Sean Hannity has responded to John Oliver’s charge that the Fox News host has been exaggerating the violence of Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests: Don’t be so serious.
“His big problem is he’s not funny,” Hannity says in a SiriusXM interview.
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, Oliver riffed on the Trump Administration’s handling of the Portland protests following the police killing of George Floyd. Oliver said that Hannity overstated the protests’ violence and that Hannity’s “tone does not reflect conditions on the ground.”
He added, “If you, like Trump, think that it is fun to use federal troops as a prop to crush the constitutional right to assemble then like a great American, I’d like to offer you a basic cognitive test.” He then held up two middle fingers, “How many fingers am I holding up?”
Appearing on SiriusXM’s Jim Norton & Sam Roberts radio show, Hannity said he didn’t see Oliver’s show (“I saw the headline on Mediaite”), but that Oliver has a “big problem”: He isn’t funny.
“I don’t live my life too concerned about what John Oliver thinks,” Hannity said on the radio show. “His big problem is he’s not funny. If you’re funny, I don’t care what you say. Be funny about it…”
Hannity doubled down on his view that the Portland protests are full of police-bashing agitators, with accounts of “cops that have been blinded permanently” by lasers and other injuries in Portland’s “Summer of Love zone.”
“I don’t really expect John Oliver to know facts or truths, and I’m sure he’ll selectively pick out ‘well, these are the peaceful protestors,’ and ignore the rocks, the bottles, the bricks, the Molotov cocktails, the gunshots, the fireworks and everything else being hurled at officers around the country…”
Late night comedy shows, Hannity added at one point, “have gotten so bad since Corona.”
Watch the Hannity segment about Oliver on the Jim Norton & Sam Roberts radio show above.
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