Last Night Today -- Live

Last night I had a fun evening out. John Oliver was in town, performing at the Buell Theater. Throughout the week, when I told people of these plans, they invariably had the two reactions that I imagine most of you are having now: "I didn't know he was coming to town!" and "I wish I were going." Yes, John Oliver still does stand up, and now that his show Last Week Tonight is on hiatus between seasons, he's out doing more of it.

He's quite funny in person, and did a set of around an hour and 15 minutes. If you've seen his show, then you know his delivery style -- storytelling (often long form) with jokes scattered along the way. But where his show tends to be political and scathing in its criticism, his stand-up has undercurrents of maybe Jerry Seinfeld mixed with Yakov Smirnoff. Most of his material is observational about his being in America as a foreigner -- and loving it here, crazy though we are.

The heart of his set was a series of long riffs on weird things he's seen around America, such as the library in Boise, Idaho with "Library!" (exclamation point) painted in bold letters on the side. (And the story of the local woman who angrily wrote to the newspaper to complain hilariously when he made fun of it.) Or the South Carolina event that involved hitting baseballs off the deck of an aircraft carrier, from an inflatable cage, into a crowd of people on jetskis trying to catch them. Or the zombie crawl in Minneapolis that he did not know anything about until he found himself in the middle of an episode of The Walking Dead.

When this last bit led some in the crowd to mention that Denver has a zombie crawl too, it led to Oliver's most hilarious bit of the night, and revealed where he really thrives: going off-script. He invited the crowd to share the weirdest thing about Denver, and several people quickly chimed in with Frozen Dead Guy Days. He kept cracking off-the-cuff jokes as audience members shared more and more details, until he was finally so disbelieving that he whipped out his phone on stage to Google it: "Frozen... okay, the Disney movie, of course... Dead G-- ho-ly shit!" It probably helped that somehow, despite all my years in Denver, I myself had never heard of this either. In any case, the combination of the preposterous facts mixed with his witty commentary produced 10 minutes of fantastic stand-up.

It seems that John Oliver is going to be hopping around the country a lot over the next few weeks. (Tonight, for example, he'll be in Anaheim, a city he seemed certain would not be able to top Frozen Dead Guy Days.) So if he's coming near you, and you like his HBO show at all, you owe it to yourself to go. His routine maybe had a couple of dry patches, but it always came back around. It was a great night of comedy.