John Oliver has long roasted his own parent company for its business decisions, but after learning this week that Warner Bros. Discovery not only expected him to do it again, but was actually looking forward to it, the HBO host pushed back.
In this case, the decision at hand was the rebranding of Max to HBO Max. Or rather, back to HBO Max, as that was the most recent name for the streamer before it became Max. Following the announcement of the rebrand during WBD’s Upfront presentation, streaming marketing chief Shauna Spenley admitted that they “cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand,” and expected it to be “pretty hot.”
During Sunday night’s episode of “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver noted he was aware of that expectation, and offered a blunt response.
“Please, look me in the eyes when I say this: f–k you, don’t tell me what to do,” the host joked. “I’m not going to do it if you want it!”
But at that, a new thought occurred to Oliver, as he wondered if maybe getting him not to offer a hot take was the goal all along.
“Unless, wait, hold on. Maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it,” he theorized. “But on the other hand, how could a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid f–king names?!”
Of course, Oliver did actually roast the rebrand, by comparing it to Donald Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
“It can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change,” he said. “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can even get used to one dumb name, some genius comes along and only makes it dumber.”
As Oliver explained this, images of HBO Max’s many names over the years were shown onscreen.
“Then somehow it gets dumber still,” he continued, as an image of HBO Max popped up after HBO Now. “And then, against all the odds, somehow it becomes even worse, before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before!”
You can watch the moment in John Oliver’s main story in the video above.
