John Oliver

Oliver worked the British circuit first, doing stand-up and building a long partnership with Andy Zaltzman that produced hundreds of hours of satirical radio and podcasting, The Bugle chief among them. Small screen parts came with it, including a car salesman in Green Wing. Then he moved to New York and became the senior British correspondent on The Daily Show, a job he held from 2006 to 2013.

That role suited a particular skill: he can be the most obviously ridiculous person in the room while making whoever is opposite him look worse. The accent does some of the work and the mock outrage does more, but underneath both is a writer's instinct for the one detail in a story that makes the whole thing indefensible. He has a Primetime Emmy for variety writing.

Last Week Tonight, which began on HBO in 2014, took that instinct and gave it twenty minutes instead of four. The format is unfashionably long and research-heavy, closer to an essay read aloud with jokes in it than to a monologue, and it has proved the most durable thing in American political comedy since. The oddity is that a generation of children know him from somewhere else entirely: Zazu in the 2019 Lion King, a Smurf, a narrator in Wonder Park, and Professor Ian Duncan on Community, a recurring part that let him play preening incompetence with no restraint at all.