John Oliver

I don’t know how you explain Piers Morgan back to Americans now. I don’t think he ever intended for America to be his home, and there’s a difference between criticising the place you have come to call home and the place you have come to live in for a bit. Ideally, on the Venn diagram between myself and Piers there would be no overlap whatsoever, on either a personal or professional level. If we could be two non-interlocking circles I’d be fine with that. Any comparison with him makes me want to challenge you to a duel.

At this point, we aren’t just flirting with disaster; we’re rounding third base and asking if disaster has any condoms.

Congress is like jazz – it’s really about the bills it’s not passing. It’s also like jazz in that most people hate it and anyone who says they don’t are lying.

In the last series, we set up a church [to expose televangelists and the ease of avoiding tax through establishing a religious organisation]. It took a lot of legal advice and months of gathering correspondence with one pastor. In terms of the UK, I’m not sure what the Inland Revenue’s position on churches is. The IRS is very much of the opinion that all churches, whatever their form, operate tax free. How would I make sense of what we achieved? We achieved nothing! We achieved $70,000 in single [donations], a four-foot wooden penis and five vials of human sperm. Although a lot of people would consider that a decent year’s work, I suppose. It’s a pretty impressive room full of tat.

Welcome to The Daily Show, I’m John Oliver. Jon Stewart is still not here. He is currently living out a live-action Lord of the Rings role-playing experience deep in the New Zealand wilderness.

Trump is like a magic eight-ball; every time you shake him he gives you a different answer, and sometimes the answer is just ‘big-league’ or ‘that’s some body on my daughter, right?’

I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I’ve lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity which I try and avoid.

I might get mad all over again watching our premiere.

You gotta wear the right trousers if you’re gonna be a rock star.

The greatest Rock’n’Roll drummer of all time was John Bonham who did things that nobody had ever even thought possible before with the drum kit. And also the greatest sound out of his drums – they sounded enormous, and just one bass drum. So fast on it that he did more with one bass drum than most people could do with three, if they could manage them. And he had technique to burn and fantastic power and tremendous feel for rock’n’roll. “When the levee breaks” is the archetypal heavy drum sound – it’s never been bettered – it’s like a steamroller, enormous bass drum. Simple but takes feel.

[on Matthew McConaughey] He was always taking his shirt off, he’s like Yeah, here’s my deal, I’m hot.” We had a meeting one day at like 11 o’clock, right before the show and he walks into the meeting shirtless wearing this like old musty sarong… He doesn’t smell great, no.

People say that I’m a millionaire, but that’s not true – I only spend millions.

My body is the shape I live in and it shapes the way I live.

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

There’s so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way. By using my career as the wind in the sails of my adventures, I could see so many things and so many people that I might have missed had my career gone a different direction.

I don’t remember anyone’s name. How do you think the ‘dahling’ thing got started?

I quite liked Sharkey and George and then there was a cartoon with rapper MC Hammer in it – Hammertime – I loved that cartoon, it was genius! They don’t make cartoons like that anymore.

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

I still like to get carried away – but passively.

Mom would kill me if I showed my navel.

I think, really, what it was was that I was raised in a very gray Britain in the 1950s. We were pummeled during the war. A lot of our cities were wrecked and smashed up and as we came out of that, we were baby boomers there; we didn’t have the candy apple red; we didn’t have the big chrome decals; we didn’t have Elvis. So what we did, we came out ferocious. We came out kicking and spitting and it was a reaction to the gray and depletion of our islands….