John Oliver Completely Dismisses the Idea He’s Doing Journalism

If you watched any of John Oliver‘s Last Week Tonight this year, you know that he’s had some pretty in-depth segments on issues not normally talked about on late night comedy shows, like civil forfeiture, net neutrality, and Miss America. And in some of these cases, Oliver and his crack team have clearly done their homework and conducted research of their own on these issues.

So does that make Oliver a journalist? Some people believe that to be the case. Andrew Sullivan in particular has praised Oliver’s show as “opinion journalism at its entertaining best” and arguing that the comedy is irrelevant to the journalism question because “great journalism should be entertaining.”

So when Oliver sat down for an interview with The New York Times‘ David Carr, he, of course, got asked about where he falls on the comedy-to-journalism scale. And after giving a short “no” answer unsuitable for printing in the Times, Oliver elaborated:

“We are making jokes about the news and sometimes we need to research things deeply to understand them, but it’s always in service of a joke. If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist. We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is ‘comedy.'”

Oliver’s first season wrapped just weeks ago, but will be back on HBO early next year.

[image via Miro Vrlik Photography/Shutterstock]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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