John Oliver mocks psychic readings on Last Week Tonight

While many people spent Sunday night watching Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga remind everyone of their star chemistry at the Oscars, John Oliver took the time to declare a war on psychics. Hollywood mediums and phony fortune-tellers were the subject of this week’s Last Week Tonight episode, and Oliver had a lot to say about them.

Like so many Last Week Tonight topics, the psychic industry is actually way more profitable than you probably thought. Even Oliver was surprised to uncover that the industry produced hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

“I had no idea psychics could make that much money,” Oliver said. “It’s like finding that the second-richest person in the world behind Jeff Bezos is this GameStop employee named Greg. I mean, good for Greg I guess, but now I have lots of questions about GameStop and literally everything else.”

Oliver took particular issue with mediums, psychics who claim they talk to the dead. As he says throughout the segment, if mediums were actually real it would fundamentally transform everything we understand about life and death. Instead of that, of course, mediums play into the probability that a room of Irish people probably contains someone with a dead relative named “Bryan,” and recite easily-Googleable facts about Matt Lauer’s dad.

As usual, Oliver did not skimp on the parody aspect. The segment concluded with Oliver hosting a fake daytime TV show called Wakey Wakey. Rachel Dratch returned to the show to reprise her Wanda Jo Oliver character, this time to play a medium. Oliver & Co. even set up a website for Wanda Jo the Free Psychic. By going there, fans can get a fake psychic reading courtesy of Wanda Jo, in which she’ll tell you something like, “I’m getting a strong ‘B’ connection. Maybe your grandma? Ah, they’re showing me your grandma’s a b—-. Their words, not mine.”

Watch the full clip above.

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