TV

John Oliver’s Put On A Stirring Tribute To The NZ Politician Who Got Smacked In The Face With A Dildo

The New Zealand flag debate is solved.

by Alex McKinnon  16 February 2016

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Last Week Tonight is back for its third season and, having missed more than three month’s worth of news over the break, had to pick what it chose to recap very carefully. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the LWT crew chose to close the show with a summing up of one of the summer’s most inspirational stories — the little flying dildo that could.

Bap!

If you somehow missed this lpiece of wonder, that unfortunate gentleman is New Zealand Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce, whose face abruptly met with an airborne dildo thrown by an anti-Trans-Pacific Partnership protester a couple of weeks ago. The protester wasn’t charged with anything and Joyce himself was a reasonably good sport about the incident, even when the New Zealand Herald unilaterally rechristened him ‘Dildo Baggins’ in the aftermath. In an open letter to TPP opponents published last week, he noted that he “literally took it on the chin in defence of the TPP”, which is genuinely the best defence of the damn thing I’ve ever read.

But in an attempt to laugh off the vigorous dildoing his face received, Joyce has only made things worse for himself, especially when he sent this prophetic tweet:

Unfortunately for him, Last Week Tonight have both noticed, and responded in kind. To put it delicately, New Zealand’s long-running flag debate is over.

Politics can be exhausting, infuriating and deeply depressing, but the fact that we live in an age where a foreign TV show host can put together a massive tribute to a politician getting smacked in the chops with a sex toy fills me with a perverse hope.

For his part, either Joyce is totally fine with it or isn’t paying his social media person enough.