While Last Week Tonight is taking Sunday off for the Memorial Day holiday, John Oliver still took the time to film an impassioned rant against that most grievous of social ills: cereal not new or flashy enough. While the cornucopia of sugary depravity at your local grocery store will reassure you that, yes, there are a ton of new cereals (Nilla Banana Pudding cereal? Girl Scouts Thin Mints cereal? Get into it), Oliver’s larger point seems be cereal’s lack of prominence and innovation as the years go on. Cereal has become lazy, he asserts. And he’s pointing his finger at the Cheerios Twitter account as a prime culprit.
“They’ve submitted to the worst, toothless impulses that dominate positivity Twitter,†he declares, while revealing the heart-healthy oat cereal’s saccharine social media presence. “They deliver empty nonsense like, ‘Good morning! Today is yours.’ What?!†In the hopes of inspiring Cheerios to do better, or at least, more, Oliver issues a challenge: he’ll donate $25,000 to a charity chosen by Cheerios if they “simply use their official account to tweet, ‘Fuck you,’†even bumping up the offer to $50,000 if they direct the tweet to a non-famous random user. Truly, it’s an offer they absolutely can’t accept.