As a green card-holding man of two nations, John Oliver is uniquely positioned to chime in on the political absurdities currently holding sway (and office) on both sides of the Atlantic. On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight the host started off in America, with a suitably exasperated comic rundown of the week in all things Trump (you know, like former FBI director James Comey calling Trump a liar many, many times in an open senate hearing, and the “walking logical paradox” of Trump claiming to be vindicated by testimony he‘s also claiming was all lies), before devoting the remainder of the episode to British Prime Minister Theresa May’s recent crushing defeat in the snap election she herself called. Meant to shore up the British bargaining position going into the controversial “Brexit” from the European Union, May instead saw her conservative Tories losing major real estate and political capital to challenger Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, leaving May (should she still be Prime Minister when the talks commence next week) wobbling into the not-at-all receptive room.
“A crumpet-fuck of historic proportions,” is Oliver’s take on the election and May’s maddeningly vague plans heading into the immensely complex Brexit talks, a position echoed by one Lord Buckethead. In keeping with the eccentric yet somehow deeply necessary British tradition of allowing all candidates—no matter if they look, as Oliver puts it, “like Darth Vader fucked an Amazon Echo”—to be on the same stage on election night, said “intergalactic space lord” garnered some 200 votes and, in a clip, offered what Oliver agrees is the trenchant analysis that the entire Brexit mess is “a shitshow.” Mountains of treaties, regulations, and policies of the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. have to be sorted out in two short years—starting in eight days—and the Tories’ articulation of their plan has a decidedly Trump-like ring of bluster to it that clearly didn’t play well with voters. Oliver pointed to May’s most coherent answer to questions about how, exactly, the country is going to extricate itself from the E.U. on tariffs, immigration, environmental protection, workers’ rights, and more, as some literal flag-waving, as she pooh-poohed all that pesky detail with an assurance of a “red, white, and blue Brexit.” (“MEGA” being apparently too gauche.) Bringing out the real Lord Buckethead as a proposed Brexit negotiator (even though Oliver understood that the show could have saved airfare by slapping a bucket on an intern), Oliver conceded that it was silly, but, as he said in pitching the plan to May, “not even close to the fucking stupidest thing you have ever done.”