John Oliver decided to do a longer show on Sunday night. But he was in need of the time. As this week’s main segment, the “Last Week Tonight” host went on an extensive tear over the British Museum — and museums in general — for stealing artifacts.
Oliver called up sculptures from the Acropolis Museum in Greece to begin the segment. He noticed that some pieces of sculptures are much whiter than the rest because they have been plastered to fill in any missing pieces. But where are those missing pieces? Well, Oliver didn’t want to implicate himself, but he had an answer: the British Museum.
“Yup, we took it! Honestly, if you’re ever looking for a missing artifact, nine times out of 10, it’s in the British Museum,”Oliver stated. “It’s basically the world’s largest Lost and Found, with both ‘lost’ and ‘found’ in the heaviest possible quotation marks there.”
Oliver was not only a critic of museums, but he also attacked his own country by slamming British defences of keeping the artifacts. These defenses included British being able care for them better than their countries.
Late night host also seized on the defense “it was a different time back then — everybody looted and it was totally OK” — specifically calling up footage of British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s response to the British Army stealing Ethiopian treasures. He said that he “deeply lamented”That the artifacts “were thought fit to be brought away by the British Army.”
“We didn’t even know how to fix a UTI without leeches back then,”Oliver laughed. “But we knew that raiding other countries for their s— was ‘deeply lamentable,’ which is British for ‘super f—ed up.’”
You can watch Oliver’s full segment on museums in the video above.
