Why John Oliver Understands the Internet Better Than Everyone

After only 12 short weeks on the air, John Oliver’sLast Week Tonight has become required watching for anyone catching up on the media while procrastinating their way through Monday morning. While many news magazines and comedy shows have tried and failed to gain viral attention, HBO's Last Week Tonight has become a “must-aggregate” show after very little time on the air. As a result, numerous clips from Last Week Tonight have collected millions of views, and though most Internet videos over five minutes end up lost in the digital shuffle, Oliver’s 13-minute, 17-second discussion of net neutrality has amassed nearly five million views on YouTube.

This success is no happy accident. Oliver and company (no relation to the 1988 animated film) have taken a number of carefully plotted steps to ensure that their show is always a part of the Monday morning conversation. Last Week Tonight, which airs Sundays at 11 p.m., and HBO have created a product that has been engineered to spread across the Internet, from their writing to their web distribution. Let’s take a look at the show’s stunning web success and dissect Why John Oliver Understands the Internet Better Than Anyone.

This seems like a no-brainer, yet so many clip-based shows can’t seem to make their content readily and easily available online. While HBO keeps episodes of Game of Thrones locked up tighter than Fort Knox when it comes to non-HBO platform viewing, they make dozens of clips of varying lengths of Last Week Tonight available after every episode. You don’t have to climb a pay wall to get them; you don’t have to navigate a clumsy proprietary network interface; you just have to be able to turn on your computer. Go to YouTube and you’ll find high quality videos on the HBO Last Week Tonight channel ready for easy consumption. HBO understands that different shows require differing web presence to maximize their impact. The right decision for Last Week Tonight has been to make show clips available early and make them available everywhere.

The idea of a once a week Daily Show seemed like a tough sell when Oliver’s show was first announced. With the announcement of Stephen Colbert’s departure for CBS before Oliver’s show aired, we were left wondering if Oliver hadn’t made the biggest mistake of his career by jumping ship a few months too early and missing out on his own Comedy Central nightly program. So far, Last Week Tonight has proven this line of thinking totally wrong. It turns out that we were far more ready for a weekly news comedy show than we thought we were.

It's worth noting that more time allows for a more polished product. While most late night hosts churn out up to five monologues a week filled with lackluster jokes, Oliver hones his segments over an entire week, working them into something rich. The structure of the show, a set of quick-hitting segments and some punch lines sprinkled in, means that the middle 10 minutes of the show can be honed into a soaring monologue each week. Oliver’s monologues aren’t just funny, they are also filled with information. Between jokes, Oliver tosses out names you’ve never heard of, events you didn’t know happened, and forges connections that you would have never have made. Watching his monologue is like taking a 10-minute course taught by a professor, who just happens to be one of the sharpest comic minds today.

Oliver’s British comedy upbringing shows in his “And Now This” segments. One can’t help but be reminded of Monty Python’s “And Now For Something Completely Different” segueways that served as transitional moments on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. These brief clips feature quick bits like “Politicians Misusing the Word Literally” and provide fast, digestible video to compliment the lengthy monologues that comprise the majority of the program.

By creating videos of variable lengths like this, Last Week Tonight is arming itself with the tools to attract a larger audience. Length matters, and shows like Saturday Night Live that create sketches that almost all clock in right around the three minute mark are depriving themselves of Internet leverage by releasing only videos of roughly the same length.

It's often thought that liberalism and the Internet overlap. However, anyone who spends a good amount of time on the Internet knows that some issues get far more coverage than others. Internet comics and thinkpieces about net neutrality or equal rights are far more common than, say, features on the environment. Though it seems that the Last Week Tonight team picks issues they are passionate about, they also make sure to focus on issues the Internet cares about.

The most obvious example of this is also one of their most successful: the segment on net neutrality. This wasn’t the only time that they punched the Internet right in its zeitgeist. Oliver’s segments on the Hobby Lobby case and the Redskins name controversy came out when those were the issues that the Internet was talking about. Being relevant is tricky business, and Oliver seems to tackle the issues that everyone is thinkpiecing about with ease.

Oliver structures his show like a good DJ set. After he digs into issues like net neutrality, he’ll head for deep cuts like Indian elections and the connection between Uganda’s anti-gay legislation and the United States. In the echo chamber of the 24-hour news cycle, we have dozens of news outlets telling us the same stories over and over again. We had just stopped hearing wall-to-wall stories about the months-old Malaysian plane tragedy when the newest Malaysian plane tragedy occurred. Not only is Last Week Tonight's strategy of shining a light on more obscure topics admirable, it's sharp marketing. Consumers demand alternatives. When everyone else is running in one direction, and you’re the only person moving anywhere else, it isn’t surprising if you bring a large audience with you.

The Internet has a celebrity hierarchy that is entirely different from that of the real world. While Jennifer Lawrence is about as famous in reality as she on the Internet, Grumpy Cat’s fame online and in Middle America are at wildly differing levels. Oliver and his team realize that Internet celebrities who don’t have quite the same level of real world cache are cost-effective ways to drive views. The Internet loves science (in fact, on Facebook it “fucking loves” science), so guests like Bill Nye (his segment from Last Week Tonight has 4 million views) and Stephen Hawking (two segments totaling 2.5 million views) are great choices. Beloved character actors are also adored by the Internet. It follows that fellow HBO-er Steve Buscemi was a natural choice to appear as a tap dancer a few weeks back.

Even Jon Stewart doesn’t always come out and state his opinions. Given the recent backlash around his opinions on Israel, it’s hard to blame him for limiting his candor. Besides Stewart, it's hard to find hosts outside of Fox News who openly express their opinion, and it’s even harder to find hosts who can do it in a charming way. Oliver has already mastered the art of casually stating opinions, and facts people treat as opinions, on his show. Regarding whether or not corporations are people, Oliver simply said, “No, they're not.” On global warming; Oliver will tell you it’s happening. Is FIFA corrupt? Yes. Is the death penalty wrong? In Oliver’s view, of course it is. In an era when the media is obsessed with giving even definitively incorrect positions equal time, it is refreshing to see a host clearly, casually, and forcefully state how he feels, and remind the audience that facts aren’t up for debate.

The Last Week Tonight team shows just how savvy they are when they call for audiences to get involved in something. Oliver encouraged viewers to comment on the FCC website (resulting in a much publicized crash), offered fake nutrition labels for use at super markets, and created a hashtag to help the CIA improve their tweets. Not only does this increase publicity for Last Week Tonight, but also creates a more ardent fan base. By including audience participation, Last Week Tonight is creating a kind of street team who will carry the show to new audiences.

Though much of Oliver’s show takes place behind a desk, he generally makes sure to include a piece of spectacle at the end of every show to punctuate the issues that he's discussed. By doing this, Last Week Tonight is taking a page out of the Jimmy Fallon playbook. Fallon’s show produces musical bits carefully structured to go viral: those pieces are the shiniest clips with the best music and the biggest celebrities. Oliver has found his own way to pull out all the stops, and whether it’s incarcerated puppets or a song dedicated to a tyrannical dictator, he generally finds a moment to deliver a spectacular punch line at the end of every show. For those that respond to spectacle better than a bespectacled man talking to them from behind a desk, these clips provide an enticing social media share.

We've talked about a few ways that Oliver has built up his fan base by making them feel like active participants in Last Week Tonight. Though he's great at bringing fans into the fold (fans who will presumably share his videos online), he's also great at keeping them there. One of the ways he's done this is through creating a serialized element to his decidedly non-serialized show. Oliver smartly takes moments to revisit figures from previous shows like FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke, and share the responses of some of his victims, like he did with the POM company. These callbacks lend the show a feeling of continuity that rewards faithful viewers who'll tweet the show to higher levels of Internet relevance.