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| John Oliver, photo by Nathan Raymond |
British comic with green card finds successful work in U.S.
By Carl Unegbu, ComedyBeat
John Oliver’s stock is rising fast at Comedy Central and this gadfly of a comedian only seems to be getting warmed up. In just three years since arriving in America to join The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, this remarkable British import has made a marathon distance look more like a dash in the American comedy playground. A few days into the New Year his John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show debuted on Comedy Central. And he still only has a green card, minted just a few weeks earlier.
Born 32 years ago in Birmingham, England, the Cambridge-educated Englishman with a trademark clipped accent and an English degree is a comedian who knows how to work up some real heat in audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite a geeky, bespectacled look and a full head of matted dark hair that recalls a Cambridge English professor, Oliver may well become the next Simon Cowell, another British transplant who has become a household name in America, courtesy of the Fox hit reality show American Idol.
And he seems to know just why he’s doing so well. By his own admission, he is as much an entertainer as an irritant. And he has never apologized for his sometimes prickly point of view or his whining about what the world is doing to him. Not long ago, he led an effort to introduce closed captioning to BBC America, claiming that the English accent could be a problem for American listeners, plus a dig at Americans for the tea throwing incident at Boston Harbor in the 1770s shortly before the revolution.
Then with a straight face at his new Stand-Up Show, he claims he should be able to vote in America, despite his arriving here only in mid- 2006. And he considers his inability to vote in America where he pays taxes and speaks the language as “Taxation Without Representation.” Then he threatens to bring back British-style tyranny on the tea party protesters, complete with stitched- up red coats and polished muskets.
But he loves good comedy no matter where it is served up. Unlike most people, Oliver sees comedy on both sides of the Atlantic as not much different from one another. “The only real difference in live comedy is alcohol level, which is significantly higher in the U.K”, says Oliver, who says both the performers and the audience alike are into the alcohol. Because American audiences have lower alcohol levels, Oliver finds them to be surprisingly more polite than their British counterparts.
In his three years in America, he has won an Emmy for his work as “Senior British Correspondent” on The Daily Show; made a foray into the movies with a role in The Love Guru; and will appear in the fall as a goofy professor in the new NBC sitcom Community, which stars movie legend Chevy Chase. But he has retained a foothold back home in England, co-hosting the weekly satire The Bugle, a news pod cast for TimesOnline.
But life in America hasn’t all been fun and games. To profess love for America and to prefer its audiences may be easy part. On the flip side, his immigration situation used to cause him more than a few headaches and he was anxious to get a green card. “Life on a visa can be perilous,” he admitted to NPR’s Madeleine Brand.
Now that he can stay in America courtesy of his green card, Oliver now gets his chance to win his argument against conventional wisdom by showing that it makes no difference where any comedian’s audience is located on either side of the Atlantic. With his stand-up charisma, who knows, perhaps he can get his American colleagues and their audiences to “booze it up” a bit before showing up at comedy venues. For all his success so far, maybe the gadfly is only just getting warmed up for a lasting legacy in comedy land.