John Oliver and The Power of Persuasion

John Oliver, comedian, commentator, and actor, is globally known for many of his appearances on a variety of shows.  On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, Oliver shared his thoughts on standardized testing in schools.  He uses comedic commentary to grasp the attention of the listeners and uses facts and statistics as examples and evidence to support his claim that standardized testing is not necessary, even inhumane and emotionless.  He tends to sly away from an exact, hardcore stance on the subject, however.  He leads the audience on by being so comical but then takes multiple stances, sometimes even mocking those of others.  Yes, he does persuade as I myself felt the want to take his side but it was not because of a strong argument.  Since he mocked others in some form, it made me feel almost obligated to take his side in fear of also being one of the people that he were to mock.  He never acknowledged a counterargument in common regards to strengthening his opinion.  Instead he made comical any examples of the opposite stance.  Although he did succeed in persuading his audience that standardized testing did no good, his argument was actually quite weak.  His former popularity and humorous background has earned him respect that can be hard to overlook in order to see true logic and reason.


There are three things that make a strong persuasive piece.  Pathos is an appeal to an audience member's emotion.  By making the audience care about what you are trying to persuade them of, they are more likely to have interest and want to hop on the back of your bandwagon.  Oliver creates a connection with each one of his audience members due to the fact that most probably either are parents of children who take these tests or once had to take them themselves.  Either way, the subject directly relates to them and affects them in some way.  Perhaps they agree with Oliver's opinion to begin with and now are finding further evidence to back their stance.  Or perhaps they have never thought of this to be a problem until now.  Ethos deals with whether or not the speaker is truly credible for what they say.  As I mentioned above, John Oliver is already well known for his comedic takes on serious topics.  He is known by name and respected due to his Emmy-winning writing award.  Anything he says or does will be seen or heard- and listened to.  Logos is an appeal to logic; being able to persuade someone using reason.  Although many may not agree with me when I say this, I do not think that Oliver appealed to the logos section of a good persuasive essay.  Maybe it is because I have never seen any of his episodes, or maybe I'm just being a total fun sponge but I found his satirical takes on news and current events to be quite unprofessional and even in some cases, insulting.