The Guardian (excerpts) John Oliver … has a characteristically unpretentious description for the process of writing jokes about the news. It is, he explains cheerfully, “like working in a sausage factory, trying to make a palatable sausage from some of the worst ingredients you can imagine – you’ve got all this disgusting stuff and then you just try and find something you can swallow”.
Lately, that sausage metaphor has seemed particularly apt: the “ingredients” don’t get much more unpalatable than the revelations surrounding the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. The clip of him explaining just how deep the scandal goes has become an online hit, not least the moment when he tells Stewart, affecting gloom over US failings as a country, that he’s about to give him a “schadenfreudegasm” of national, institutional shame.