Liam Conner
If you find yourself laughing at something Bill Maher said recently on HBO’s “Real Time,” his Friday night perch for the past 21 years, be careful: Next time, the joke could be on you. No one is spared from Maher’s humor, or, as he sees it, from telling the truth – not the right one (“If you’re going to hand your party over to a foreign power, at least choose the right one. Russia? Are you kidding? It’s as if Republicans looked at every company they could merge with and chose Sears!”), nor the left (“You call yourself a resistance? Then fight behind enemy lines. That’s what a ‘resistance’ does. That’s the difference between blowing up a tank and tweeting about this. Get out of your echo chamber and infiltrate theirs!”).
CBS News
Asked if you can make an audience laugh and think at the same time, Maher replied: “Totally, of course. The great thing about laughter is that it is involuntary, so if you laugh at something, something in you tells you that it is true. It must be true; I laughed at that! Maybe I shouldn’t.“
He said the throughline of everything he writes and says is: “Keep it real. Don’t be tribal. Don’t say something just because it will make the audience on one side applaud or boo. Practical solutions as opposed to ideological solutions. . and don’t throw a punch.
Maher, 68, has hit targets high and low throughout his career, taking his own share of blows along the way. But he still happily courts controversy, as when he told the “Real Time” audience: “The right response to a speech you don’t like is more speech, not the lazy and cowardly response of ‘cancelling’ people.”
That attitude explains the title of his new book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” (to be published May 21 by Simon & Schuster). It was compiled from years of comments from Maher on “Real Time.”
Simon & Schuster
“I wanted to see if the world had changed or if I had changed more,” he said. “I was digging, reading all these editorials from years and years and years, and I wanted to find this answer. I speak for normies. .I don’t want to hate half the country and I don’t hate half the country.”
Costa said: “You write a lot throughout this book that the left irritates you, sometimes frustrates you, but the right often alarms you?”
“Yes, they are very alarming!” Maher responded. “They are extremely alarming. More alarming.”
But if he finds the right more alarming than the left, why not shine the spotlight just on them? “The truth is not that one-sided,” Maher said. “Democrats are constantly competing against Trump with the idea, You guys couldn’t vote for this guy. And people are saying: See me. Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again. Instead of just saying, Oh, he lied. Like us to know he is a liar. He is Donald Trump! He can’t help it. He’s crazy. I mean, I think it’s literally crazy. I think there is a certain level of malignant narcissism, which is not just a personality quirk, it is diagnosable, and he suffers from it.”
Costa asked, “If you had him on ‘Real Time,’ what would you ask him?”
“Could you please go away?” Maher laughed.
He said Trump was invited to be on the show: “Of course, we asked everyone, I mean, that stature. He knows he has an open invitation to come on, but I don’t think he really hates me, because of the amount of times he He’s going after me.”
“He watches the show,” Costa said.
“Accidentally! It’s always accidentally,” Maher said. “He ‘accidentally’ watches it every week. It’s amazing!”
In fact, conservatives do not shy away from “Real Time”. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, was invited last year. Maher said the reaction from liberal circles “was exactly what I hate about this country: How do you dare? How dare you platform someone?
“So you’re going to have to talk to people and maybe you’ll find out that they’re not the monsters you think they are. I mean, I apologize for Bill Barr’s horrible behavior (I thought) when the Mueller Report came out and he basically lied about that. But look, that’s what I call a good Republican. He came out and said Trump lost the election at this point: do you believe that elections only count if you win?
“As good as it gets” could well be Maher’s motto for politics and life – don’t wish for what it could be, but recognize that what he sees is real (and accept you if it isn’t).
READ AN EXCERPT: “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You” by Bill Maher
The new book from the host of HBO’s “Real Time” takes aim at those who shamelessly invoke today’s standards to rewrite history in ways that even “Star Trek” would think went too far.
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson and Robert Marston. Editor: José Frandino.
