Comedian John Oliver made an unexpected joke about Princess Diana’s death on a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, prompting audible gasps from the audience. Diana died at 36 on August 31, 1997, following a car crash in Paris that also took the life of her close friend Dodi Fayed.
John Oliver shocks his Last Week Tonight audience with a dark joke about Princess Diana’s 1997 death
During the October 4 episode, the 49-year-old host delivered the dark joke while discussing the U.S. Secret Service in the show’s main segment. Oliver was especially surprised by a scene in the trailer for the 2013 film Olympus Has Fallen.
The trailer shows the president and his wife getting into a car accident on a bridge, with the first lady becoming trapped in her seat before falling into the icy water below. Oliver said, “I’m sure she’s fine. That scene really follows a key rule of screenwriting. If you want to make a man sympathetic, but you don’t know how, just kill his wife in a tragic accident.”
However, his remark about the British royal family prompted a wave of audible “oohs” from the audience. As a photo of Princess Diana appeared onscreen, he said, “Incidentally, I believe that’s the same strategy the British royal family had in 1997.”
This is not Oliver’s first joke involving the royal family. He made another remark in 2022 while discussing the COVID-19 pandemic. He joked that Queen Elizabeth II was “looking up at” Princess Diana from the “afterlife” while criticizing then-President Joe Biden for saying the pandemic was “over,” reports the New York Post.
Oliver called the announcement a “complete bulls–t” and argued that simply declaring something does not make it a reality. He then said, “If I declared, ‘The Queen is alive,’ that doesn’t make it true. We all know she’s in the afterlife right now looking up at Diana.”
