Mr. Oliver spoke further about the coming season of “Last Week Tonight” and his exchange with Mr. Hoffman. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

At this time last year, you spoke about not wanting “Last Week Tonight” to be overrun by coverage of President Trump. Do you think you succeeded?

I was quite anxious that we protect the main body of our show from being cannibalized by him. So, I think we were able to do that. We tried to contain talking about whatever he had done that week — to the extent that we could — to the first section of the show, leaving the majority of the show for those long pieces that have nothing to do with him. Still, it’s hard to ignore the president, right? Even though we did a piece on vaccines, he was in that, only because the president has expressed vaccine skepticism. It felt irresponsible not to mention the fact that there is someone in the Oval Office who’s expressed skepticism for vaccines, which is dangerous.

A year into this administration, do you feel a certain futility in your task, that all this satirical sunlight you’re providing is not serving as any kind of disinfectant?

When we take a position, we try to keep people on board who might disagree, so that at least they can watch our thought process. We don’t want to be another haranguing voice, which turns people off. We did a long piece about the Confederacy, and I understand that people have different feelings about what those monuments mean. We didn’t want to do the shorthand, which is “blah, blah, blah, you’re all wrong, they’ve got to come down.” We tried to explain who Jimmy Savile is, who was a genuine hero in Britain, who we had built statues of because he was so iconic. Then his memory became recontextualized when it turned out he had done terrible things and those statues had to come down. When you talk about that for a few minutes, you get people to at least buy into the idea that history can recontextualize people’s actions. Then, hopefully, you’ve approached it in a way that you’re working from a basic point of agreement. Even if you don’t agree with our conclusions at the end of it.