Executive producer Tim Carvell explained that the show's short comedic segments were deliberately constructed to function like commercial breaks, since the team realized audiences wouldn't want to hear anyone talk for a straight half hour, even someone as charming as Oliver.
HBO gave the producers freedom in choosing guests and specifically advised them not to feel obligated to feature celebrities, and Oliver stated the show would not use fake 'correspondents' pretending to be journalists like The Daily Show.
During the COVID-19 pandemic the show was filmed from Oliver's home starting March 29, 2020, with no studio audience, using a textured bluish background that Oliver personified as a character called 'The Void,' voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; the show didn't return to a studio until September 2021.
The show's title sequence features satirical captions written in dog Latin, such as a gun labeled 'deus ex machina,' a photo of Vladimir Putin labeled 'POTUS Operandi,' and a photo of Oliver himself labeled 'hostus mostus'.
Oliver told Vulture in 2019 that he and Tim Carvell have always seen the show as their attempt to make The Muppet Show, occasionally achieving 'Muppet Show adoration' through the show's ludicrous mascots like Jeff the Diseased Lung and Hoots the NSA Owl.
In 2014, Oliver coined the hashtag #NotMyChristian to complain about Jamie Dornan being cast as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey film adaptation, and it became a recurring punchline on the show.
For a March 2017 episode about Bolivian zebra-suited traffic educators, the production recorded 23 minutes of raw footage of a person in a zebra costume dancing before a green screen specifically so fans could edit it into their own humorous videos.
For an October 2014 episode about the Supreme Court, the show released a video called 'Real Animals, Fake Paws' featuring dogs standing in for the justices, intended to make listening to oral arguments more entertaining.
The military government of Thailand reportedly listed Oliver as 'undermining the royal institution' after he called Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn a 'buffoon' and an 'idiot'.
After a June 2018 segment criticizing Chinese leader Xi Jinping, both 'John Oliver' and 'Last Week Tonight' were immediately blocked from the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo, along with the HBO website.
A 2016 segment supporting the UK remaining in the EU became the single most shared video clip on Twitter during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
In 2015, Oliver hired a professional tax lawyer to legally establish a fake church called 'Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption' to demonstrate how easy it is to set up a tax-exempt religious organization; all donations received were later forwarded to Doctors Without Borders before the church was shut down.
A 2016 segment on Donald Trump revealed the Trump family name had originally been 'Drumpf' and launched the viral 'Make Donald Drumpf Again' campaign, garnering more than 85 million views on Facebook and YouTube combined, described by an HBO spokesman as a record for any HBO content.
In 2016, Oliver purchased and forgave nearly $15 million in medical debt for 9,000 people through a company he created called Central Asset Recovery Professionals (CARP), which he claimed was the largest debt giveaway in American television history.
In 2018, Oliver published a children's book called A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, parodying a book by Mike Pence's family about their pet rabbit, featuring a same-sex rabbit couple to criticize Pence's LGBT stances; it became the number-one book on Amazon the next day.
In 2023, Oliver ran an extensive global campaign for the pūteketeke bird in New Zealand's Bird of the Century vote, including billboard ads in Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing, Mumbai, and the Champs-Élysées, and dressing as the bird on Jimmy Fallon's show; the bird won with 83% of the vote.
In 2023, Oliver publicly offered Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an RV and $1,000,000 per year until either of their deaths if Thomas resigned from the Court, a proposal legal experts consulted by the show described as 'somehow legal'.
In 2020, after Oliver satirized Danbury, Connecticut, the town's mayor jokingly threatened to rename its sewer plant after him; Oliver then donated $55,000 to local charities in exchange for the plant actually being named the 'John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.'
Coal executive Bob Murray sued Oliver, HBO, and Time Warner for defamation after a 2017 segment on coal mining safety; the suit was eventually dropped, but it cost HBO $200,000 in legal fees and tripled the show's libel insurance costs.
The Last Week Tonight YouTube channel had grown to over 10 million subscribers and more than 4.5 billion views by November 2025.
