John Oliver and Stephen Colbert fight over wax presidents, laugh at Don Trump Jr.

John Oliver and Stephen Colbert spar over wax statues

(Image credit: YouTube/Screenshot/Late Show With Stephen Colbert)

last updated 17 July 2017

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight is on hiatus this week, but last Thursday Oliver was a guest on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, and over the weekend, The Late Show posted this unaired clip of Oliver and Colbert sparring over the wax figures of Warren G. Harding and Zachary Taylor they bought, respectively, at an auction in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It is mostly safe for work, and features a contest of comedic insults about historical figures most people know little about.

Oliver was off this week, he explained on The Late Show, because typically this is a very slow time for news. "I imagine you took these two weeks off because this is the part of the year, the summer, where you go, like, nothing's gonna happen," Colbert said. "Nothing — it's always quiet, right?" Oliver said, laughing. "You'd have to have an offspring who is so stupid," he began, referencing the emails Donald Trump Jr. released acknowledging he met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised information from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton. Oliver mentioned his show's "Stupid Watergate" frame for the Trump-Russia scandal — "the idea that it's something with all the gravitas but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything," he reminded viewers — and said the frame "was supposed to be a self-contained joke, but current events are making it more and more relevant, which is not normally how jokes work."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.