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John Oliver is celebrating the end of the actors strike — sort of.
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, he noted that the 118-day strike had come to an end after SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers last week (the deal still has to be ratified by the guild).
“The SAG strike finally ended, meaning that movies will be back in production,” he began in the opening segment of his HBO show. “Although to be honest, I’m not even sure that I need movies anymore since this 17-minute video was released of what I can only describe as a hamster Gatsby living its best life.”
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He then showed about a minute of a video titled “The Awesome Hamster Ball Pool Maze” uploaded to YouTube by Homura Ham Pets that’s garnered 1.4 million in the four months it’s been online. (Watch the video below in its entirety.)
“It’s a complete masterpiece and it goes on for 16 more minutes. I mean, Barbenheimer was fine,” Oliver said, referring to movies Barbie and Oppenheimer, which opened on the same weekend. “I liked it fine, but be honest, it’s just not as good as that.”
Oliver, of course, was joking. When his show returned with new episodes in October following the end of the writers strike, he expressed anger at the studios, accusing them of prolonging the strike.
“The Writers Guild went on strike and thankfully won, but it took a lot of sacrifices from a lot of people to achieve that,” he said. “And while I’m happy that they eventually got a fair deal and immensely proud of what our union accomplished, I’m also furious that it took the studios 148 days to achieve a deal that they could have offered on day fucking one. But hopefully, this might encourage others, from auto workers to Starbucks baristas to health care providers, whether they are in unions or would like to be, to find power in each other. And within our particular industry.”
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