John Oliver, born in Birmingham, England, on 23 April 1977, has hosted HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver since 2014. The show has won twenty Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, and he became an American citizen in 2019.
John William Oliver was born on 23 April 1977 in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington, the son of music teacher Carole and school headmaster and social worker Jim Oliver. His mother is from Liverpool and his father from the Wirral, and he has been a Liverpool F.C. fan since childhood. His uncle was the composer Stephen Oliver, and he has a younger sister who lives in Australia. He grew up in Bedford, where he attended the Mark Rutherford School and learned to play the viola. He was raised Anglican but lapsed at the age of 12.
In the mid-to-late 1990s he studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights. His contemporaries included David Mitchell and Richard Ayoade, and he became the club’s vice president in 1997, writing and performing with Footlights president Ayoade in the 1997 and 1998 touring shows. He graduated with a degree in English in 1998.
He made his first screen appearance in 1985, playing Felix Pardiggle in the BBC drama Bleak House, and later said the BBC wanted a child “with dark hair and brown eyes, and I was two-for-two on that”. One of his first paying jobs was writing for the British morning show The Big Breakfast. His first major stand-up appearance was at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and his first solo show at the 2002 Fringe. In 2004 and 2005 he co-hosted the political radio show Political Animal with Andy Zaltzman.
He came to wider attention in the United States as the senior British correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 2006 to 2013, winning three Primetime Emmy Awards for writing and guest-hosting the programme for eight weeks in 2013. From 2010 to 2013 he hosted the stand-up series John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show on Comedy Central, and he co-hosted the comedy podcast The Bugle with Zaltzman. His acting roles include Ian Duncan on the NBC sitcom Community and voice work in The Smurfs films and the 2019 remake of The Lion King.
Since 2014 he has hosted Last Week Tonight. Its influence on US culture, legislation and policymaking has been dubbed the “John Oliver effect”, and Time described him in its 2015 Time 100 list as a “comedic agent of change” who tackles issues thoughtfully, without fear or apology. His work has been described as journalism or investigative journalism, labels he rejects.
At Footlights he also worked on Emotional Baggage (1997) and Between a Rock and a Hard Place (1998), frequently worked with comedians including Daniel Kitson, Russell Howard, David O’Doherty and Alun Cochrane, and from 2002 to 2003 worked on the BBC Three series The State We’re In alongside Anita Rani, Jon Holmes and Robin Ince, giving him a long British apprenticeship before his American breakthrough.
Image: John Oliver speaking at an event in 2014 (file photo). Photo: Steve Jennings for TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
