There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who recently won reelection in what can only be described as a rigged vote and who has overseen a deadly three-year crackdown on the popular uprising in his country that has killed 100,000 and displaced millions.
Clearly he’s not going away and that’s frustrating. “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver feels powerless in the face of Assad’s iron-fisted rule, so he did the only thing he can reasonably hope to do to at least tweak the Syrian strongman during his Sunday night HBO show: he made fun of his terrible musical taste.
You see, Assad, once a promising optometrist and volleyball lover who was pressed into the family business by his brother’s death in 1994, was outed in leaked e-mails two years ago as a lover of pop music. Among his favorite iTunes downloads? “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO and … wait for it, “I’m Too Sexy” by bald and beautiful British 1990s one-hit wonders Right Said Fred.
“Yes, he’s a monster, but he’s also a moron,” Oliver said. “Which is why it’s so frustrating that we’re powerless to do anything to hurt him. If only there was something, however small, that we could do … I guess we could find something he loves and turn it against him. We could track down, let’s say, Right Said Fred, and we could, hypothetically, fly them all the way over here from London to perform a specially rewritten anti-Assad version of their greatest hit.”
And, thankfully, that’s just what he did. And it was awesome. (Performance begins at 1:35. Warning: strong language.)
No Comments