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" As a Canadian, I have always been amazed by how easy it is for the British to play Americans for suckers. British writers move to New York when they&amp;#039;re used up\u2014see Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie\u2014and are treated as heroes. And there have always been far too many pretentious English actors in Hollywood operating more on accent than on talent. And then there was Piers Morgan. The executives at CNN must at least have some claim, however vague and in dispute, to expertise on how television works. And yet they had thought it was a good idea to replace Larry King, American everyman, with a mean-spirited hack from London. Morgan, at the time he left Britain, was one of the most despised men in his country. Jeremy Clarkson, a fellow British TV host, claimed he was ashamed of having punched Morgan\u2014but only while bragging about it on television. The schaudenfreude in England when Morgan eventually lost his CNN show was so widespread it amounted to groupthink\u2014hating him was more or less a requirement of belonging to civilized society there. How was it possible that anyone could have believed that a man despised in his own country would somehow become beloved in the United States? For reasons that are unclear\u2014a weird hangover of colonialism? a democratic fascination with aristocracy?\u2014a British accent does something to American ears: They can&amp;#039;t help taking it seriously. Fortunately, after ten episodes of Last Week Tonight on HBO, John Oliver is now redeeming his countrymen. He&amp;#039;s a Brit in America who for once doesn&amp;#039;t come off as superior and smug, and who is nonetheless utterly hilarious. Last Week Tonight has developed a new and surprisingly effective form for television: the extended rant. Even Jon Stewart, to whom Oliver is of course a prot\u00E9g\u00E9, usually doesn&amp;#039;t spend more than ten minutes on a single subject. Oliver isn&amp;#039;t afraid to go longer, and when he does, he&amp;#039;s superb. His thirteen-minute FIFA rant, in which he managed to explicate, in detail, the evils of organized soccer while also explaining his mad passion for the game, was the best thing, anywhere, on the subject of the World Cup. Last night, he did a full seventeen minutes on prisons\u2014America&amp;#039;s most bizarre public shame\u2014bringing up the horrors of a woman whose C-section wounds were treated with kitchen sugar and Sesame Street episodes aimed at children whose parents are in jail.  Oliver can even make something like income inequality, not inherently a topic you might think would serve as the basis for extended comic riffs, funny.       This segment, more than any other segment on the show, reveals exactly how good Oliver is and why his Britishness matters. Inequality is a perfect subject for an expatriate of Britain, where the class system is currently functioning at nineteenth-century levels. In his tirade, Oliver runs clips of serious American news channels offering advice on how to spend a $540 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot\u2014typical American bullshit fantasy\u2014but at the same time he knows that that basic hopefulness, that innate and commonly held belief that a great future is just around the corner, is one of America&amp;#039;s best features. Like many outsiders, he has found that America&amp;#039;s most beautiful realities are also its craziest.  This insight is what Piers Morgan never had. He fought against guns, which is not inherently a minority opinion in America, but the way he talked about it was anti-American to the core. As New York Times media columnist David Carr put it, &amp;quot;Mr. Morgan&amp;#039;s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III, peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.&amp;quot; Morgan was classically arrogant in the way that only the British can be, with a sense of superiority as vast as it is undeserved.  John Oliver, mercifully, has none of that arrogance. He is fully aware that it would be absurd for a Brit to lecture Americans on inequality: The British invented it, perfected it, and made it the heart of their culture. What he possesses instead is the knowledge that America should do whatever it can to avoid Britain&amp;#039;s fate. His criticism is motivated by a love for the country that is not his. And there is a way in which that love is more interesting\u2014more insightful\u2014than mere enthusiastic patriotism. When Fox News or even CNN waves the flag, it&amp;#039;s no doubt genuine, but it&amp;#039;s also thoughtless, an automatic gesture. And even the most cynical American comics (Stewart again) have so much patriotism bred into them that love for their country is absolutely ingrained.       In last night&amp;#039;s episode on prisons, Oliver referred to the incarceration crisis as &amp;quot;our&amp;quot; problem. It was a subtle shift, but important. Oliver&amp;#039;s affection for America is more real, more believable, than that of a standard American media opinion-maker. Oliver cheers the country exactly at the same moment as he mocks it, which makes him the anti-Morgan. And that alone makes him worth watching. The contradiction makes him as accurate as he is hilarious. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29529/john-oliver-brit/>