Here comes John Oliver! On the Sunday, Sept. 21 episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the show host confirmed — rather hilariously — that the Miss America Pageant is, in fact, the largest provider for scholarships for women in the world.
“Last Sunday was the Miss America Pageant, and through it all — the swimsuits, the dance numbers, the inexplicable ventriloquism — it was very difficult to think, ‘How the f— is this still happening?'” Oliver, 37, said.
“Miss America is about something more than just looks,” Oliver continued. “In fact, Miss America treads on their scholarship claims so much that if you call the Miss America headquarters, this is what you hear: ‘Thank you for calling the Miss America organization, the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women.'”
The skeptical show host went on to say it was “a little bit weird” that Miss America was the largest provider for scholarships.
Still, he explained: “Miss America backs this up with numbers… $45 million, that is an unbelievable amount of money. As in I literally didn’t believe that.”
That “crazy number” continued to bug Oliver, to the point that he and his staff pulled public tax forms for the nonprofit. “What we found instead was that in 2012, at the national level, they spent less than $500,000 in cash scholarships. Leaving us a mere $44.5 million short of what they say they provide… we [tried] to pull the tax forms from every single state level from the country, because this was starting to drive us insane.”
Oliver’s team got 33 state forms, and still couldn’t get close to the $45 million mark. “At this point we were in way too deep, so we just called Miss America.”
Watch out how the numbers “held up” in the video above!