John Oliver Goes on an Epic, Unfiltered Rant About the Paris Attacks

Most of the reports out of Paris described a solemn hush in the air as dawn broke after Friday's attacks. People were emotionally worn out, beaten down, grappling with the fact that the Paris they woke up to was forever changed from the Paris they had just days before. 

It was the same way on the streets of New York, albeit to a different degree. Throughout the city we saw more police with automatic weapons, experienced tense subway rides, side-stepped fewer tourists haplessly gawking their way through SoHo. More people seemed inside than outside. I was in Washington D.C. on the morning of 9/11 and it was the same way then: the city just gets ominously quieter, as if covered in a layer of heavy, silencing snow. 

What we really want to do, most of us, anyway, is forego the respectable quietude and unleash a tirade of F-bombs against these assholes. John Oliver, with the freedom of HBO, did exactly that at the start of his show last night. It was cathartic. It was necessary. It was the intersection of highbrow and lowbrow discourse: an unfiltered gut feeling from a master of rhetorical argument. We needed it.

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