John Oliver is an expert at taking serious, sometimes dull political issues and mining them for laughs. This time, however, he was lobbed a softball.
Following the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last week that effectively legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 US states, a number of gay pride parades took place around the world. CNN covered one such parade in London, where CNN International reporter Lucy Pawle thought she noticed something strange among the revelers.
Sure, the flag is clearly a parody of the real ISIS flag, and at quick glance could perhaps be mistaken for one. But it soon becomes abundantly clear that the writing on the flag is in fact not Arabic and has been replaced by various sex toys.
“I seem to be the only person who has spotted this,” Pawle said live, on the air. “Nobody seems to be raising any questions or pointing it out.”
“That’s not the ISIS flag,” Oliver responded to the lunacy on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight. “That’s a flag with dildos and butt plugs all over it.”
For seven minutes, CNN carefully considered what an ISIS flag might be doing at a gay pride parade. The network even brought in national security analyst Peter Bergen—a distinguished reporter who once famously interviewed Osama bin Laden—to discuss the flag. Bergen wondered aloud if the flag might be a parody, before CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux asked him if, perhaps, the flag was actually a warning.
“Could it be a sign? Could it be a flag of sorts of ‘hey, you know what, this is our next location, this is our next attack,'” she asked. Watch the entire CNN clip below, via Mediaite: