WATCH: John Oliver ribs Obama on his foreign love-quest

On Wednesday night's Daily Show, John Oliver gets in a little fun at President Obama's expense. The first half of the show is an elaborate narrative about Obama, finding both his poll numbers and jump-shot deteriorating at home, going on an ancient Greece–style odyssey abroad to find the love he's losing at home. It ends with a Lord of the Rings twist.

So far, Oliver says, Obama hasn't found the warmth he's looking for. In 2008, before he won the presidency, Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 to a speech in Berlin, Oliver notes; on Wednesday, Obama drew fewer than 10,000 people to the same location. Germans, being foreigners, are mad that Obama is assuring Americans that the NSA is only spying on foreigners, Oliver says. This has still got to sting, though: "Losing 95 percent of your audience in just five years, that basically makes Obama the NBC of presidents."

Oliver then travels back in time, both in Obama's European trip and America's relationship with Russia. He contrasts Obama's chilly meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday to Bill Clinton's boozy bonhomie with Boris Yeltsin and George W. Bush's warm rapport with, well, Vladimir Putin.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Why was this meeting of American and Russian presidents so frosty? I might have guessed Sunday's report in The Guardian about the NSA intercepting Russian leaders' phone calls at a 2009 summit, but Oliver has another theory. It involves a ring. It's pretty funny.

In the wild card segment of The Daily Show, Oliver has a mustachioed John Hodgman on to discuss the Supreme Court's recent ruling that you can't patent human genes. Oliver says the ruling is a no-brainer. Hodgman laments it as a lost commercial opportunity, holding out the possibility of marketing an array of John Oliver knockoffs. Watch: