RIP, Jimmy Piersall — Bill Maher Struck Out All By Himself On Live TV

In this post, NY Fishwrap culture critic Wesley Morris suggests a modest proposal (Pace, Jonathan Swift) for the next epissode of "Real Time with Bill Maher: Maher's "panel" would consist of prominent critics of Maher's lame attempt racial humor during his opening interview with Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) in the "Real Time" episode on June 2, 2017. A public shaming is the most appropriate response to Maher. If this is a (fair & balanced) pursuit of a national dialogue about race, so be it.
PS:
As this blogger pulled away to run an errand, his iPhone jukebox played this tongue-in-cheek tribute to political correctness —

[x Youtunb/The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel]
"National Brotherhood Week (1967)
By Tom Lehrer

Enjoy!

[x NY Fishwrap]
What Was Bill Maher’s Big Mistake?
By Wesley Morris


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

adults american approach asked bill black book chris comedians comedy dammit dinner fields future griffin guy halloween happens hbo house joke line love maher matter means meant moment moral nebraska night obligated people political problem real sasse senator short someone something sort swing transgression week white whose work year-old

created at TagCrowd.com

I know what he meant. Lots of people know what he meant. Nonetheless, the thing about some jokes is that they’re open to interpretation, and the interpretation isn’t up to him.

“Him” is Bill Maher, whose HBO talk show is “Real Time With Bill Maher.” The title is a selling point: Who knows what might fly out of anybody’s mouth at any moment? Time here is real, dammit! And on this week’s installment, on Friday night, dammit, “real” happened.

It was the moment that Mr. Maher, not 10 minutes into the show, welcomed Ben Sasse, the Republican senator from Nebraska, a jovial, youthful guy (for a senator, anyway) with a toothy smile and black cowboy boots, whose new book, The Vanishing American Adult (2017), argues that traditional adulthood is dead. The conversation began with some softballs about the book’s premise and how much Mr. Maher agreed with it:

Mr. Maher: “Your book is so right about how we have actually kind of lost the thread of what adults are anymore in this country. Adults: They wear shorts everywhere, they have cereal for dinner, and they treat comic books like they’re literature. What is your prescription for this problem?”

Mr. Sasse: “More cereal for dinner. First of all, let’s not disagree about everything. So this is a constructive project, right? I’m not trying to beat up on millennials. But there’s something weird in human history if you can’t tell 10- and 15- and 20- and 25-year-olds apart, ’cause that’s new. Adolescence is a gift — ”

Mr. Maher: “Halloween used to be a kid thing.”

Mr. Sasse: “It’s not anymore?”

Mr. Maher: “Not out here. No. Adults dress up for Halloween. They don’t do that in Nebraska?”

Mr. Sasse: “It’s frowned upon. Yeah. We don’t do that quite as much.”

Mr. Maher: “I gotta get to Nebraska more.”

Mr. Sasse: “You’re welcome. We’d love to have you work in the fields with us.”

Now, I’m going to halt the transcript before Mr. Maher delivers his controversial riposte, to say that few quick-witted comedians — and certainly none who specialize in hot-button issues — would let a line like “We’d love to have you work in the fields with us” sit there, unharvested. In baseball, that is what they would call a fat pitch, one that leaves a batter almost morally obligated to swing.

The problem is that Mr. Maher swung as if the sport still had a Negro League. “Work in the fields?” he asked in a tone that was both funny and incredulous in a way, what, with certain white people right now, you’d call “woke.” He turned his nose up like someone who had just smelled curdled milk or watched Amy Schumer in “Snatched.” He could have stopped there: a kind of check-swing. His disdain was evident. But apparently he felt that moral obligation to swing: “Senator,” he said, throwing up his hands, “I’m a house nigger.” Immediately, he told the audience that he was joking. (On Saturday, he apologized. HBO called his remarks “inexcusable” and said it would edit that segment out of future broadcasts of the show.)

I’m not a regular “Real Time” watcher, but as someone who encounters Mr. Maher’s comedy almost exclusively in moments like this, I had to ask: Isn’t this something that just happens on every Bill Maher show?

He has compared his dog to developmentally disabled children. He has questioned vaccines and claimed that Islam “has too much in common with ISIS.” After the September 11 attacks, he wondered, on his old late-night ABC program, “Politically Incorrect,” about the nature of bravery, comparing the terrorists’ suicide mission to American missiles, which he saw as a hands-off “cowardly” approach. Advertisers pulled their spots, and the network suspended the broadcast. (It was canceled the next year.)

This is all to say that Mr. Maher has views, but what he said on Friday night isn’t among them. For one thing, it’s not even a view, per se. It was an attempt to mock Mr. Sasse’s unfortunate choice of words. (I think I knew what he meant, too: Nebraska grows too much corn for grown people to fret over who to be for Halloween.) But intention is tricky in comedy. Mr. Sasse said something that was, on its face, unsavory. You don’t need much of an imagination to envision Chris Rock, Larry Wilmore or Wanda Sykes taking a whack at that line. ABC’s sitcom “black-ish” exists, partly, to satirize these sorts of conversational bloopers.

But Bill Maher isn’t Chris Rock. He’s not on “black-ish.” He’s a 61-year-old white man who would never get a pass for jesting about slavery or the N-word. (His track record inspires too much doubt to give any benefit.) That’s a license reserved, arguably, for Louis C.K., or Sarah Silverman in her performance-art prime — white comedians who have really grappled with what it means to flirt with racially inflammatory language and ideas, what it means for the flirtation to fail. Mr. Maher’s approach to television doesn’t necessitate that kind of rehearsed rumination. The appeal of “Real Time” is its on-the-spot discourse, its anti-rehearsal. That looseness can tip easily into blurting, flatulence and worse.

The insult to injury here involves the conflation of Mr. Maher’s transgression and the umbrage he feigned at being asked to work in the fields. As my sister might say: Oh, he fancy now. For a long time, black people have deployed slavery-derived hierarchies as a social and psycho-political sorting mechanism. A house assignment might have won a slave less arduous work but more suspicion and contempt from her counterparts in the fields. No one self-identifies as a house Negro — unless that person is making a joke. And even then that person probably shouldn’t be Bill Maher.

The flap over his language transpired during a weekend of more terrorism in London, and at the end of a week in which a racist spray-painted a slur on a LeBron James home in Los Angeles; and Portland, OR, braced itself for a white supremacist rally. Mr. Maher’s incident seems fit for the basket labeled “Life’s too short.”

He didn’t commit a hate crime. He overstepped his privilege as a famous comedian. That’s all. But if he crossed a line, it’s one that, for white people, has never moved.

But the climate around other sorts of propriety does seem different. Last week also featured perhaps the greatest dent in Kathy Griffin’s comedy career. She lost her New Year’s Eve hosting job for CNN after staging a photo of herself and a decapitated Donald J. Trump effigy. People of all political stripes deplored her. The Secret Service was conducting an investigation of her.

And yet nobody asked me to write about Ms. Griffin — perhaps only because a lot of Americans are clinging to the idea that we need a sense of moral dignity, that it’s all we have. No matter what some people might wish for the president, we can’t wish that. Not on Instagram, not anywhere. We just can’t. We understand the harm of Ms. Griffin’s transgression. But we’re not sure what to do with affronts to race like Mr. Maher’s.

Still, the culture is sometimes prepared for moments like this. Mr. Maher’s joke is the sort of overidentification Bradley Whitford’s liberal kook in “Get Out” would make with his black future son-in-law: playing at being down. (For what it’s worth, “Real Time” has a Black Lives Matter image in its opening montage, which feels a little pre-emptive: Don’t worry, you guys. Bill gets it!)

Should Mr. Maher lose his job? That would be too easy. “Real Time” is the sort of laboratory where just this sort of problem is talked — or shouted — out. It would be fascinating to see him in the next episode, if there is one, surrounded by a cast of characters who have castigated him for Friday’s scandalette. He may not learn a lesson. But there would be a lesson in that, too. We’ve been not learning that one for centuries. # # #

[Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large for the NY Fshwrap. He came to the Times in 2015 from Grantland where he wrote about film, fashion, and music. Morris spent 10 years at The Boston Globe, where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Morris received a BA (film studies and literature) from Yale University.]

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