For the past couple of months, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has been off the air, due to the now-resolved 2023 WGA writer’s strike. Because that weekly dose of comedic newscasting was absent from the 2023 TV schedule for some time, Oliver and his writers had a lot of catching up to do; and oh wow, did they come back swinging. One of the points of order was the Daily Show alum roasting Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” cover, and it only reminded me how glad I am for him and his crew to be back at it again.
In a segment aptly titled “The Last Five Months,” the HBO comedy news program ran through quite a few major events that occurred since it last aired. As the previous episode hit the air on April 30th, there was naturally a lot of room to cover tidbits like the phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer” to a bunch of varied political and pop culture topics. Which led to the following joke invoking the ‘80s pop hit in question, and its cover:
We missed so much, it would take a whole new version of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ to cover it. Which reminds me of something else we missed: Fall Out Boy released a new version of ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ that absolutely nobody asked for, covering the last 34 years. And if you’re wondering, ‘2001 was in the last 34 years. They didn’t bring up that thing, did they?’ Well the answer is, ‘Yes, they very much did.’
“That thing” happened to be 9/11, which only gave John Oliver more fuel for the fire that even Billy Joel himself mocks to this day. The segment even included a clip of the Piano Man himself skewering his own hi. So all in all, the case for this revisitation of what feels like a pop standard in some people’s eyes is a truly Last Week Tonight rant. Which has only reminded me why I missed this show so much in the last five months.
HBO’s decision to air the host’s satirical, but also heartfelt and deeply insightful, looks at modern life on a Sunday night has always been perfect. Seeing the program kick off a new week of news and life by blasting the previous week’s events is cathartic, which only leads into a deeper catharsis when featured segments come into play. Last night’s rundown of Prison Healthcare was flanked by “The Last Five Months” and the show’s annual Pumpkin Spice meltdown, which only showed how this formula has been perfected over time.
LWT can do anything, from calling out “Business Daddy” Warner Bros. Discovery to explaining why HOAs could indeed be the devil. But even in that previous rant, there was room for the host to shred The Voice’s most glaring problem in the midst of breaking down some serious issues. So experiencing a tirade akin to that time Fall Out Boy got massacred for their Ghostbusters theme was just par for the course for viewers. And ultimately, it welcomed myself and the rest of the world back to this beautiful laboratory of news and insults in a perfect way.
If you’re as excited as I am, you should know that Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is back to airing on Sunday Nights, at 11 PM ET, only on HBO. So if you have a Max subscription, you can watch along with the broadcast crowd, or catch up after the fact. Either way, the barbs are still as sharp, and Oliver’s just as annoyed with the world as he was when they went off the air.