John Oliver opted for a longer show on Sunday night, but he needed time. As in this week’s main segment, the “Last Week Tonight” host sheds a wide tear on the British Museum – and museums in general – for theft of artifacts.
To begin the section, Oliver first called for the sculptures that are housed in the Acropolis Museum in Greece. He noted that, in some sculptures, his fragments are much whiter than the rest, as the missing pieces have been filled in with plaster. But where exactly are those missing pieces? Well, Oliver didn’t want to trap himself, but he had an answer: the British Museum.
“Yeah, we got it! Honestly, if you’re ever looking for a missing artifact, nine times out of 10, it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver said. “It is basically the world’s largest lost and found, with both ‘lost’ and ‘found’ in the heaviest possible quotation marks.”
And although Oliver largely targeted museums in his segment, he made frequent excavations in his home country, criticizing the British defense of keeping artifacts, which included reasons such as Britain, which compared to his home countries. I was able to take better care of him.
The late-night host also defended that “it was a different time – everyone robbed and it was totally fine” – especially in response to British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s theft of Ethiopian treasures by British forces. Calling footage. In it, he said that he “deeply mourned” that the artifacts were “deemed fit to be brought in by the British Army.”
“We didn’t even know how to cure a UTI without a leech,” Oliver joked. “But we knew it was ‘deeply mournful’ for them to raid other countries, which is British for ‘super f-ed up’.”
You can watch Oliver’s full segment on museums in the video above.
