HBO Satirist John Oliver Takes On Flint Water Crisis: Watch

It’s tough to find anything to joke about when it comes to the Flint water crisis, but satirist John Oliver pulled in some laughs Sunday on his HBO program, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," when he addressed the serious problem posed by lead in water systems and paint still commonly found in the United States.

“Lead — the most dangerous thing in Led Zeppelin’s name, and I will remind you the other thing was zeppelin,” Oliver said, opening the 18½-minute segment. “We’ve heard a lot about lead in the last year due to the horrific events in Flint, Michigan. Flint has become a city whose very name evokes disaster, like Benghazi or Waco or Smurf Village.”

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Nothing the catastrophe was “a perfect storm of incompetence from start to finish,” he showed video of dignitaries raising water-filled glasses when Flint began drawing water from the Flint River in 2014.

The move was intended to save money for the struggling city of 100,000, which was under the control of a state emergency manager at the time, but the water’s corrosive properties caused lead in the city’s aging pipes to leach and expose thousands to dangerously high levels of lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage in children.

“It’s a little weird to see people make a toast as they essentially drink poison,” the humorist quipped, “because under those circumstances, you would expect to hear, ‘I’ll see you all in hell,’ or ‘the mother ship is coming and soon we will all ascend.’ ”

Oliver took aim at Washington politicians and bureaucrats, who he said are “lining up to be vocally outraged.”

Some reports put the number of U.S. cities with dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water supplies at 2,000, spanning all 50 states. But even if the estimated 7.3 million lead service lines were ripped out and replaced, that still wouldn’t stop lead poisoning.

In a video clip, Elizabeth McDade of the Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning, said:

“Kids are not going to poisoned from a water fountain at their school. They’re not. They’re going to get poisoned by paint in their homes.”

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“I like how that starts off sounding reassuring, but ends up being more terrifying,” Oliver said. “It’s like saying, ‘Look, that boa constrictor isn’t going to bite you. It’s not. It’s just not. It’s going to crush you to death with its body and then swallow you whole, because that’s what it does.”

To illustrate McDade’s point, Oliver showed clips from a video made 20 years ago by “Sesame Street,” the children’s educational television program, warning children about the dangers of lead in their homes.

“That video was made 20 years ago and it’s enough to make you wonder if lead paint is so dangerous, why the (expletive) is there still so much of it houses where kids live?” Oliver asked. “That’s a good question. Many countries banned it in the 1920s because we knew then it was dangerous. But instead of joining them, America decided to put lead basically everywhere.”

Oliver got some help from Muppets Elmo and Rosita in a recreation of the lead video.

“A lot of places still contain lead paint,” he told the Muppets. “We need to care more than we currently do, so we spend enough money on containing it.”

Oliver, Elmo and Rosita commiserate about the cost of lead eradication, and the position of some politicians that it’s too expensive a problem to fix.

“That’s ridiculous. How can anyone say it’s too expensive, huh?” Oscar the Grouch said, popping up from his trash can and rambling off Environmental Health Perspectives research that shows that every dollar invested in controlling lead paint hazards has a return to 17 to one.

“Wow!” Oliver retorted. “That’s an amazing level of economic insight coming from someone who lives in a trash can.”

Oliver closed the segment by singing with the Muppets: “Lead is still all around us, our pipes, our walls and our air, we should do more to contain it, but first we all have to care.”