Why John Oliver is 'shocked' with Harry's clarification that Prince Philip wasn't 'being racist'?

After Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey aired earlier this month, an old clip of John Oliver warning the former actress against joining the British royal family also went viral, with netizens astonished at how he kind of predicted her feud with Buckingham Palace.

Therefore, Oliver wasn't surprised by the explosive revelations made by the couple in the recent interview, as he admitted during an appearance on "The Tonight Show" on Monday evening. Dubbing the interview "amazing," he told Jimmy Fallon: "That is kind of what I felt like, sadly, her experience was going to be going in." However, there was one statement by Harry that "shocked" Oliver as well.

In the CBS interview, Harry and Meghan confessed that a member of the royal family had expressed concerns about the skin colour of their unborn child, but refused to divulge the name of the person as it would be "too damaging" for them. However, it soon led to speculations on the internet about who might have made the comment, prompting Harry to clarify through Oprah that his grandparents Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had no part in it.

This came as a surprise for Oliver, as he revealed to Fallon, "the only thing that shocked me after was that Oprah, the next day, saying, 'Harry wants to make clear it wasn't Prince Philip being racist.' Which made me think, 'Really? Okay, that is actually surprising.'"

Prince Phillip has made a number of embarrassing tone-deaf and racially insensitive comments in the past before he stepped down from royal duties in 2017. The 99-year-old, who recently returned home after spending a month in the hospital, told a Kenyan woman presenting him with a small gift in 1984: "You are a woman, aren't you?" A decade later, during a visit to the Cayman Islands, the Duke of Edinburgh asked an islander: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"

In another embarrassing gaffe in China in 1986, the Duke of Edinburgh told a British student: "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." Despite facing widespread criticism back then, he made the same mistake two years later as he told a student trekking across Papua New Guinea: "You managed not to get eaten, then?"

In 2002, the Prince Consort was with the Queen in Australia, when he asked Aboriginal Elder William Brin: "Do you still throw spears at each other?" The next year, during a meeting with the President of Nigeria who was dressed in traditional robes, Prince Philip asked: "You look like you're ready for bed!"

The inappropriate comments made it to public stages as well. While addressing a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986, the royal said: "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has two wings and flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

Prince Philip is not the only royal who has made racist comments, though he has done it the most times. Harry himself famously called an Asian member of his platoon "our little P*** friend" in a video diary he made while training as an officer at the Sandhurst military academy in 2006. A year before, he had issued a public apology after wearing a Nazi swastika at a fancy dress party.