John Oliver tackled the “bulls–t” that is robocalls on Sunday, when he also used the topic as an opportunity to fire a few (more) shots at HBO’s new parent company, AT&T. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) still got the worst of it though last night.
The “Last Week Tonight” host has had it up to here (we know, that idiom doesn’t really work in print) with robotic spam calling — and studies show it’s only going to get worse as we become even more reliant on mobile communication.
“We can’t go back to the days where everyone would just shout their message into a jar, and then mail that jar across the country,” Oliver said. “That was a terrible system, as it was only marginally more accurate than having AT&T now.”
Rut-roh, AT&T owns HBO — and all of the rest of Time Warner — these days. So guess who pays Oliver?
“Oh! You like that business-daddy?” Oliver tweaked his new parent company. “Johnny’s acting up again!”
“I’m gonna get some spicy jars in the mail about that,” he said.
A little later in the segment, which had a big payoff at the very end, Oliver ripped AT&T’s cell service again.
“Oh that’s right — you’ve inherited a problem child,” he said after. “Let’s dance.”
Oliver closed the evening by revealing the robocall he set up to harass all five FCC commissioners — the only people who could stop this phone-spamming nonsense. It was super-easy, Oliver said — and yes, it involves bagpipe music.
Watch the video above.