Time: The John Oliver effect: it’s officially real

After drumming up a huge amount of support to stop the Internet slow lane, find out how else the John Oliver effect is creating change.  Article by Victor Luckerson for Time His show has crashed websites, boosted donations and inspired legislation Comedians mock our cultural and political institutions on TV all the time. But it’s not every day that a comic’s jokes crash a government website or directly inspire legislators to push for new laws.

John Oliver, host of HBO comedy news program Last Week Tonight, is quickly building up that level of cultural cachet. While his forebears and former colleagues Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart spend as much time lampooning the news media covering world events as they do analyzing events themselves, Oliver’s show stands out for its investigations into topics as varied as the militarization of the police state, Net neutrality and Argentina’s debt crisis.

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