. It was basically the penis version of a headshot.
MJ: So this was like models?
JO: Models, basically. And you go through and say, “This one’s good, this one’s good, let’s get down to a short-list. Okay, it’s between these three. Um. I like this one.” And then what you do is you make a decision, you walk out of a room, and you stare out a window and question what the f*ck you’re doing with your life…That’s basically how it goes.
So there you go. Now you know.
