John Oliver on JD Vance and the couch


Oliver’s weekly show ,em>Last Week Tonight starts out with a monologue on contemporary events followed by a long in-depth segment. It is only the latter that HBO puts out on YouTube a few days after the Sunday show is aired. Apparently he had a lot of fun in his monologue last week talking about Vance and the cushion.

I found this clip of it.

It will likely be taken down soon and we will have to be satisfied with this summary.

John Oliver checked in on the US presidential race and the state of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Sunday evening. The Last Week Tonight host ripped into JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and “Great Lakes Ron DeSantis”, who is not polling well with anyone.

The Ohio senator “sucks so much”, said Oliver, that the internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a bestselling book to “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir”.

That is not in Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, Oliver emphasized, “but I think the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked. “If you ask me to play two truths and a lie with this man, before he’d even open his mouth, I’d shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ Because I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.”

“He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes,” Oliver continued. “If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because JD Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, ‘Yeah that sounds right.’”

Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’s decision to factcheck the tweet with a headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news site later removed the article with the explanation that the story didn’t meet its “standard editing process”.

“No shit it didn’t, because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. “And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say ‘JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch’ definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”

Oliver’s staff, he revealed, tried to contact the Vance campaign this week; when asked by phone if he ever had sex with a couch, the spokesperson hung up, “which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it”? Oliver laughed.

“Who knows where this is going?” he mused. “The news is moving so fast right now – the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Kamala’s VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But … until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that JD Vance fucked a couch.”

I wish that clip were freely available.

People are likely to ask Vance about the couch until he or his spokesperson explicitly denies it. Either way, it is not a good look for him.

Comments

  1. Callinectes says

    The episodes, and segments, come up on the official channel, but there’s usually a few weeks delay.

  2. lochaber says

    I’m so here for this nonsense.

    It’s going on like a decade or so of the media just unquestionably spewing orange asshole’s talking points as if they had any substance, so it’s nice to finally see some pushback.

    The major difference, IMO, is that we all know this is a bullshit rumor, and I think most of us wouldn’t ultimately care if it was true or not, but it’s gaining some momentum on social media, and drawing the focus for now, and, well, if we can’t focus on policy and qualifications, then I’ll take what I can get…

  3. lochaber says

    also, I forget who, (but I want to credit Catherynne M. Valente), one of the best things to do when facing a fascist is to laugh at them.

  4. Silentbob says

    People are likely to ask Vance about the couch until he or his spokesperson explicitly denies it. Either way, it is not a good look for him.

    This is actually a notorious LBJ tactic:

    https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/never-deny-rumor

    Former President Lyndon B. Johnson was in a tough congressional race and decided to hit his opponent with a nasty a rumor, that the guy’s a pig-fucker. His campaign manager was shocked, he tried to pull him back, he says, “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!” But Johnson shoots back, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.”

  5. KG says

    How old was the couch J.D. Vance didn’t fuck? Was it asleep, inebriated or otherwise incapable of giving informed consent at the time J.D. Vance didn’t fuck it? So many questions!

  6. anat says

    The funniest thing now is that hardly anyone talks about the assassination attempt on SSACFT anymore. So much other, more interesting stuff to talk about.

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