It’s never surprising to see John Oliver remind his audience that he not a fan of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Yet when Oliver fixates upon something (just ask Adam Driver), he can really get going, and that’s exactly what’s happening with his Carlson distaste. For the third consecutive week, Oliver’s taking on the “sentient polo mallet” after not one but two “f*ck you”s, and this time, it’s a particularly comedic affair.
In the opening moments of Last Week Tonight (which HBO has declined to post on YouTube, although the deep dive on facial recognition is available), Oliver highlighted Carlson’s raging fit over Sesame Street taking a stance against police brutality and in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement. Carlson, as ludicrous as it sounds, lashed out last week over a pair of puppets, who were ultimately discussing why institutionalized racism has led to protests. He was entirely outraged to see this happening on a kids’ TV show — “Got that, Bobby? America is a very bad place and it’s your fault … So no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain” — and Oliver is here to tell “giant baby” Tucker to simmer down:
“F*ck off, Tucker, you one-man homeowner’s association … that unspecified ‘they’ in ‘what they do to you when you grow up’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There’s basically two options for what that could mean. One, that Tucker and his viewers have benefited from a racist system that renders any specifications of who they are unnecessary. Or two, that his show is a badly written piece of garbage.”
This led to Oliver asking, “So which is it, Tucker? Are you a racist or are you a total f*cking moron?” And of course, Oliver conceded that the answer could be “both,” so there you have it. We might never see a Tucker-Elmo face off on the red puppet’s upcoming late-night talk show on HBO Max, but at least John Oliver got the ball rolling for the HBO team.
You can watch Sunday night’s Facial Recognition deep dive below.
