2016By Ian Casselberry on
John Oliver has been an outspoken critic of the Rio Olympics on HBO’s Last Week Tonight over the past couple of weeks. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that he would cover what has unfortunately been the biggest story to come out of the 2016 Summer Olympics: Ryan Lochte and the controversy over his fabricated robbery story.

Here’s the opening from Sunday’s Last Week Tonight:

https://youtu.be/1OBAmvOLlm0

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That was a beatdown. If Oliver’s jokes weren’t so hilarious and on the spot, that segment almost would have been painful to watch, like a boxer trapped in the corner who’s unable to get his hands up to defend himself as he’s getting pummeled.

“If Sting was a jock”? “Doesn’t understand how mirrors work”? “America’s idiot sea cow”? Or he could just play various clips from interviews and his E! reality show, What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, to demonstrate that Lochte can’t even answer the simplest of questions, teed up for the ideal sound bite.

Oliver making fun of Lochte is almost unfair. The disgraced swimmer is such an easy target — not just for his hair-coloring choices or lying about being robbed at gunpoint, but for his general lunkheadedness. And Oliver wields some of the sharpest verbal knives on late-night television. At this point, Lochte is America’s poster child for the dumb jock. Or as Oliver put it, he’s “the purest form of the chemical element ‘Bro.'”

Premium cable’s favorite Sunday late-night host does point out that Lochte exposing himself as “a total asshole” makes poking fun at him less amusing than it used to be. But it’s still pretty damn funny. Especially when all Lochte has left us to do is laugh at him.

About Ian Casselberry

Ian is a writer, editor, and podcaster. You can find his work at Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He's written for Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation.

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