It was only fitting that John Oliver was Seth Meyers’ first guest on the day that Britain buried Queen Elizabeth II.
After the Late Night host congratulated Oliver for beating his show out to win his seventh consecutive Emmy this month for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, Oliver admitted that he hates award shows and it “would have been nicer to see you literally anywhere else on Earth,” comparing the event to a “royal funeral without a dead queen.”
With that line, they were off and running with commentary about what Oliver clearly sees as his home country’s over the top reaction to the death of its long-standing monarch. As Late Night’s unofficial “royal correspondent,” the Last Week Tonight host was quick to feign distress over what he described as “10 days in forced mourning,” offering up a “sorry for our loss” to Meyers’ British drummer.
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“Basically whenever a senior royal dies, I will come here,” Oliver promised. “Just click your heels three times and I will be here to give it the disrespect it deserves.”
He went on to make fun of the U.K. for calling off football matches—an “act of tangible class warfare”—and even apparently lowering the sound of check-out beeps in grocery stores to honor the queen. “As if someone would have gone in, heard the regular beep and said, ‘Have some fucking respect! She’s lying in state! As is tradition, a quieter beep is appropriate!’”
Later in the segment, Oliver revealed that British TV actually censored his initial reaction to the queen’s death when his show aired overseas last week.
“All we said was that Britain is still mourning the shocking loss of a 96-year-old woman from natural causes,” he explained. “Scientifically, it’s not a joke. That’s just a fact with a kind of dickish inflection. That’s all it is. And yet, they cut it out. Which is pretty shitty, because, apparently, all we’ve heard all week is that the queen had an incredible sense of humor.”
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