Last Week Tonight's Online Harassment Report Reminds Us That Even Horrible Topics Can Spawn Comedy

Last week, Jon Stewart got a lot of online shares by forgoing the content he normally opens The Daily Show with -- comedy -- to deliver this explicitly humour-free address about the Charleston church terror attack instead.

It's easy to imagine the feelings of horror, disgust, and impotence that led Stewart to craft these comments because we all probably felt the same way -- but we, unlike Stewart, had the luxury of not having to take them to the satirical news show we're expected to headline. That's why I didn't take to this space last week to complain that Stewart pretty much abdicated his actual job in order to lecture us all instead. (As my esteemed colleague/spouse David T. Cole can attest, however, I did take to a long car ride on Friday to do that. The word "bloviate" was involved.)

My disappointment in Stewart was indirectly confirmed last night with the latest episode of Last Week Tonight. Not only did host John Oliver open with a furious, laser-focused piece on exactly the shootings Stewart had decided not to try to cover as a humorist; he went on to use the rest of the episode to dig into another depressingly intractable issue facing an embattled segment of the population: the harassment of women online. To be fair, AOL made it a little bit easy by having produced a brilliantly terrible promo for its service twenty years ago so that LWT could mine it for source material.

And when Rob Huebel and Colin Hanks show up to put a button on the report, it's pretty much perfect? (I know the screen shot makes it look like this is the same clip twice, but it's not.)

I get that time is a luxury that allows Last Week Tonight to appear more thoughtful and incisive than The Daily Show can: it has 25% as many episodes to produce as The Daily Show in any given week. But that also means it could focus on the lighter awful news stories and shag softballs at them, and it doesn't, nor does its host arbitrarily use its platform to grandstand. I get that Jon Stewart is tired and has one foot and three toes of the other out the Daily Show door at this point. But Comedy Central is still paying him to do a job, and John Oliver is showing him it can be done better.