John Oliver, host of "Last Week Tonight" on HBO, is a 21-time Emmy winner. But he still remembers how frequently he bombed as a young comedian in the U.K.
When he was starting out, Oliver used to go for easy laughs. Eventually, he decided to make people laugh about topics that he cared about, namely politics. "It felt like a risk worth taking," Oliver said.
From the U.K. to the U.
S. Oliver has been making people laugh since he was a kid in the suburbs of Birmingham, England. His father was a school principal, his mother was a music teacher, and Oliver was a class clown.
Later, as a 20-year-old college student at Cambridge University, Oliver traveled to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – a massive, month-long, performing arts festival where no act is turned away. The Fringe is a magnet for comedians, and it became Oliver's comedic launching pad. On his first trip to the Fringe, he tried his hand at standup.
"I remember walking offstage thinking, 'Oh boy, I wanna do that again right now,'" Oliver said. In his early days, Oliver bombed all over Edinburgh , but nowhere worse than at a 55-seat venue called Pleasance Below, where, he said, he once performed to an audience of four. He remembers about 10 minutes into his set, half the audience left.
Then a third person walked out, followed by the last audience member a few minutes later. Only Oliver and the sound technician remained. "And he said, 'Do you wanna keep going?' I said, 'No, I think we're done here,'" Oliver s.