John Oliver Has Declared All-Out War With An Ex-FIFA Official In The Best Way Possible
This is why you don't mess with comedians.
There’s a very good reason why people tell you not to mess with comedians. If you heckle them at a live show, you’ll become the butt of every joke for the rest of the night. If you pick a fight with them online, your humiliation will become very public. If you’re an embattled ex-sporting official challenging them with dramatic YouTube videos for calling you out on your very serious corruption charges, you’re fucked. Overnight, ex-FIFA official Jack Warner learned this the hard way as a result of an ongoing feud with John Oliver.
Despite his love of football, the comedian’s been perhaps the biggest opponent of the troubled organisation launching an assault of their ethics with one of his first episodes of Last Week Tonight. After the official corruption charges last month, he then followed up with a new monologue which directly criticised the (now-resigned) President Sepp Blatter and Jack Warner — a Trinidad and Tobago politician, former FIFA Vice President and human adult living in the 21st century who publicly illustrates his points with articles from The Onion. Because that last point just makes him way too appealing as a target, Oliver may have also started up an ad campaign in Trinidad and Tobago that directly mocked him.
Proving he’s apparently not very busy with the 164-page indictment against him and the fact the FBI are claiming he diverted $750,000 of Haiti relief funds into his own bank account, Warner then ranted back in a video calling Oliver a “comedian fool”. Inevitably, Oliver responded to his on his show last night and, even if you haven’t been following any of this great big mess, it’s just a beautiful sight to behold.
I know it’s an unfair fight. Warner is a 72-year-old man fumbling with a webcam his grandkids probably hooked up to his PC from the early-noughties and Oliver and his team are some of the smartest comedians in the world who are entirely capable of finding his knockoff Bond villain music on a simple Google search. But still. I want this to keep going. I want more.
“If you really want to continue to trade shit-talking videos with increasingly high production values, then consider your challenge accepted my friend,” Oliver said. “Either respond to me by this time next week with a more spectacular video than this or I will accept your graceless defeat.”
In lieu of actual prison time, this is probably the best punishment Warner could have.
“Your move, Jack. Your move.”
–
Just in case that wasn’t enough for one episode, Oliver also challenged the government’s interrogation techniques last night and asked Helen Mirren to make an audiobook of the US Senate Torture Report no one’s read:
Remember when our own politicians launched a Senate estimates hearing on Gillian Triggs despite not having read the Forgotten Children Report they were criticising her for? Lolol. John Oliver is going to have a great time here later this year.