“Last Week Tonight” tries to rekindle bizarre sex feud with Adam Driver at Emmys

The authors of “Last week tonight ” couldn’t accept his sixth consecutive Emmy for exceptional writing for a variety series without thanking their favorite unwashed buffalo – and tempting him to break their toes.

As a selection of the show’s writers took the stage to accept their award Sunday night, one of its writers couldn’t help but greet Adam Driver.

“And finally, we would like to dedicate this award to Adam Driver,” the writer, who Entertainment Weekly identified as Chrissy Shackelford, said from the Emmys podium, prompting “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver to nod in agreement in the background. “He knows what he’s done and we know what we would like him to do.

Shackelford’s cry to star in “Marriage Story” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” was actually a callback to an ongoing dark joke about Driver that the HBO series used frequently in its final season. Randomly, and often during serious monologues, Oliver would suddenly refer to Driver in a sexually bizarre way, then ask the actor to do a strangely violent act on him.

For example, in an August 2020 episode about former President Donald Trump’s promise to build a border wall, Oliver referred to Driver as a “human wall” and asked him to “crush my rib cage, you monster carrier. “.

Other hilarious and weird things Oliver has said about Driver include ‘dislocate my ankles, rusty cello’, ‘pull my heart through my ear, you meaty oak tree’, and the above ‘take them out for me. toes, large unwashed buffalo ”.

There are even compilations of the joke on YouTube:

Driver confronted Oliver and his strange obsession with him during the last episode “Last Week Tonight” of 2020.

“That weird, weird piece that for some reason you dragged me into – what is it?” Said the driver angrily, though jokingly. During their interaction, Driver asked Oliver to apologize for it, and Oliver said he would stop playing the joke.

Oliver explained the origins of the ongoing joke during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth MeyersIn November 2020.

“Water on the seed [of the joke] felt real resistance from the public, ”Oliver said, noting that the first Driver joke happened before the pandemic hit. “It was as if only 40% liked it. So we did it as a reminder a few weeks later, and they weren’t really happy to get it back. So at that point it became kind of an obsession with our staff. “

Oliver also explained that after a year of making these revolting and risky references to Driver, the show reached out to actor “Annette” and asked him to join in the fun.

“The message came back from him saying, ‘He heard about it, he thinks it’s very strange, and he’s in it,'” Oliver continued to Meyers. “So we thought ‘Great’ and we didn’t know what we were going to do, but at least then we had an end in sight.”

Still, Shackelford’s crack during the Emmys seems to have resurrected the joke – and rekindled Driver’s (presumably bogus) feud with the series.

But Oliver told Deadline Sunday after his show’s Emmy win, he doesn’t care if Driver is “crazy” about the scream and cheered the actor on.

“We said we wouldn’t do the joke again – but if he’s crazy about it, that’s what we’re really looking for,” Oliver said.

So fingers crossed that Oliver’s “smoldering mountain” doesn’t break his fingers after his editorial staff hit.