Love Over Hate
"Hope you’re happy with what you bought," the Last Week Tonight host cracked after showcasing several hypersexualized illustrations of Liberty Mutual's new mascot
John Oliver addressed his new “business daddy” at the end of the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, saying he was thrilled to now be part of the Skydance family next to a trio of sexy fanfic images of the… new Liberty Mutual mascot, Liberty Biberty? Yeah, that sounds about right.
Sunday marked Oliver’s first show since Paramount completed its controversial, multibillion dollar acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (of which HBO is one of the prized Warner subsidiaries). The new company, headed up by David Ellison, son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, is now one of the biggest media conglomerates in the country and is going by the name Skydance.
Oliver, for his part, made his feelings about the merger known in March after the company, then called Paramount Skydance, edged out Netflix in the bidding war for Warner. “It turns out we might be getting a new business daddy,” Oliver quipped at the time, calling the development “not great news.”
He then cracked, “In fact, if I may quote anyone who’s ever accidentally sat on their Roku remote, ‘Oh shit, I’m in Paramount now, how the fuck do I get out of this?’”
Seven months later, Oliver has found himself decisively not “out of this.” But the comedian is, of course, looking for ways to make the most out of being a pawn in the crushing game of corporate consolidation.
The end of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight featured a characteristically stupid, yet insightful segment about effective ways to push back against corny and annoying corporate branding. Oliver highlighted a recent hubbub in New Zealand, where a local bank was forced to pull back on an ad campaign featuring an animated sheep after it started overzealously slinging copyright takedowns at social media users partaking in a viral meme about how they wanted to — sorry, there’s really no other way to put it — fuck the sheep.
For Oliver, the incident was illustrative of a moment when many in the United States are seething at Liberty Mutual’s relentless new ad campaign featuring its Liberty Biberty mascot, a weird, fuzzy, anthropomorphic yellow ball with a Statue of Liberty crown. But as Oliver pointed out, outright hate, and even threats to murder Liberty Biberty, just doesn’t cut it an era when negative engagement counts as engagement nonetheless.
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Perhaps the only way to actually fight back, as the New Zealand sheep mascot incident illustrated, is to choose love, not hate. As such, Oliver asked Last Week Tonight’s resident illustrator to mock up several images of sexy Liberty Biberty in the hopes that they might spread online. He even encouraged the furry community to make use their special talents, too.
It was, at this point, Oliver briefly addressed his own new corporate overlords, singing off with the crack, “I’m thrilled to be part of the Skydance family! Hope you’re happy with what you bought, guys. We’re never gonna change!”