John Oliver laments joking for Donald Trump to run during ‘Daily Show’ days
We’re now only one day away from the Presidential Election on Tuesday, which mostly means to us one thing: It’ll all be over soon. The fact that this has all been going on for well over a year now is appalling, and without getting too political towards either party, that is the biggest thing that we’d change in the future — putting some sort of limit on how long in advance candidates can announce that they are running to spare ourselves some of the insanity of having almost half of a politician’s term completely overrun with people doing campaigns.
The other thing? Well, cutting down on attack ads and funding for commercials, since they’re inescapable on almost any channel you watch at the moment.
Of course, Donald Trump’s been a popular punching bad for late-night comedians almost the entirety of the election, and while they’ve been looked at as a source of laughter for some, they’ve also come under their fair share of criticism over time. Specifically, there are some who have accused comics of helping to enable Trump’s candidacy by giving him a lot of attention and treating him as a joke for over a year or so. We’ve seen some issue mea culpas, and while you didn’t quite get that on last night’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” you did get plenty of self-deprecation.
While encouraging people to go out and vote, Oliver painfully lamented that three years ago on “The Daily Show” (see the video below), he openly proclaimed that he would “write a check” if it means that Trump would run for President — not because he expected people to vote for him, but because he thought it would be entertaining. He used this and another clip from eight years ago, where he proclaimed that the Chicago Cubs would never win the World Series, as evidence that he is frequently wrong.
Ultimately, the point of Oliver’s segment was to right his own wrongs and make it clear that Trump was in his mind a threat not worthy of votes; but in the end, we hope that late-night comics do remember somewhat in the future that there is a downside to continually shining a light on a given politician, whether they be Democrat or Republican. Sometimes, there are people who will vote to keep someone around just because they find them entertaining, even if that means jokes at their expense.
It’s just something to consider, and if you excuse us, we have to deal with another day and a half of election madness before we get to the other side. (Photo: HBO.)