Boston ‘cop slide’ video turns up on John Oliver

Off Beat

“It is cinema at its finest,” Oliver said of the viral “cop slide” video during Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight.”

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After thousands of views and countless parodies, the viral hilarity of Boston’s infamous “cop slide” had begun to fade.

That is, until John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” resurrected this summer’s popular video of a Boston police officer’s bumpy ride down the slide at City Hall Plaza.

In Sunday’s episode — Oliver’s first since the five-month Writers Guild of America strike ended — the host recapped some of the major pop culture milestones that happened during the hiatus. He talked about missing “Barbenheimer,” the cultural phenomenon that blended Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” to great success.

“It was one of the biggest movie events of the summer, alongside ‘Sound of Freedom,’ the feel-good child sex trafficking hit that we’d all been waiting for,” Oliver said. “Although I would argue, if you are truly looking for the single best movie of the summer, it has just got to be ‘Cop Slide.’”

He cut to a news clip showing the officer rocketing down the slide on his stomach and tumbling roughly to the ground. 

“He does hit the ground hard, and it’s absolutely incredible — from the sound of him thundering down the slide to all his cop toys flying all over the place. It is cinema at its finest,” Oliver said. “It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last time that I say this, but I wish cops turned on their body cams more, because I’d love to have seen that from inside the slide as well.”

The video’s virality hit epic proportions as “Boston Cop Slide” became a destination on Google Maps, inspiring a surge of adult thrill seekers to check out the slide (which is, notably, intended for children ages 5-12). 

Oliver also acknowledged the memes and parodies that the “cop slide” video spawned, playing a clip where the sound of the officer’s ricocheting replaces an epic drum break in Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” 

“Come on! Eat your heart out, ‘Miami Vice,’” he said. “That is now the all-time greatest use of that song.”