Six More Weeks of This

Mid-November 2016. The year still had six weeks left and that felt obscene. It had taken David Bowie in January, Alan Rickman in January, Prince in April—and those were just the deaths. There was also the election, which handed the White House to someone who had spent the entire campaign demonstrating his contempt for facts, decency, and basic competence, and who won anyway. By November the year felt less like a calendar period and more like a sustained act of malice.

John Oliver, on Last Week Tonight, assembled celebrities and regular people to look directly into the camera and say, collectively, Fuck you, 2016. It was cheap catharsis and everyone knew it. You know it won’t fix anything. But there’s something in naming the thing out loud—in having someone confirm that yes, this was as bad as it felt, you’re not being dramatic, the year genuinely destroyed things that will take years to rebuild.

The segment works because Oliver understands that comedy, when it’s functioning properly, isn’t a way of defusing grief—it’s a container for it. Saying fuck you to a year on television is absurd. But absurdity, in late 2016, felt like the only register that still made any sense. The alternative was sitting with the unprocessed weight of all of it, and nobody was ready to do that yet.