John Oliver Is Looking For Ways To Avoid Talking About Trump When He Returns To ‘Last Week Tonight’

John Oliver returns to HBO this Sunday and he stopped by The Late Show to get some of the cobwebs out of his head before hopping back behind his desk. The main topic to kick things off — aside from his green card fears — was how Last Week Tonight will handle Trump upon its return and how it has felt to be on hiatus during the new administration’s ascendance. He tells Colbert something similar to what he spells out for The Hollywood Reporter, saying he’d love to avoid as much of the president as possible:

Yeah, I didn’t really miss being off between the election and the inauguration because it didn’t feel like there was a great deal to say. When it was just in the process of being put together, there was no point in trying to predict what was going to happen. Since then, the kind of rapid-fire avalanche of activity has just been — I guess the key thing for us has been to try and work out what we were going to do long-term going forward. I’ve not really missed having to condense our thoughts down about whatever’s going on.”

Oliver tells THR that his team is working on a lot of longer pieces that are far away from the presidency, both for sanity and out of common sense:

“He moves so fast that there’s no real point in spending a month on something that he’s said until you work out what the consequences of that are going to be,”

Later during the second half of his chat with Colbert, Oliver sat down for one of the Community Calendar segments on his hometown of Bedford of Bedfordshire. There’s an obsession with hauntings and scares there for some reason, right in the middle of February. It’s a little odd, but I’d take that over anything related to Valentine’s Day.