John Oliver Relentlessly Trolls Lauren Boebert In First Show Back After Strike

HBO’s John Oliver tried to cover a lot of ground on Sunday, his first night back on the air since the show went on hiatus with the start of the writers strike in May.

But there was one story he had to keep going back to: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) getting kicked out of a performance of the “Beetlejuice” musical for vaping, being disruptive, taking pictures and apparently getting very handsy with her date during the show.

“I don’t want to get bogged down in it,” the “Last Week Tonight” host insisted. “After all, she was kicked out of the show, that is probably punishment enough.”

He moved onto a new topic, and began speaking about economic problems in Italy.

But he couldn’t stay focused as he kept interrupting his report on Italy to mention Boebert and the “fondling and light over-the-pants hands stuff which was caught on video.”

Oliver was also baffled by the fact that it was “Beetlejuice” and not “one of the more explicitly sexual ones like ‘Spring Awakening’ or ‘Rocky Horror’ or ‘Cats.’”

He added: “This was ‘Beetlejuice,’ a show that’s quite loudly about death. I’m just saying, if you’re gonna get your nipples tweaked and your pipes squeaked, you save that shit for ‘Fiddler’ like a goddamn adult.”

He pointed out that Boebert reportedly pulled a “Do you know who I am?” and threatened to call the mayor as she was ejected, which he called “two catastrophically bad decisions.”

“If you’ve been caught for, again, sexual activity during ‘Beetlejuice: The Musical,’ you would hope no one knew who you were,” he said. “And you definitely wouldn’t want to immediately get on the phone with the mayor to tell him what had just happened.”

Oliver’s main story of the evening was about health care in prisons, especially the problems caused by care outsourced to private companies: