Why is Bill Maher?

And finally new rule: Who is this person actually for and why does anyone watch his show?

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or met a Bill Maher fan.

I’ve seen people agree with him about something, occasionally. Usually some other reactionary nitwit boomer like Elon Musk high-fiving him about how colleges and Pixar movies are turning all the kids trans. But he doesn’t attract anywhere near the type of ends-of-the-earth cult following that some of these other commentators and pundits develop. Nobody thinks that Bill Maher has any special insight into anything.

Yet the man has been on television since the 80s. Who is he for?

I have to believe that the appeal of Bill Maher, for his guests as well as his viewers, is the specific type of high that you get from the speedball cocktail of adrenaline, cortisol, endorphin, and serotonin that hits your bloodstream when an idiot says something stupid in confidence and then immediately gets his ass handed to him for it. If you search social media for discussion about Bill Maher’s show after any given episode you just get a string of clips with captions like “Bill Maher destroyed and humiliated on his own show” “That time Bill Maher’s guests took turns roasting his ass and laughing” “Here’s Roddy Piper making Bill Maher look like a bitch.”

By the way, here is that clip of Roddy Piper making Bill Maher look like a bitch. It’s old but it’s a perfect example of what I’m going to be talking about regarding this bafflingly employed old hack:

Maher is the most confidently wrong person on television. To the extent that I think the one thing you can reasonably applaud him for is consistency. Some people’s brains conflate confidence with factual accuracy and that’s kind of how gaslighting works. Bill Maher doesn’t even have that going for him. You can’t even agree with him by accident. Even when he’s right he’s wrong, he’s like a paradox of cringe.

He's ostensibly a comedian doing that format of show where he’s doing one part panel discussion and one part punditry, but he’s got this long baffling segment where he just lectures his audience. And you might say, “but Sped, that’s an established thing, John Stewart does that.” No, John Stewart educates his audience on why their mutual enemies are morons and builds their arsenal of informed mockery so they are better equipped to combat idiocy out in the world. Bill Maher lectures his own audience with the tone of a boarding school headmaster whose entire class won’t stop shitting in the sink.

It's bad enough that he’s such a contemptuous misanthrope, that would be fine if he was right. George Carlin was a cranky old cynical fart who happened to be right about everything. The last time Bill Maher was right about anything was when he told Buddy Holly it was safer to fly commercial. Now it’s all just boomer tirades against debunked boogeymen from the Reagan administration. Here he is going on about how violent movies are the reason there’s gun violence in America. You know, the only place in the world where movies exist.

The best proof of Maher’s overconfidence is his podcast/interview series Club Random, in which Maher invites a public figure over to his basement man cave to drink expensive spirits and smoke cigars for a couple of hours of unscripted casual conversation.

I understand the idea of it, yeah—cutting past the bullshit of the traditional interview format, just having an off the cuff conversation in a casual environment with as much mood enhancing substance as you like or are legally permitted to have. You get much more humanity out of a guest that way than you would with Kimmel. But put a couple of whiskeys into Bill Maher and it just turns into a lecture. If you’re lecturing somebody and you’re drunker than they are, you have to know better than they do about what you’re talking about.

If you don’t—if you’re Bill Maher—it becomes a bloodbath. So Club Random is nothing but a spectacle of slurring, awkward-laughing, self-immolation, time after time. It really is fascinating to watch.

Bill Burr isn’t necessarily the Pope of Ideal Takes either but he’s got Maher’s ticket when it comes to a completely unwarranted attitude of bold truth-telling.

I don’t know why he keeps going on the show, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know why Maher keeps inviting him. I don’t know which one of them is more masochistic.

I used to think Bill Maher was cool enough, I guess, back in the mid 2000s when I was sort of doing the atheism-as-a-personality thing, but even then I was never really completely on board with the so-called New Atheism movement that he was hitching his wagon to. This form of political atheism—philosophically an Enlightenment movement but politically neoconservative, championed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—always felt like a lie to me, a mask used to cover a real attitude of cultural and/or racial superiority. With the notable exception of Hitchens, who I believe was coherent, I stand by that. It was Islamophobia for people who wanted to be politically correct about it.

That’s another big fat douchy lie about Bill Maher, by the way—the idea that he’s “politically incorrect.” That’s what he called his first show, and what he’s tried to manufacture his entire brand around. Maybe at one point his schtick might have appeared politically incorrect, back when the face it was coming out of less matched the cantankerous old man attitude of the words, but Maher is firmly within a set of media personalities I’ve seen referenced variously with terms like the “post-left,”—not exactly right-wing, but righter-wing in politics than the aesthetic they wear. And there is nothing more politically correct than intellectual dishonesty. In fact, isn’t that largely its definition?

Bill Maher isn’t politically incorrect, he’s just the regular type of incorrect.

He doesn’t even have any consistent ideology, and that’s kind of a big red flag when it comes to identifying somebody who is, in general, Wrong. After all, when you’re right, you’re right. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room there. When you’re wrong, all sorts of random incongruent batshit can spew out of your piehole. I’m no friend to the claims of organized religion myself but Maher’s big atheism documentary, Religulous, could challenge the Bible for its density of factual errors, and even his attitude toward religion changes based on the context of whatever else he’s ranting about at the time. When he’s bitching about cancel culture he’ll throw out sarcastic quips like “What’s next, we cancel God?” as though that’s the insane ditch at the bottom of the slippery slope rather than something he was literally asking us to do ten years ago. When he needs material to back himself up about the Israel/Palestine conflict he’s practically Orthodox.

Of course his mission of the current age is against “wokeness” and the material there is limitless because it’s already a massive grab-bag of incoherence. I’ve written before about the fact that “wokeness” is radically incoherent and internally inconsistent, so the topic is like Disneyland for someone like Maher whose decision for the hour is whether he wants to dine at Alien Pizzagate Planet or ride the Black Lives Matterhorn.

Recently he’s sought the favour of Ron DeSantis, of all fucking people, purely because he’s firmly in the anti-Woke camp, and delivered a stern lecture fawning over DeSantis for his war on drag queens, insisting, as DeSantis does, that liberals and progressives are at best tolerant of and at worst complicit in an insidious child-grooming operation.

That’s odd, because Maher himself has not just once, but at least twice defended adult sexual relationships with underage minors. On the earlier occasion, Henry Rollins had to step in to tell him politely why it’s improper for a 35 year old to have sex with a 14 year old (in case it’s unclear: when Henry Rollins tells you anything whatsoever, the correct response is “yes, sir”)

And much more recently, he commented on a story about David Bowie having sex with a minor, and interestingly enough, here he is complaining that the woke (or social justice warriors, as they were called at the time) were irrationally against grooming minors.

Again, who the hell is Bill Maher actually for? Why do people tune in again and again, week after week, to listen to his embarrassing own-goals and humiliating self-immolation?

I think I have an answer, based on the guests who turn up again and again to laugh with and at him. Based on the social media response. Based on myself, following his stupid show and listening to the dumb shit he says:

He’s a harmless hate-watch.

Bill Maher isn’t deeply insidious. I do not think, all things considered, that he’s a grifter. He’s not outright poison, like Tucker Carlson. He gets the blood flowing just enough. He hits that strange spot where his role in pop culture feels more like motivation than a threat. He’s a little bit of poison that you put into your body to immunise yourself.

I cannot stand this dipshit, but I will watch all the highlights this weekend. I must solemnly admit I’m part of the problem.