Jon Stewart used to be our go to guy for raising legitimate outrage over ridiculous situations in society, but after 15 years we’ve started to tune him out a bit. The new hotness in creating discussion about systemic stupidity is HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which uses its one hour of TV a week to really hone in on specific terribleness — like our loss of privacy or the f*ckbarrel — and break it down in explicit detail.
On his latest episode he devoted 18 minutes to the IRS; that’s 3 minutes less than Jon Stewart gets for an entire episode of The Daily Show. Oliver used the time to do more than just get a couple of wise cracks in at the IRS’s expense. He actually turns the segment into something of a rallying cry to support the IRS, comparing the organization to our anus: not our favorite part of the body, but essential to keeping everything from turning to sh*t. Add in Michael Bolton belting out a power ballad for the tax collection agency, and you might be singing the same tune by the end as well.
