John Oliver And Comedy

John Oliver At Foxwoods Saturday

John Oliver's career as lead correspondent on "The Daily Show," active standup performer and occasional actor in TV and movie comedies is quite different from the goals he had at prestigious University of Cambridge.

"I studied English in college, which seems like cheating when you're already English," Oliver says in his familiar accent over the phone in New York. But while at Christ's College, Cambridge, "I started writing sketches, realizing that's what I wanted to do with my life."

While he wouldn't normally think of performing comedy on a stage, he says, "I thought it would be a frightening thing to do, so I tried it. I also got hooked on it. Which I'm sure would be the same case with heroin."

His addiction to comedy led him to his Emmy-winning slot on "The Daily Show," host of the "John Oliver's New York Stand Up Show," also on Comedy Central; a recurring role on the NBC sitcom "Community"; several movies, from "The Love Guru" to the upcoming "The Smurfs"; and a standup career that brings him to Comix at Foxwoods in his Connecticut debut Saturday, June 4.

He describes "a comedic pedigree" at Cambridge, where he was a member of the Footlights troupe, from which Monty Python had sprung decades before.

"I thought I'd try it and I liked it a lot straight away," Oliver says of the comedy troupe. "I spent a lot more time there than on my degree, to the frustration of my tutors. By third year, I was a lost cause. I began thinking I had come there to learn comedy."

He developed an act at the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival but had never been to America before he got a call to come to the "Daily Show" in 2006.

"It came out of nowhere really," Oliver says of the show. "I didn't even know they were looking for someone. I guess Ricky Gervais met up with Jon Stewart and recommended me. I came out straight away, so quickly that my stuff is still in storage in England. I came over with two bags and have rarely been back since then."

Oliver had heard of the "Daily Show. " "It was my favorite show. I watched it online and it had just started being aired in England. I'd never been to America at that point and thought it would be so remote that I'd ever get on. It all happened very quickly."

Oliver brought with him an interest in political humor and quickly flourished in a position where Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Ed Helms and Rob Corddry had preceded him, especially in filmed interview bits, where his English roots came in handy.

John Oliver on Tea Party Rallies, His Comedy Central Stand-Up ...

He's also made a mark in the sitcom world, playing Ian Duncan, Greendale's most apathetic professor, on 'Community.' Finally, Oliver has still been doing his current-events-charged stand-up, some of which you'll see on the new season of 'John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show,' which premieres Thursday night (Friday morning) at midnight ET. The series' second season will showcase unknown comedians as well as vets like Maria Bamford and Greg Behrendt. Well, it's been a lot of fun. I guess mostly it's been a lot of fun. It's definitely been kind of deeply, profoundly exhausting. But I think 'The Daily Show' helps in a way because it's quite frenetic. There's a momentum to it that basically doesn't stop. So you can't really afford to get tired. It's like when you can't afford to get sick. You just have to have some mental conversation with your body, going "It's not really going to work out, you know, you're going to have to put this off for down the line." So I'm sure I am building up a colossal... maybe I should hibernate in about 5 years. I'll just sleep for 6 months. I think the protests in Madison are something that I've seen before in England. That scale and that tone of protest. I think the difference is the Tea Party style of protest; that is something which you don't really get. The way that religion is brought into that, that there is a Godly way to do things, is something that just doesn't exist in England. I guess [England is] broadly a relatively secular country, so the idea of religion being injected into politics is just not there. So that has been the more shocking thing. I remember going to a Sarah Palin rally in Scranton just before the [2008] election. And that was a pretty eye-opening experience. Because you realize the people that were there, who were very, very frightened of the idea of Obama becoming President, for reasons that didn't really make sense, but yet their fear was real. You know, they really meant it. If you put a heart monitor on them, they would've got panicky. Yeah. And they were furious. They really honestly believed that [what Obama was doing] was tyranny. And I think beyond the normal kind of, "Oh, I'm going to exaggerate for effect." They were really sticking by the fact that it was tyrannical what Obama and the government was doing. Which is absolutely ridiculous. That's objectively ridiculous to use that term. You can have legitimate grievances with it.

The tales of John Oliver Hobbes, pseud "Some emotions and a moral," "A study in temptations," "The sinner's comedy," "A bundle of life."

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