Early life

Oliver was born in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham, and educated in Bedford at the Mark Rutherford School. He is the son of Carole, a music teacher, and Jim Oliver, school headmaster and social worker, both originally from Liverpool. His uncle was composer Stephen Oliver, and his paternal great-great-grandfather was William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon and court chaplain to Queen Victoria. In the mid to late 1990s, Oliver was a member of the Cambridge Footlights, the comedy troupe run by students of Cambridge University, with contemporaries including David Mitchell and Richard Ayoade. In 1997, he was the troupe's vice president. In 1998, he graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read English.

Career

Stand-up

Oliver first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001 as part of The Comedy Zone, a late-night showcase of newer acts, where he played the character of an "oleaginous journalist." He performed his debut solo show in 2002 and returned in 2003. In 2004 and 2005, he collaborated with Andy Zaltzman on a double act and co-hosting Political Animal, with various acts performing political material. After moving to New York City for The Daily Show, Oliver began performing stand-up in small clubs around the city and later headlined shows in larger venues. Oliver's first stand-up special, titled John Oliver: Terrifying Times, debuted on Comedy Central in 2008 and was later released on DVD. Since 2010, Oliver has hosted four seasons of John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show.

According to Edward Helmore in The Guardian: "His style leans toward the kind that Americans like best from the British - exaggerated, full of odd accents and mannerisms, in the vein of Monty Python." Oliver has used his English culture as a primary subject of his jokes. Oliver describes his own accent as a "mongrel" of Brummie, Scouse and Bedford influences.

Mock the Week

Prior to joining The Daily Show, Oliver was making appearances on British television as a panellist on the satirical news quiz Mock the Week. He was a frequent guest on the first two series in 2005 and 2006, appearing in 7 out of 11 episodes.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Oliver joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as its Senior British Correspondent in July 2006. He says he was interviewed for the show on the recommendation of comedian Ricky Gervais, who had never met Oliver but was familiar with his work. It was his first time in the United States. Two weeks after the interview, he got the job, flying from London to New York on a Sunday and unexpectedly appearing on camera the very next day. Oliver received Emmys for outstanding writing in 2009, 2011 and 2012.

During the summer of 2013, Oliver guest-hosted The Daily Show for a total of eight weeks while Stewart directed his movie Rosewater. Oliver's performance received positive reviews, with some critics suggesting that he should eventually succeed Stewart as host of The Daily Show or receive his own show. CBS discussed the possibility of Oliver replacing Craig Ferguson on The Late Late Show. Three months after his Daily Show hosting, HBO announced it was giving Oliver his own late-night show.

Last Week Tonight

Oliver began hosting Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a late-night talk show that takes a satirical look at news, politics and current events, on 27 April 2014. His initial two-year contract with HBO was extended through 2017 in February 2015. Oliver says he has full creative freedom, including free rein to criticise corporations, given HBO's ad-free subscription model. His work on the show led to Oliver being named on the list of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2015.

The Bugle

Main article: The Bugle

From October 2007 to May 2015 Oliver co-hosted The Bugle, a weekly satirical comedy podcast, with Andy Zaltzman. Originally produced by The Times of London, it became an independent project in 2012. Its 200th episode aired on 13 July 2012. The show reached a download count of 500,000 times a month.

John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show

Main article: John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show

From 2010 to 2013, Oliver hosted John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show, a standup series on Comedy Central that featured sets from himself and other stand-up comedians. Four seasons of the show were produced through 2013, the first three lasting six episodes and the final lasting eight.

Television acting

Oliver has a recurring role on the NBC comedy Community as Dr. Ian Duncan, a psychology professor. However, he declined becoming a regular cast member of the series because he did not want to leave The Daily Show for it. He did not appear in the show's third and fourth seasons, but returned in season five, appearing in seven of its 13 episodes.

As a boy, Oliver played Felix Pardiggle, a minor role in the BBC drama Bleak House in 1985.

Oliver has also worked on Gravity Falls as the voice of Sherlock Holmes (season 1, episode 3), Rick and Morty as an amoeba named Dr. Xenon Bloom (season 1, episode 3), People Like Us as a bank manager (season 2, episode 5), Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja as the voice of Coach Green (season 1, episode 9), My Hero as a man from the BBC (season 2, episode 5), and Green Wing as a car salesman (season 1, episode 1).

Oliver guest starred as Booth Wilkes-John in the 25th season episode "Pay Pal", of the long-running FOX animated television series The Simpsons.

Film

In 2008, Oliver was given his first film role, playing Dick Pants in The Love Guru. He later voiced Vanity Smurf in The Smurfs film and its sequel.

Other work

Oliver wrote and presented a BBC America campaign to have viewers use closed captioning (subtitles). Shown in brief segments before shows, "The following program contains accents you would have heard a lot more if you hadn't thrown our tea into Boston Harbour," says one. "Not even British people can follow the British accent 100 percent of the time. Therefore you, like me, might want to use closed-captioning." Oliver used some of these jokes in his stand-up routine.

Oliver frequently appeared on the BBC Radio 5 Live sports show Fighting Talk.

In 2003, Oliver manned the "results desk" on an election night episode of Armando Iannucci's satirical show Gash on Channel 4. He would work with Iannucci again in 2005, as a panelist in the second episode of Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive.

Oliver performed various roles in the 2009 Comedy Central series Important Things with Demetri Martin.

In 2009, Oliver made a cameo appearance as the actor Rip Torn in the music video for the Fiery Furnaces single "Even in the Rain", which is based on the story of the making of the film Easy Rider.

Influence

Oliver has credited Jon Stewart as one of his major influences, and in a 2014 interview listed five others: Armando Iannucci, David Letterman, Monty Python, Peter Cook, and Richard Pryor.

Oliver's comedic commentary has been credited with helping influence US legislation, regulations, court rulings, and other aspects of US culture, which has been dubbed "The John Oliver Effect." This came from the show's fifth episode, which focused on net neutrality, a subject that had previously been considered obscure and technical. Oliver documented problems attributed to internet service providers and argued that the FCC could resolve these concerns with upcoming changes to internet regulation. Oliver then encouraged viewers to submit public comments through the FCC's website. The FCC's website promptly crashed. Internal FCC emails revealed the clip was being watched inside the agency. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler publicly addressed the video. The FCC was flooded with 3.7 million comments on the subject, by far the most for any issue in the agency's history. Reporters detected a shift in the FCC's stance: Before Oliver's segment, The New York Times described an FCC proposal that would leave net neutrality "all but dead," but the paper later said that chairman Wheeler showed "a steady shift toward stronger regulation." Ultimately, the FCC enacted robust net neutrality rules that classified broadband internet service as a public utility. Oliver was credited with transforming the net neutrality debate. The official YouTube video of his net neutrality segment has been viewed more than 10 million times.

A Ninth Circuit Court judge cited a Last Week Tonight segment about the lesser constitutional rights of residents of US territories in a ruling in favor of the residents of Guam. Members of Congress credited Oliver with helping win a vote to enforce protections for chicken farmers who speak out about industry practices after a Last Week Tonight segment aired on the subject. A Washington, D.C. council member proposed a resolution in Oliver's honor after he aired a segment on the district's struggle to attain statehood.

Oliver maintains that he is not a journalist, but reporters have argued that his show does engage in journalism. The Peabody Awards honored Oliver, saying his program engages in "investigative reports that 'real' news programs would do well to emulate." One example of Oliver's investigative work is a segment on The Miss America Organization, which bills itself as "the world's largest provider of scholarships for women." Oliver's team, which includes four researchers with journalism backgrounds, collected and analyzed the organization's state and federal tax forms to find that the organization's scholarship program only distributes a small fraction of its claimed "$45 million made available annually." Oliver said that at the national level, the Miss America Organization and Miss America Foundation together spent only $482,000 in cash scholarships in 2012. Oliver found that at the state level, The Miss Alabama Pageant claimed that it had provided $2,592,000 in scholarships to Troy University despite not actually distributing any such scholarships. The pageant appeared to multiply the value of a single available scholarship by the number of contestants theoretically eligible for it, while using the term "provided" in a way that did not mean "distributed." The official YouTube video of Oliver's Miss America segment has been viewed more than 9.5 million times. The Society of Women Engineers said Oliver's mention of their scholarship in his story led to $25,000 in donations in the first two days after the episode.

Oliver has also founded and legally incorporated a church, Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, to demonstrate how easy it is to qualify as a church and receive tax exempt status in the United States. The church was created in conjunction with a segment on televangelists who have tax-free mansions and private jets funded by millions of dollars in donations, which are sent in the belief that money given to televangelists can result in God rewarding donors with money, blessings, and cured diseases. The next week, Oliver showed off a mountain of donations mailed to him. The church's website stated that donations would go to Doctors Without Borders upon the church's dissolution.

Oliver's segment on presidential candidate Donald Trump is reportedly the "most watched piece of HBO content ever", and a network spokesperson said on the piece, "this is a record for any piece of HBO content."

Personal life

As of 2016, Oliver lives in New York City with his wife Kate Norley, an Iraq War veteran who served as a US Army medic. Oliver has said that they met at the 2008 Republican National Convention; he was doing a piece for The Daily Show and Norley was campaigning with Vets for Freedom. She and other veterans hid Oliver, the other correspondents, and the camera crew from security. The two married in October 2011. HBO announced on November 12, 2015, that the couple had a boy named Hudson, without specifying the birth date.

Oliver's immigration status placed certain constraints on what he could do in his adopted country, but also provided him with comedy material as he poked fun at the opacity and occasional absurdity of the process of obtaining US residency. Oliver was one of the many writers on the picket lines during the Writers' Guild strike, which brought The Daily Show to a halt; he appeared on the show upon its resuming production on 7 January 2008. During a sketch, he pointed out that he was then in America on a visitors' visa that requires him not to strike while the show is in production, as violation of the terms of the visa would be grounds for deportation. When asked about his residency status in early 2009, Oliver said, "It's an ongoing, and slightly unsettling, battle to be honest. I tried engraving 'Give me your tired, your poor, and your aspiring comic performers' into the base of the Statue of Liberty, but apparently that's not legally binding." In an episode of The Bugle released 31 October 2009, Oliver announced he "finally got approved for green card" (for US residency), noting that now he can "get arrested filming bits for The Daily Show". Oliver says he was given a scare when applying at the United States embassy in London, when an immigration officer asked, "Give me one good reason I should let you back in to insult my country," which the officer followed up with, "Oh, I'm just kidding, I love the show." Since then, he referred to Americans as "us" or "you" as each segment demanded.

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
2008	The Love Guru	Dick Pants
2011	Moves: The Rise and Rise of the New Pornographers	Protest Leader	Short film
2011	Smurfs, TheThe Smurfs	Vanity Smurf (voice)
2013	The Smurfs 2	Vanity Smurf (voice)
2013	The Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow	Vanity Smurf (voice)	Short film

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1985	Bleak House	Felix Pardiggle	Episode: "1.2"
2001	People Like Us	Bank Manager	Episode: "The Bank Manager"
2001	My Hero	Man from BBC	Episode: "Pregnant"
2003	Gash	Himself	Episode: "1.4"
2004	Green Wing	Car Salesman	Episode: "Caroline's First Day"
2005	The Comic Side of 7 Days	Himself	6 episodes
2005-06	Mock the Week	Panelist	7 episodes
2006-13	The Daily Show	Himself (correspondent)	388 episodes; also writer and host (for 31 days)
2008	Terrifying Times	Himself	Stand-up special
2009	Important Things with Demetri Martin	Various Roles	2 episodes
2009-11, 2014	Community	Ian Duncan	19 episodes
2010-13	John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show	Himself (host)	26 episodes; also creator, writer, executive producer
2012	Gravity Falls	Wax Sherlock Holmes (voice)	Episode: "Headhunters"
2012-13	Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja	Coach Green (voice)	4 episodes
2013	Rick and Morty	Dr. Xenon Bloom (voice)	Episode: "Anatomy Park"
2014-present	Last Week Tonight with John Oliver	Himself (host)	Also writer and executive producer
2014	The Simpsons	Booth Wilkes-John (voice)	Episode: "Pay Pal"
2014	Robot Chicken	Serpentor (voice)	Episode: "G.I. Jogurt"
2016	Danger Mouse	Dr. Augustus P. Crumhorn III	Episode: TBA

Published works

• Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race (Grand Central Publishing, 2010) ISBN 978-0-446-57922-3

Awards and nominations

Year	Award	Nominated work	Result
2008	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series	The Daily Show	Nominated
2009	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series		Won
2010	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Won
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series		Nominated
2011	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
	Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Special	Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear	Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Series	The Daily Show	Won
2012	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series		Won
2013	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series		Nominated
2014	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series		Nominated
2015	Writers Guild of America Award for Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) - Series		Nominated
		Last Week Tonight with John Oliver	Won
	Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Producer of Live Entertainment & Talk Television		Nominated
	Dorian Award for TV Current Affairs Show of the Year		Nominated
	Dorian Award for Wilde Wit of the Year		Won
	Peabody Award		Won
	Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Talk Show	Last Week Tonight with John Oliver	Nominated
	TCA Award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information		Won
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series		Nominated
	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series		Nominated
	Environmental Media Award for Best Reality Television		Nominated
2016	Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Talk Show		Won
	Dorian Award for TV Current Affairs Show of the Year		Won
	Dorian Award for Wilde Wit of the Year		Nominated
	Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Producer of Live Entertainment & Talk Television	Last Week Tonight with John Oliver	Won
	GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Talk Show Epsiode		Nominated

Charities

John Oliver supports the following charitable cause: Veterans.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]