John Oliver: How embracing mascots elevated Last Week Tonight

Vulture

"The first time that we made something that was going to be directly motivated by the main story was the piece about tobacco," says Oliver in an interview with Vulture. "We made Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat. We made it to fuck with Marlboro. That was pretty cleanly motivated in the body of the story. We wanted to try to get these images of our Marlboro mascot to mess with their Google results. We felt bringing that mascot to life would be fun. And it was. It was really fun... It actually made us think significantly about, in terms of production, what we were capable of. Because at relatively little notice that week, we got a bus advertisement in Uruguay, and we sent boxes of T-shirts to Togo and successfully shot both of them. That was one of those moments where we realized not only can we do this, but we can think about what we can actually do if we had this idea earlier. It was amazing that we could scramble and get those results. That started to make us think, Hold on, if we extend our production on each story, or if we have an idea three weeks out, then we can really do some sh*t. It was very, very much a moment of realizing we could add very high-end HBO production to a comedy show."