Jerry Seinfeld, John Oliver, and a Triumph TR3
The “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee” season finale delivers.
You can't help but love John Oliver. The erstwhile Daily Show correspondent took up hosting his own news-humor program, HBO’s Last Week Tonight, back in 2014. Since then, he's taken down Dr. Oz, learned us about patents, and made the death penalty debate tolerable using cute hamster B-roll. Oliver's sharp, clever, and, above all else, British.
So. Freaking. British.
Were he any more British, the man would just be a soggy bacon sandwich with arms, queuing for a queue, beating up other Brits for wearing the wrong soccer—sorry, football—jersey. So it only makes sense that for Oliver’s appearance on "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee," the eighth season finale, our squire Seinfeld brought out one of the O.G.’s of postwar roadsters, a 1959 Triumph TR3.
The car’s lovely, but the conversation really delivers. Topics? To start with, Oliver’s wife, a combat medic who joined up after 9/11 (Oliver, describing a gig in Pittsburgh: “It was like a war zone out there...” His wife: “No, it wasn't.”) and his former hairstyle (Seinfeld: “Men with bangs disturb me.”) Also: stand-up audiences, eating Key Lime pie, donating jet skis to Doctors Without Borders, agitating the Russian government, similarities between hipsters and Orthodox Jews, and the “internal logic of comedy.”
The end narrative, of course, plays to the car. It's all about being wonderfully impractical, and Britain, and the value of childish fun in a demanding, grown-up world. By now you know the formula; that makes it no less enjoyable.
Check out the video here.
