‘Last Week Tonight’ Has Aged John Oliver By Like a Hundred Years

No one told John Oliver that roasting the president for over eight years shouldn’t age him as much as being president for eight years.

Ahead of Last Week Tonight’s Season 10 premiere this Sunday, Oliver appeared on another former Daily Show correspondent’s late-night show to lament the toll 10 seasons has taken on the British comedian. Stephen Colbert showed the Late Show audience an advertisement for Last Week Tonight’s premiere that features a before-and-after photo of Oliver with the caption, “It’s only been nine years.”

Paul Rudd must have made a deal with the English devil to transfer all his aging to Oliver’s face because this looks like the before-and-after photo of a paratrooper who fought for all six years of World War II, not pictures of a comedian who spent nine years doing terrible impressions of Donald Trump.

Oliver says that the first draft of the advertisement that HBO sent him featured the same before picture, but the after photo was an edited image of himself with a long “ZZ Top beard.” Oliver set them straight, explaining, “The joke isn’t what I might look like if I aged badly, the joke is my actual face,” adding, “Believe me, my face can stick the landing on this punchline.”

Colbert questioned Oliver on the Jim Halpert-esque mop of hair that the young, unsullied version of the Last Week Tonight host donned in the first promotional photos ever shot for the show. Oliver told the story of how one of his producers, Liz Stanton, demanded that Oliver cut his swoopy, messy, mid-2000s sitcom hair before the show started — Oliver obliged, but not before he posed for the pictures that would adorn billboards with the eyesore atop his head. “Those bangs hurt her eyes and soul every time she sees them,” he told Colbert.

Apparently, Stanton got her revenge by cursing Oliver to sprout a gray hair every time he says the words, “And now, this.”