John Oliver kicked off Last Week Tonight with an extended segment on the natural disasters that have hit the eastern coast of the United States in recent weeks amid hurricane season.
Throughout the introductory bit, Oliver joshed everything and everyone from Dancing With the Stars to president Joe Biden, with a number of minutes dedicated to Southern breakfast food joint Waffle House, the Index of which serves as an unofficial but much relied-upon metric by FEMA categorizing the severity of extreme weather storms.
First off, he played a clip of Alfonso Ribeiro introducing a number set to Scorpions’ classic “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” a line the host delivered somberly as he said the choice was made “weeks in advance” of Hurricane Milton‘s path toward Florida.
“Yeah, that’s not great,” Oliver said. “While I’m sure the song was decided weeks in advance, it’s also the middle of hurricane season right now! This wasn’t some freak unforeseeable thing like if he’d have to come out and say, ‘Before our contestant’s cha-cha to ‘The Thong Song,’ we want you to know, it was chosen weeks before this morning’s mass thong-strangling.’”
The Waffle House Index, originated by the government and coined circa 20 years ago, is based on the restaurant chain’s business strategy of staying open as much as possible, knowing that profits increase before and after climate catastrophes. Oliver pointed to the irony that the chain’s open doors signify a beacon of hope of sorts during hurricane season when the establishment otherwise embodies chaos with frequent patron brawls and “staggering variations of hash brown bowls, described by Waffle House as ‘the jazz music of the breakfast scene,’ which I guess makes sense because, like jazz, the idea of a hash brown bowl sounds fun but what you actually experience is, you think to yourself, ‘There is too much going on here and I’m not sure I’m enjoying any of it.’”
Oliver then pointed to Waffle House’s 1999 re-recording of classic tunes for their in-house jukeboxes, like “Raisin Toast,” a parody of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons’ “Sherry.”
“‘Sherry, Baby’ [sic] is a song about Frankie Valli being horny for a girl, and this is basically that, but raisins. Horny for raisins, which — not for nothing — sounds like it could be a believable title for a Joe Biden memoir,” Oliver quipped, as a fake book cover titled “Horny For Raisins, C’mon!” flashed on screen, featuring a smirking Biden holding up a carton of Sun-Maid raisins.
The political host then transitioned to another example of Waffle House’s balancing act between chaos and order: the way line-cooks are meant to remember orders — and it’s not in a computerized system or by good old-fashioned pen-to-notepad record-keeping. In two clips, one from an employee posted to TikTok, as well as an official trainee video from the restaurant, packets of condiments, as well as their precise positioning on a plate, indicate a variety of plate combos.
“Sorry, but if it’s cool with you, I am going to let that mayo packet confuse me because I feel insane right now. I was confused when you said two pickle slices in the No. 3 position means bacon sandwich. You could have said Vince Vaughn at a christening on Fourth of July means cheese omelet, and it would have had the exact same effect on me because what the actual f— am I looking at there?” Oliver said. “That is a plate with two loose pickle slices, a Kraft single and an unopened mayo packet. That is not a form of communication. It looks like dinner at the Fyre Festival.”
