John Oliver is now a U.S. citizen, but the decade-long process has left him with a few scars.
The “Last Week Tonight” host explained how emotionally taxing the onboarding process for this country was while visiting Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on Monday. Apparently, it was so bad that he forgot his own phone number.
“There’s a hundred different question and they select 10 of them to fire at you,” Oliver said of the citizenship test. “It’s incredibly nerve-wracking, and the first question they asked me was, ‘What’s your phone number?’ and I was so scared, I forgot. I swear, it’s true. I blanked.”
Next, they asked him for his social security number.
“I went, ‘I don’t know what that is either. This isn’t going at all well,’” he laughed. “It was utterly petrifying.”
The “Last Week Tonight” host first came to the U.S. from Britain in 2006 and has been trying to become a citizen ever since.
“I was trying to explain to my wife, I’ve been anxious about this for a decade. It’s been an ever-present hum in the back of my mind,” he said. “There was part of me, even the day of the ceremony — I kind of thought it was gonna be a trap. There was a part of me that literally thought they’d open the door, and there’d just be plastic sheeting on the ground like in ‘Good Fellas,’ and just Jared Kushner sitting in a swivel chair and stroking a hairless cat, saying, ‘Oh,’” he laughed. “That would have made more sense to me than the thing I wanted happening.”
Colbert, however, had to do very little to obtain his own citizenship.
“I was born,” Colbert explained. “I navigated the birth canal and they handed me the little piece of paper when I came out.”
Watch the clip above.