“John Oliver: Terrifying Times” serves mainly to demonstrate the huge gulf between “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” to which Mr. Oliver contributes funny bits, and traditional stand-up comedy. Watching Mr. Oliver pose clueless questions to serious people on “The Daily Show” can be painfully funny. Watching him onstage for an hour is more like anesthesia.
“Terrifying Times” has the feel of a vanity production or a contractual obligation: it’s being shown on Sunday night by Comedy Central, also home of “The Daily Show.” The live audience at Symphony Space in Manhattan, most likely hand-picked and no doubt appropriately cued, still doesn’t manage to muster much enthusiasm.
Mr. Oliver is a British comedian of the currently popular aggressive-nerd variety, distinguishable from his American counterparts by his accent, smaller frame and floppier hair. One of his funnier lines comes at the very beginning: “I am going to be speaking to you this evening with a British accent, so do be prepared for the words you hear to come with a little more authority than you’re used to.”
He works familiar anti-Bush, antiwar, pro-can’t-we-all-just-get-along territory. There’s nothing exactly wrong with a set piece on how America has “taken the baton of imperialism” from the British and is about to hand it off to the Chinese, but the material has a wonky writers’ room quality rather than the naturalness of something worked out onstage. (Note to Mr. Oliver: “infrastructure” is not a funny word.)
The best joke from that section imagines third-world nostalgia for British rule: “They long once more to be treated that badly that politely.” He strays from such political-cultural commentary only once, to tell a story about his adolescent athletic inadequacy that involves his own funny bits’ falling out of his running shorts.
Mr. Oliver is safest when he sticks to mocking Britain, which he says proved its green bona fides by being “the first nation to use Catholics as fuel.” My favorite line: he won’t utter the American term for the world’s most popular sport because “if I ever do say that word, somewhere in the world a British person dies.”

nytimes.com