John Oliver made a jab at the expense of Mel Gibson — and the actor’s father — on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight.
The HBO late-night host recapped the news about Liz Oyer, a U.S. pardon attorney who wrote an opinion column for Rolling Stone last week theorizing about why she was fired from her job.
“No one has told me why I was fired. But the notice was delivered hours after I declined to recommend reinstating the gun rights of a famous friend of the president, the actor Mel Gibson, who has a history of violence against women,” she wrote.
Oliver also showed part of an interview Oyer did with CNN. “When I came into work on Friday morning, I said to a colleague, I really think that Mel Gibson might be my downfall, and within hours of saying that, I was being escorted out of my office,” she told the cable news network.
“Wow, that is, frankly, incredible,” Oliver marveled. “She got fired because she didn’t think Mel Gibson, best known for his work in screaming, should have guns.”
Oliver urged his viewers to check out Gibson’s Wikipedia page “if you’ve forgotten the specifics of his various scandals.” He also shared that Gibson’s father’s Wikipedia page is worth reading for the “opening paragraph alone [which] is spectacular.”
Quoting from the elder Gibson’s page, Oliver shared: “‘Hutton Peter Gibson was an American conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, writer on sedevacantism’ — which is a belief that there hasn’t been a valid pope since 1958 — ‘a World War II veteran, the Jeopardy! grand champion for 1968, and the father of 11 children, one of whom is the actor and director Mel Gibson.”
“That is a fascinating man,” Oliver continued. “And imagine having so many terrible views that producing Mel Gibson is not the worst thing about you.”