John Oliver Attempts to Make Infrastructure “Sexy” to Show its Importance

When you hear the word “infrastructure”, what is your initial reaction? “Cool!”, “Wow”, “Sexy”, ‘Important”, or…”What?”, “I don’t know.” This is exactly the point that popular comedian John Oliver tries to make on his show Last Week Tonight. 

With a satirical smile, Oliver shows at least three politicians label the issue of deteriorating infrastructure as “unsexy” and boring.

He then goes on a twenty-minute rant about how important the infrastructure of America is and how public awareness needs to be raised.

Bustle reports:

“Time and again, the subject of our country’s infrastructure has been shoved under the rug. Many politicians have deemed it a boring issue that nobody wants to talk about; it’s “unsexy.” And much like the men who label it as such, John Oliver quips on his latest episode, infrastructure is “important but not sexy.” Sure, infrastructure may not be as exciting as counterterrorism measures, but it is an urgent issue nonetheless, and the more we ignore it, the more American lives are at risk. In this week’s episode, John Oliver examines America’s deteriorating infrastructure — “roads, bridges, dams … basically, anything that can be destroyed in an action movie” — and helps make the issue more exciting with his own blockbuster action movie.

Oliver opens his segment by acknowledging the popular opinion that infrastructure is not sexy, but to be fair, he notes, it’s because “Hollywood promotes unrealistic standards of infrastructure beauty.” Then he points to a picture of the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz and shouts, “That’s not what a real road looks like! Real roads have curves!”… But all kidding aside again, the state of America’s infrastructure is pretty dire and something needs to be done.”

This is the mock-trailer for Oliver’s movie to bring people’s attention to how valuable infrastructure really is.

It’s a great laugh and highlights an important infrastructure asset management issue facing every state of the USA.

Watch John Oliver’s “Infrastructure” episode by clicking on the play button above.