John Oliver

TheFaction1776/Twitter

Guerrilla artists turn John Oliver billboard ad into right-wing meme

Last month the artist collective targeted Bill Maher’s billboard with the same NPC-meme used to deface the John Oliver Last Week Tonight ad.

 

David Gilmour

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 19, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 6:45 pm CDT

A billboard advertising John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight was turned into a giant meme Tuesday by conservative guerrilla street artists the Faction, who tweeted the finished product out to fans.

The artist invoked the right-wing NPC meme to satirize Oliver, replacing his face with a non-playable character (NPC) image used to depict liberals as mindless partisan zombies. The name of the show was also scrubbed from the billboard, rebranded instead as The Orange Man Bad Show with John Oliver.

It makes for the second HBO advertisement in Los Angeles, California, that the Faction has vandalized since the start of 2019, part of a campaign to fight “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in the media.

In mid-January, media outlet Culttture ran exclusive footage of the Faction targeting a billboard advertisement for liberal comedian Bill Maher’s Real Time talk show with the same meme.

This week, elsewhere in the city, a fellow conservative street artist who goes by the name Sabo trolled Hollywood by posting faux movie posters.

Most went after Empire actor Jussie Smollett, over the debunked claim that he was the victim of a hate crime, and Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who faces a political crisis over allegations related to a racist photograph from his old medical school yearbook.

It is understood that Sabo and the Faction’s campaigns were not planned to coincide.

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*First Published: Feb 19, 2019, 4:20 pm CST