Being out of work for five months thanks to the writers’ strike was not something that the late night hosts enjoyed, or treated as “a vacation,” and John Oliver would really like people to remember that. Because, according to the HBO host, he got non-stop comments implying such all through the strike — and he hated it.
Stopping by “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Monday night, Oliver and Meyers first celebrated that their shows were even back on, with Meyers noting that “the strike was a bad time.”
“Yeah. Really bad. I know cursing is [forbidden] here — let’s calling it a f—ing bad time because, otherwise, what are intensifiers for?” Oliver joked. “Yes, very bad.”
Meyers agreed, adding that he was surprised to learn that many people considered the five months off “a positive” thing for the hosts to be going through. And Oliver was just as irked by that.
“They sure do assume that, don’t they? They assume that almost every — and they assume that reminding you of that might be a pleasant thing for you to hear,” he said. “It was non-stop, people saying ‘Well at least you get some time off, it must feel like a vacation!’ And I, most of the time, did not respond to that. And when I did, I was not as gracious as I might otherwise have been.”
The HBO host then told a story of one particular encounter he and his wife had in an elevator, with a fan who departed the car by telling Oliver, “Yeah well, at least you’re getting a nice vacation, that must be nice.”
“I was following them off, to say ‘You’re f—ing wrong about that.’ Until my wife pulled me back and said it’s not our floor,” Oliver recalled. “I know it’s not our floor! But that’s not appreciating the difficulty of the situation that I’m in right now!”
You can watch Oliver’s appearance with Seth Meyers in the video above.
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