John Oliver’s main story on Last Week Tonight may have been about fetal personhood but the British comedian also found some time to compare the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln to some of Ryan Murphy’s work and give an update on his “hot soap opera summer”.
News reports last week detailed the “horrendous details about conditions” on the aircraft carrier, which has been deployed for more than 250 days. One mother of someone stationed on board said her son compared the conditions to a “scene out of American Horror Story” where he “feels like everybody is dead but they don’t know it yet”.
“Well, that’s not good,” said Oliver. “You never want to be in a position where you describe your job as a scene out of American Horror Story. Honestly, if you absolutely have to choose a Ryan Murphy show for your workplace to resemble, the obvious answer is All’s Fair.”
Highlighting the key art of the Hulu legal drama, which has Kim Kardashian, Niecy Nash-Betts, Teyana Taylor, Naomi Watts, Sarah Paulson and Glenn Close all wearing “different shades of magenta suits”, he also joked about the writing.
“How are you?,” asks Kardashian’s Allura Grant. “Never mind me,” Paulson’s Carr Lane replies, “How are you holding up, you poor discarded cumrag?”
“That’s the Ryan Murphy production you’re gonna want to be stuck in, not this floating fucking nightmare,” added Oliver.
Oliver also gave viewers a look into his “hot soap summer”, which saw him star in both General Hospital and Days of our Lives.
This came after a show in March when Oliver discovered Stephen A. Smith had been a character on General Hospital for a decade and he wanted his own arc. “I offered myself to any soap opera that would have me on a few conditions. One, I wanted to play a character with a ridiculous name. Two, I wanted a juicy storyline. And three, I wanted to be slapped,” he said.
On General Hospital, Oliver played Z, the head of an international spy agency with hair “that looks like if L’Oreal sold a color called Midlife Crisis Black”.
“You may remember we only stumbled into this because one of our writers’ mothers is obsessed with General Hospital. You’ll be happy to know that when Connie of Newnan, Georgia, saw my first episode, she texted her daughter, and I quote, ‘Very James Bond.’
He also landed a spot on Days of our Lives “in a whole different way”. “Instead of being an international spy boss, they wrote me a character a little more my speed,” he said before revealing he played Devlin St. John, chief city water inspector in Salem. “I’m the only thing standing between this town and a catastrophic plumbing failure, the literal sewage apocalypse,” he joked.
“If you were going to bottle my essence and sell it as cologne, it would be called Chief City Water Inspector,” he joked. “If you’re wondering whether I got slapped on Days of our Lives, not only was I slapped by a man wearing elegant silk pajamas, I also got to slap him, which felt utterly incredible. But wait, I was also stabbed with a syringe, and not once, not even twice, but three different times.”
“Neither show ended up killing me off. Though, to be honest, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything anyway. It’s soap operas. No one ever really dies. So, a massive thank you to everyone at both General Hospital and Days of our Lives for welcoming me into your worlds and making my soap opera dreams come true,” he added.
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