From Stephen Colbert to Lorne Michaels to President Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld only invites people whom he truly admires to appear on his Emmy-nominated web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. But, as he admitted in the season eight finale of the show this week, he is actually “obsessed” with John Oliver.
“We’re going to get along just fine,” Oliver predicted at the beginning of the episode, and he was right. After picking Oliver up in the “perfect British definition of a sports car,” a 1959 Triumph TR3, Seinfeld told the Last Week Tonight host, “I have been watching so much of your stuff. I really have to compliment you,” joking that he would cut the praise out of the show.
Seinfeld said he has become “obsessed” with Oliver’s HBO program, adding, “I don’t even know what the hell it is, is it just you talking, is that it?”
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One highlight came at the very end of the episode, when Seinfeld asked Oliver if his remarkable #MakeAmericaDrumpfAgain segment from February was his biggest ever. With more than 27 million views on YouTube at this point, Oliver said, “That thing got out of hand.”
“I think he has a big clowny body,” Seinfeld said, trying out a rare bit of political humor. Building off of Oliver’s contributions, he added, “He would make a good little stress ball.”
Oliver then made Seinfeld nearly double over in laughter by adding of Trump, “He would make a better stress ball than he would a president, that’s for sure.”
It wasn’t the first time these two fast friends made each other laugh uncontrollably throughout the 18-minute episode. After being greeted by a “judgmental silence” at hipster Williamsburg coffee shop Allswell, they bonded over their shared comedy values, in which they are willing to say literally anything if it gets a laugh.
“The internal logic of comedy is really hard for anyone to understand from the outside,” Oliver said. “That you’ll do anything for a laugh, like a sociopath.” Seinfeld agreed, saying, “That’s right, that’s right.”
Oliver also recounted to Seinfeld the story of how he met his wife, U.S. Army combat medic Kate Norley. As he revealed, she did not take it well when he once described a particularly hostile stand-up comedy club as a “war zone.”
“HBO will let you do anything, so you want to say, OK, where is that line?” Oliver added later. “Let’s see what ‘anything’ means, shall we?” As an example, he told Seinfeld about the secret trip he took to Russia in 2015 to interview Edward Snowden, which he said managed to anger both the White House and the Kremlin.
“So I get back home, and it was really fun, because, you know, trouble is fun,” Oliver said, smiling. His wife told him she thought he was “done” with that type of mischief that he first perfected on The Daily Show and he replied, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m done.”
“This is really great,” Seinfeld said near the end of their time together. “I think we’re going to be friends.”
