John Oliver enlists Richard Kind's sad blobfish to expose plastic manufacturers
Aux Features John Oliver
Ah, to be liberated from the burden of trying to make comedy from the lunatic, white supremacist rantings of Donald Trump, and thus free to look at the myriad other ways in which we as a country and species are completely and irrevocably screwed. You can practically feel John Oliver’s relief as, in his main Last Week Tonight story on Sunday, the host took time for asides from a horrific goat-headed man-beast and a blobfish, inevitably voiced by Richard Kind. Kind’s sluggishly animated psychrolutes marcidus, Slurp, spilled the beans that he’s going to pull another Bing Bong by stealing three upcoming “fun but intermittently touching” Pixar films, because of course he is. (Slurp dies in the third one, but don’t worry. Slurp has excellent representation.)
Oliver, sadly never freed up from laying out our seemingly intractable and life-threatening societal ills, wasn’t all fun and blobfish, however, as he spent most of Sunday’s show showing how we’re up to our collective ass in sketchily manufactured plastics. Yes, plastics, that The Graduate punchline that’s worked its way into our ecosystems (and plain old systems) to the extent that, as Oliver noted, we ingest about a credit card’s worth in our food and water every week. Plastics, which we’ve dumped into our beleaguered oceans so much that it’s estimated the total tonnage there will outweigh fish by 2050. (Sorry, Slurp.) And plastics, the material whose environment-despoiling ubiquity plastics manufacturers have been scolding us for years is the fault of consumers who make fake Native Americans cry on TV and ignore the hastily thrown-together efforts of local recycling mascots to do our part. (That’s where the unholy goat-man comes in. His name is Totes McGoats, and disobey his well-intentioned recycling message at your peril, hapless residents of Niagara Falls, New York.)
And, of course, we should continue to do our part by filling those (plastic) curbside totes (Ohhhh— “Totes McGoats,” there it is)—and filling them with a lot more care. Oliver notes that you can’t recycle umbrellas, as much as you want to, and that those plastic single-use garbage bags really gum up the recycling plants’ works. But the host also dug deeper into the often two-story heaps of festering and slowly degrading-into-ingestible-microparticles plastics to show that the real plastic polluters are those selfsame plastic manufacturers who keep tut-tutting at us for daring to use their products while they routinely produce misleading propaganda ads and make and break promises about recycling every damned year.
As Oliver notes, companies like Coca Cola (the number one top global polluter) has been reciting the same old rosy predictions and assurances about company-wide plans to reduce, reuse, and the other thing for decades. At the same time, they’ve been part of the plastics manufacturers’ lobbying efforts to scuttle legislation like citywide plastic bag bans (now preemptively themselves banned in many states), and any proposed governmental regulations that would force them to take the responsibility for disposing of and recycling the literal metric tons of plastic crap they continue to churn out every day. (Such legislation is called Extended Producer Responsibility, and it’s a new thing to pester your representatives about now that we can all stop just primal screaming, “Get that fucking racist sociopath out of the White House before he kills us all, you spineless nothings!” into our lawmakers answering machines.)
As Oliver concluded (before turning things back over to Kind’s Slurp for some final credits sequence scene-stealing), yes, we need to do a much better job at cleaning and sorting our recyclables (and finding out exactly what those numbers on the bottom of our plastic containers mean). But what’s really going to make a difference is pressuring plastics manufacturers to pick up after their own, fish-poisoning, landfill-overflowing mess. Also, stop comparing the noble blobfish to noted environmental despoiler Ted Cruz. Slurp has feelings, you guys.
25 Comments
It’s depressing to learn just how limited the concept of recycling plastic is. One problem is that most if not all companies don’t want to pay to recycle plastic because it’s simply not economically viable; it’s such an expensive process that there’s no way to make a profit on it. Ideally, this would be solved by nationalizing the issue, because who could possibly argue with using tax dollars to fund the future of the planet, right? Right? Haaha…And the other problem is you can only recycle plastic so many times before it starts to degrade to the point of unusability. So unless someone can come up with a market for Tupperware containers with a bunch of holes in them, we’re still gonna have tons of plastic that we have no use for and no place to put. How we think our way out of that one is gonna have to be figured out by somebody smarter than me.
– Launch all trash into the sun- Which slowly decreases the mass of the planet by a few fractions of a percent- Which slowly moves Earth a little bit farther out on its orbit the sun- Which slowly cools the planet a few degrees, counteracting global warming.I can swing by Stockholm to pick up my Nobel Prize as soon as I’m vaccinated later this Spring. Thanks!
Hey, this idea is just a mishmash of two or three different “Futurama” episodes!
::sad penguin noise::
That a Frisky Dingo reference there, Baby Lamont?
::happy penguin noises::
Also:
The Horse says “Nobel Prize denied!”
“In that case, I declare it Robot Party Week!”
You forgot a step:
-Profit.
Smithers, have the Rolling Stones killed.
Doesn’t seem very cost effective or carbon footprint effective.
Upvoted for username-comment synergy
No I think my namesake would instead suggest we launch all low-income neighborhoods and public transit systems into the sun, along with their residents and riders.
My god, you people will just NOT stop talking about Trump. Also, every single episode of John Oliver doesn’t warrant a newswire post. But hey, I don’t get paid to run your shitty website so you do you.
Lol
I…the fuck? Okay, sure, whatever.
Nobody makes you read them. SO fuck off.
Fun fact about “Iron Eyes” Cody, he grew up down the road from where I live now. Kaplan, Louisiana has a local reputation for possessing such a strong accent that even other Cajuns—a notoriously thick and borderline incomprehensible accent to outsiders—think they talk funny.
LOL I went to college in Louisiana and I remember the first time a student asked our French professor if he would be able to speak with Cajuns after a year of two of French class. The professor, a somewhat weird guy with a strange Kevin Spacey vibe, was NOT amused. “Monsieur X, the local fauna do NOT speak French.”
Oliver’s dismissal of McGoats – ‘Get out of here! You look like a furry who can’t commit!’ – just hit my funny bone after a not great day. I laughed so hard I almost snorted tea out of my nose.
it’s a new thing to pester your representatives about now that we can
all stop just primal screaming, “Get that fucking racist sociopath out
of the White House before he kills us all, you spineless nothings!” into our lawmakers answering machines.)
Just a note, that it’s been 2 whole months since the sitting president was a massive international embarrassment (as far as everyone to the left of the SS is concerned) or committed felonies or treason in a bid to retain power!2 whole months!If we do productive legislative things regarding the misinformation streams from Faux News, NewsCrack and pushers on Fakebook, we might not get someone like that back in 2024!
Of course the solution is the same that it’s always been and will continue to be fought by the same people for the same stupid reasons:Make everything out of hemp.
Not to fear! Plasma Waste Converters will save us!Seriously, this is a thing.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/please-listen-to-how-plasma-waste-29467780/