“Public shaming: or, as we call it in England, ‘parenting,’” John Oliver quipped, opening Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight. Jokes aside, though, after delving into the ways that the internet has played a role in fanning the embers of controversy into raging fires, Oliver spent the second half of the show interviewing Monica Lewinsky, who became intimately acquainted with the subject thanks to the tabloid-fueled scandal that erupted around her affair with then-president Bill Clinton.
“It was an avalanche of pain and humiliation,” Lewinsky told Oliver in the interview. “At 24 years old, it was really hard to hold onto a shred of dignity or self-esteem when you're just the butt of so many jokes.”
It’s really only recently, in the wake of the first #MeToo revelations, that earnest, public reevaluations of how Lewinsky was treated and talked about during the Clinton impeachment have gained traction, with podcasts like Slow Burn and empathetic interviews (and a few candid essays by Lewinsky herself). Lewinsky’s case doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though; on Last Week Tonight, she and Oliver discuss the role of social media in online bullying (Lewinsky is now a staunch anti-bullying advocate)—both its downsides and upsides.
“One of the things that happens with these kinds of experiences is that you start to disappear, you start to feel like you don’t matter,” she says. “I think that when somebody sees you and just acknowledges your humanity in the smallest way, it really can make a world of a difference.” It could even “help save someone’s life,” she says. After all, the support of her own family and friends, she explains, was instrumental in getting her through the whole thing. After the interview, Lewinsky took to Twitter, which she does now have as a resource, to thank Oliver and Last Week Tonight, but above all, the kind feedback she’d received on the platform in the wake of the segment.
Oliver doesn’t shy away from his own complicity in Lewinsky’s public shaming; he brings up a Daily Show segment he appeared in a decade after the scandal first broke, in which a graphic read, “10 Sucking Years.”
“Which is gross,” Oliver said. “It’s gross.” Oliver was not alone in making Monica Lewinsky the ubiquitous, reliable butt of late-night jokes: He points out that Jay Leno, for example, made especially vicious, and frequent, Lewinsky jokes, which makes his recent desire to bring some “civility” back to late-night television ring especially false, Oliver noted. After all, what’s more civil than a mocked-up Dr. Seuss book cover reading The Slut in the Hat? See the full episode, below.
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