But the core of the site is strong and scathing, with a clear point of view: that a large segment of online media has nothing interesting to say, but many creative ways to get you to read it. While it’s too smart to state this explicitly, the point of almost every story is that the purveyors of such online news think you’re incredibly stupid.

Image Clickhole takes aim at online quizzes and the like. Credit... Clickhole

John Oliver, a frenetic British stand-up comic with an appealingly curious mind, also makes that point, just through the carefully modulated exasperation in his voice. Like his former boss on “The Daily Show,” he reacts incredulously (and righteously) to clips of newsmakers and juxtaposes a multitude of politicians or journalists saying the same thing.

But Mr. Oliver departs from Mr. Stewart’s template in a few critical ways. He wisely focuses less on the low-hanging, and much-gnawed-on, fruit of cable news and gravitates to foreign affairs. (It’s hard to imagine Mr. Stewart starting a question for a guest with “The Times of India had a really interesting article yesterday.”) Mr. Oliver also prefers to add dashes of theatricality, with varying degrees of success. (Using lottery balls to illustrate a point about income inequality on Sunday was weak prop comedy.)

What distinguishes Mr. Oliver is that his half-hour show is dominated by one very long, rigorously reported segment on a single issue, often running longer than 10 minutes. (The fact that HBO has no commercials helps considerably.) In his talk show on TBS, now canceled, Pete Holmes tried a similarly focused tactic for his monologue. But that’s very difficult for a daily show that is not responding to the news. In a weekly format, Mr. Oliver has a chance to be comedy’s answer to a magazine show.

There is no inherent virtue in length. After all, verbosity is not the soul of wit. But sustained thought on an undercovered topic is smart counterprogramming in our age of multitasking and tweeting. And Mr. Oliver has a gift for bringing technical, wonky subjects to vivid life.

In a magnificent 13-minute surgical strike on a proposal to allow Internet service providers to charge for “fast lanes” to the web — a departure from so-called net neutrality principles — Mr. Oliver played a clip from a Federal Communications Commission hearing, then responded: “Oh my God, how are you so dull? And that’s the problem. The cable companies have figured out the great truth about America. If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”