Let me tell you from someone who knows John Oliver quite well, living in the United States for years and following him since he worked alongside Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.
Other than that: “He's just a comedian!”.
Oliver's episode on Italy is a political speech: otherwise it wouldn't be possible to explain why whoever shared it didn't do so with the informal spirit of someone who wants to have a laugh (“Hey raga, feel how strong this is!”) but with the sacred attitude of someone who has just come into possession of a shocking international document and is preparing to reveal the “Truth” to a people incapable of seeing beyond a veil of tricolor Maya.
The well-known Freudian perversion of Italians, who enjoy when they are spoken badly of abroad in order to be able to give free rein to anathemas against their fellow countrymen (with the premise, let's be clear, but they are different), it has something to do with it up to a certain point.
In recent times, all the American newspapers venerated in Europe as custodians of the Absolute Truth such as
New York Times, il
New Yorker or the
Washington Post they dealt with Italy, now telling of a country subjected to Putin's fake news, now prey to a rogue nostalgia for fascism by virtue of which it refuses to kick down the buildings built during the Twenty Years, now immoral to the point of insisting on trying those accused of sexual harassment in court and not in a newspaper.
Nevertheless,
these contents have had a very modest circulation in our countryand even the analysis of an authoritative figure like the former editor of the Economist Bill Emmot was greeted with a shrug of the shoulders.
Despite talking about the same things – fake news, fascism and bunga-bunga as the country's main evils – Oliver instead breaks the screen and overflows
feed of tens of thousands of people who relaunch it with the same pleasure with which Binetti wore the hair shirt.
The speed of the story, the perfect comic timing, the bars alternate with numbers, data, authoritative sources:
combining fun with reflection, Oliver's monologue is a summation of that "committed fun" which is somewhat of the magic formula of today's entertainment society, and that allows you to always get by, even in the face of certain monumental blunders that would never be tolerated in journalism (let alone politics).
For example: at some point,
Oliver shows a photo of Trump with Salvini – just introduced to the public as a fascist eager for ethnic cleansing – presenting it as evidence of a
endorsement of The Donald at the Felpa di Ferro. After all, the host continues, it's no surprise: Trump is “the Forrest Gump of human misery”.
The joke is fantastic, the audience in the theater explodes in laughter and so does the audience at home.
Too bad it's all fake news, designed by Salvini himself.
As reported by all the progressive newspapers at the time (who
Republic) Trump had no idea who that guy next to him was, at least at the time of the photo. It was a "
photo opportunity” where anyone could take the opportunity to take a photo with the then candidate for President. Strengthened by his past as a famous crasher in the Milan to drink, Salvini didn't have to be told twice, e
obtained the precious shot, he had resold it on social media passing it off as an endorsement, only to then be fantastically exposed by the Hollywood Reporter.
A Barbine figure for Salvini, but a fact that has little or nothing to do with Trump: yet in Oliver's story here is the American President and the leader of the League, accused of fascism, they become friends.
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