John Oliver took great delight in deflating psychics on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. "Now, chances are you haven't thought about psychics in a while — which is weird, there's not really a whole lot else going on," he joked. "But if you watch daytime TV at all, you'll see that they pop up all the time."
"I am not going to be litigating whether psychics are real in this piece — for one, they're not," and if you believe they are, "there is nothing I could say that will convince you otherwise," Oliver began. "And look, it is easy to dismiss psychics as a joke — really easy. Fun, too. But the fact of the matter is, one recent poll found four in 10 Americans believe in psychics," and "the psychic industry is both larger and grimmer than you might assume. By one estimate, it's a $2.2 billion industry, and there has been a lot of predatory behavior."
Oliver focused his show on "one of the most insidious parts" of the psychic industry, mediums, or "people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead." He ran through their two main tricks, "cold reading," or "taking high-probability guesses," and "hot reading, which involves doing prior research on a subject." He also showed the human costs psychics can inflict and chastised daytime TV hosts for enabling them.
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But it wasn't all cold water. "Every now and then, when handled responsibly, a psychic on television is a delightful thing," Oliver said, and he specifically had in mind "humiliating them with a ghost boy in a Denny's parking lot." To drive his point home, he created a fake daytime TV show, Wakey Wakey, a fake psychic — who also happened to be his "wife," Wanda-Jo Oliver (Rachel Dratch), from when he founded a for-profit church — and a website to fill your psychic needs free of charge. Watch the entire, occasionally NSFW show below. Peter Weber
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