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Da Vinci Code: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive)

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John Oliver spent eight minutes on YouTube blowing a gasket over a 2003 airport thriller.

With HBO’s Last Week Tonight on its usual winter hiatus, John Oliver used a web-exclusive upload on January 10, 2022, to torch Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its 2006 Ron Howard film adaptation. There’s no religion segment, no policy angle, no chart — just Oliver, a taped studio audience, and roughly eight or nine minutes of disbelief that a puzzle box novel became a defining cultural artifact of the post-9/11 era.

• Oliver’s core complaint targets the climax: Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon is treated as a genius for cracking a cryptex whose password is simply “A-P-P-L-E,” tied to Isaac Newton.
• He jokes that “Isaac Newton is to apple what George Washington is to the cherry tree,” mocking how a centuries-spanning conspiracy hinges on such an obvious clue.
• Oliver acknowledges the studio audience directly, noting they were stuck sitting through a lengthy, straight-faced recap of an 18-year-old bestseller without their phones, and closes with his own mock art puzzle before reminding viewers the show returns in February 2022.

A Web Exclusive to Fill the Gap

Last Week Tonight typically goes dark for several weeks after its fall season wraps, and this stretch was no exception. Instead of leaving the channel silent, Oliver’s team cut together a standalone bit that functions less like a news segment and more like a comedy set built entirely around one book. There’s no A-block newsy hook — the entire premise is that Oliver has apparently been sitting on this grievance since 2003 and finally had airtime to unload it.

The Cryptex Complaint

Oliver’s real target is the mechanics of the plot itself. In Brown’s story, Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu spend the bulk of the book chasing down a rosewood cryptex supposedly guarded by the Priory of Sion, only for the answer to be a five-letter word connected to Newton’s tomb inside Westminster Abbey. Oliver can’t get past how thin that payoff is for a story that convinced millions of readers they were getting a crash course in secret history.

“Isaac Newton is to apple what George Washington is to the cherry tree.”

That line sums up the whole bit — Oliver treats the “shocking” solution as roughly as clever as name-dropping a founding father’s most famous myth, and can’t fathom why an entire fictional secret society would gate-keep something a moderately attentive tourist could guess.

The Captive Audience Bit

Part of the fun is Oliver turning to the crowd mid-taping and effectively apologizing for what they just sat through — a phone-free, largely deadpan plot recap of a nearly two-decade-old novel. It’s the same self-aware device Last Week Tonight has leaned on before, similar in spirit to how other late-night formats let a bit turn into commentary on the show’s own production, the way SNL’s cold opens occasionally wink at their own studio conditions. Oliver leans into it here, framing the whole video as something the audience endured rather than something he expects viewers to take too seriously.

Wrapping With a Puzzle and a Return Date

Before signing off, Oliver presents his own mock art puzzle as a jab at the film’s reliance on visual riddles, then reminds viewers that Last Week Tonight would be back on HBO in February 2022. As 2022 kicked off with plenty of its own predictions floating around — including pieces like this look back at decade-old forecasts for the year — Oliver’s video reads as a low-stakes placeholder, a way to keep the channel active without pretending it’s a real episode.

The video runs under nine minutes, cost the show nothing but studio time already on the books, and exists mostly because Oliver apparently couldn’t let the “APPLE” reveal go unaddressed for almost two decades. Last Week Tonight’s actual return in February 2022 is where the real news content resumes — this was just Oliver clearing his throat.