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Video: John Oliver Meets The Dalai Lama & Investigates Trump's 'Stupid Watergate'
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 6, 2017
Modified Mar 6, 2017
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 6, 2017
Modified Mar 6, 2017
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Before the new season of Last Week Tonight premiered last month, John Oliver noted in interviews that he feared having an overload of Trump stories, and that he and his team were trying to balance out the unceasing Trump news cycle by preparing some of their more typical in-depth pieces during the winter break. One such piece premiered last night, as Oliver traveled to Dharamsala, India to meet the Dalai Lama, a.k.a. the original "woke bae," for a hilarious and fascinating interview.
They talk about Tibetan persecution, what happens after the Dalai Lama dies, self-immolation, how to use "the human brain properly," and how the Chinese government has labeled him a demon: "Whatever they want to say, that's their freedom," he said. "I have no negative feeling. I just feel love. I practice taking others' suspicion, distrust and giving them patience, tolerance and compassion. I practice that."
Oh, and the Dalai Lama also explained how he cured Mongolia of alcoholism by getting people to drink horse milk. "Wait, hold on," Oliver said. "You tried to wean them off vodka by giving them horse milk?"
But of course, there was still that pesky matter of the immediate Trump news to tackle, and Oliver did that at the start of the show by looking at the Jeff Sessions/Russia mess (Sessions is "the unfortunate result of Dobby the House Elf’s one-night stand with a Confederate flag"), and Trump's subsequent attempts at distracting the nation from his scandals by claiming (without any evidence) that Obama had tapped his phones.
"It is not clear what is really going on here yet," Oliver said. "One possibility is that this all amounts to what I'm going to call 'Stupid Watergate': potential scandal with all the intrigue of Watergate, except everyone involved is really bad at everything. And the relevant questions isn't so much, 'What did the president know and when did he know it?' as it is, 'Is the president physically capable of knowing things at all?'"
Oliver also took extreme pleasure in Trump's inability to spell simple words correctly in his many unhinged tweetstorms: "In 1992 Dan Quayle misspelled 'potato' and it became one of the most famous dumb moments in political history," Oliver said. "We are now at a point where the president is so busy hurling destabilizing conspiracy theories around we can’t even pause to enjoy the fact he misspelled the word 'tap.'"
Tagged
dalai lama
donald trump
john oliver
last week tonight
stupid watergate
television
tv
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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