John Oliver Wants to Believe the J.D. Vance Sofa Rumor: “I’ve Never Seen Someone With More Couch-F***er Energy”

John Oliver spent several minutes of his Last Week Tonight opening segment talking about the 2024 presidential race, but he devoted a good chunk of that time addressing the baseless rumor that J.D. Vance once had sex with a couch.

As you would expect, Oliver is no fan of Republican candidate Donald Trump‘s running mate for vice president.

“J.D. Vance sucks so much that it says something that for a few days this week, the Internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a New York Times best-seller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir,” Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Oliver said on his HBO show.

While that is not actually true, Oliver opined that he could believe it might have happened.

“It is not in his book, but I think the reason it spreads so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he said, showing a photo of Vance. “If you ask me to play Two Truths and a Lie with this man, before he even open his mouth, I shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.” 

Oliver continued: “He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes. If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because J.D. Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.”

The Last Week Tonight host noted that the rumor even made its way around the world, with a Norwegian media outlet posting the headline “Hadde ikke sex med sofa,” which he quipped “sounds like a sign they had to put up in IKEA after J.D. visited too much.”

Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’ decision to post a fact-check with the headline “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch,” which the news outlet later removed from its website. The link then took Internet surfers to a message reading “page unavailable” and the explanation that the story didn’t go through the AP’s “standard editing process.”

“No shit it didn’t because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. ” And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say J.D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”

Oliver then said that his staff reached out to Vance’s campaign last week, asking point-blank if Vance “ever had sex with a couch.” 

“They — and this is true — hung up on us, which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it?” he said. 

Follow-up texts and emails have also been left unanswered.

“But…look, who knows where this is going,” Oliver continued. “The news is moving so fast right now, the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Harris’ VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But…until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that J.D. Vance fucked a couch.”