Seven years later, John Oliver still can't quite make sense of his first 48 hours in America.

Then a 29-year-old comedian working the London club and stand-up circuit, he flew to New York on a Sunday evening and reported to a studio overlooking the Hudson River in Midtown Manhattan the next morning. Several hours later, he was standing in front of a packed audience and riffing on President George W. Bush's latest social faux pas, trading quips with Jon Stewart as The Daily Show's new "Senior British Correspondent."

"I just finished the thing and it all happened in a blur, and J.K. Rowling was sitting in the audience," he recalled in a phone call with BuzzFeed on Thursday. "And I could have presumed I just hallucinated it. And then she came around afterwards, just to say, 'Well done.'"

Oliver babbled a response, tripping over his dropped jaw and sputtering out a few words of gratitude to the Harry Potter author.

"She kind of gave me a hug and told me to calm down," Oliver said. "And that's kind of everything you want from a moment like that, having J.K. Rowling hug you and say everything's going to be OK... It was like a one-evening guardian angel, and my guardian angel was the creator of a boy wizard. I remember getting back to the place I was staying in, looking at my still-full suitcase, and thinking, What the fuck just happened?"

Like her magical characters, Rowling was able to foresee the future. Despite warnings from his agent that he shouldn't rent an apartment in New York at first because he'd "probably get fired within four weeks," Oliver has become a Daily Show mainstay. That Oliver has lasted so long there is in and of itself a feat; he was stepping into huge shoes left by the recently departed Stephen Colbert and Ed Helms, who would soon be followed out the door by fan favorite Rob Corddry. Most of the correspondents introduced since Oliver was hired, from Olivia Munn to Wyatt Cenac, have also left.

Now 36, Oliver will assume the unenviable task of filling in for Stewart on June 10, when the longtime Daily Show host heads off to the Middle East for 12 weeks to direct his first feature film, Rosewater, an adaptation of the memoir of a former Iranian political prisoner.