One of this blogger's favorite stand-up comedians is Bill Maher, the host of "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO. Maher has had a tumultuous career for pushing the limits of freedom of speech with a 9/11 observation that resulted in his termination of his TV show, "Politically Incorrect," by ABC. Maher continues to push the free-speech envelope on "Real Time." If this is a (fair & balanced) examination of iconoclasm on live TV, so be it.
[x Esquire]
Bill Maher Knows Exactly What He's Doing
By Stephen Rodrick
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
A few weeks before Bill Maher nearly blew up his career for the second time, a middle-aged man named Billy Martin warmed up the audience that had come to watch a filming of "Real Time with Bill Maher." Martin, Maher's head writer, stood on the LA soundstage where "Real Time" is broadcast [sic, cablecast] live on Friday nights, the same one used by "The Price Is Right." He asked if there were any conservatives in the audience, which skewed white and rowdy. A guy in a Tommy Bahama–style shirt raised his hand.
"How was the drive up from Orange County?" Martin asked.
The crowd laughed, unaware that Martin would use the same joke the next week. He finished his routine by urging a standing ovation for Maher, who blew a kiss to the audience as he moved toward his mark on the stage.
Maher, who is sixty-one, has been hosting "Real Time" on HBO for fourteen years, ever since a blunt comment cost him his old series, ABC's "Politically Incorrect." That was the first time he nearly scuttled his television career. "Real Time's" format is a throwback to a seventies talk show—with a monologue, an interview, a panel discussion, some jokes, and a closing argument—but here everything is done without the benefit of breath-catching commercial breaks. This setup sometimes leads to what can feel, in the moment, like a random car wreck, but Maher's been doing comedy for forty years. He's addicted to provocation, and more often than not, he's driving his show into a brick wall by design.
"It's really old-school in that sense," says Larry Wilmore, who hosted his own series, on Comedy Central, until last year. "There's no retakes. The preparation that goes into making it look effortless like he does is extraordinary."
Onstage, Maher wore a black suit, white shirt, and blue tie. He congratulated the audience on making it through Donald Trump's first hundred days. "It's like Lent if we all gave up reality," he said. After noting that some people were disappointed with the president's lack of accomplishments, he paused before his punchline. "Vladimir Putin. All that work for nothing."
This was Maher lite. Trump's startling victory last fall has been a boon for comics across the country, but Maher, who routinely calls the president a "whiny little bitch," got there early. In 2013, he mocked Trump's birtherism by offering $5 million if Trump could prove that he wasn't the love child of an orange-haired orangutan. The future president, determined to prove himself a thin-skinned primate by other means, sued over the joke, allowing Maher to carry on, in his words, "a three-month national debate over whether his mother fucked an ape." The week after his Putin joke, Maher would pantomime Ivanka Trump jerking off her father to keep him calm.
Yet while Maher has never hidden the joy he takes in busting on Trump—or, for that matter, his broadly Democratic leanings—he has distinguished himself from John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers by sucker-punching the Left as gleefully as he does the Right. Before introducing his panel, he talked one-on-one with Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, about why Americans chronically vote against their interests. Maher didn't miss a chance to needle her with one of Trump's own epithets. Attempting to explain the Democrats' dismal fortunes with working-class voters, he told her, "They don't like you, Pocahontas." Warren didn't respond to the insult, choosing instead to stare a hole through her host's high forehead.
A few weeks later, Maher would answer a joke by Nebraska senator Ben Sasse with a similarly tone-deaf response. When Sasse extended an invitation to come work in Nebraska's fields, Maher playacted surprise and said, "I'm a house nigger." Whereas the Pocahontas remark prompted another round of an ancient Internet dispute—whether Maher is a misogynist, a dick, or a fearless political savant—the comment to Sasse sparked universal outrage. HBO called it "completely inexcusable and tasteless," and many clamored for Maher to be fired.
But that was in the future. The night Maher spoke to Warren, Rob Reiner, a panelist, waited outside Maher's dressing room after the show to say goodbye. "He doesn't suffer any kind of bullshit," Reiner told me. He expressed the Platonic ideal of Bill Maher: "If there's a sliver of bullshit, he does not accept it. And that I love."
Maher emerged in a flowered shirt and jeans. He hugged Reiner and then sped away in a golf cart with a twenty-something woman hanging on precariously next to him.
Two Saturdays a month, Maher wakes up the morning after his show and jumps on a plane to do stand-up across the country. The day after he sparred with Warren, I joined him on a flight to Chicago, where he had a show scheduled that night. I brought up the Pocahontas remark before he disappeared under his sleep mask.
"Is that when it looked like she was tearing up?" Maher smirked. "Just like everybody in life, not everything everybody says is always the most wonderful thing they ever heard that day," he said, without quite suggesting remorse. "And then what happens? You move on." (Maher did, however, apologize for using the n-word with Sasse, calling it "offensive.")
Three hours later, our plane bucked over Illinois in near-zero visibility, jostling the unpasteurized goat-milk yogurt he had brought for the flight. We looked at each other with a nervous curiosity that soon turned to actual alarm. Maher put down a binder of jokes and turned to Mark Monto, his gray-haired security guy, who is also a former pilot.
"We're going to be okay, right?"
The plane emerged from the storm a few minutes before we landed at Midway Airport with a thump. At the regal Chicago Theatre, Maher stepped onstage in front of more than three thousand fans. He waited for the shouts of "Trump is a whiny little bitch" to subside—the line has become something of a catchphrase—and then went into his routine. Heavy on international politics, it included one of his favorite chestnuts: "Islam believes in peace. A piece of you here and a piece of you over there." The crowd was subdued for much of the set, perhaps because the rainstorm had soaked their enthusiasm along with their clothes, but they gave Maher a standing ovation at the end.
Backstage, he ate his usual postshow meal of baked potato and whitefish, a break from his weekday diet of seeds ground with fruit. Maher is a longtime friend of Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter, and in his dressing room he greeted her ex-husband, Billy Marovitz, a seventyish man with the hair of someone half his age. Maher and Marovitz chatted about the decline of the Bunny brand. "I told Hugh a long time ago that the Playboy channel should be airing shows like 'Mad Men,' " Maher said, in a flat monotone that works surprisingly well as a comic instrument. "I mean, how many wives are going to let their husbands watch a channel where the guy is getting a blowjob?"
Then it was back to the airport for a flight to Texas. Airplane problems had caused Maher to miss a show in Dallas three months earlier, so he was donating his fee to charity and throwing his fans a barbecue as a mea culpa.
Twenty-five thousand feet over Oklahoma, I was reading The New York Times on my laptop when I spotted an op-ed making the case for Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate for French president. (A week later, Le Pen would lose the election, with just 34 percent of the vote.) Maher was settled into his plane seat with his favorite comic read, the National Enquirer.
I saw him tousle his silver mane and asked him, with a snicker, whether he'd seen the op-ed.
"Are you saying they shouldn't have published it?" Maher asked.
"No," I said. "It's just dumb. I'm not a fan of supporting a crypto-fascist."
Maher pressed me as though I were one of his panelists. "Do you really know anything about her? You know she kicked her dad out of the party."
"Yeah, but I just find some of her positions kind of horrible," I told him.
"I'm not sure you know what you're talking about," Maher insisted. "If you think democracy as we know it will survive if France becomes 51 percent Muslim, you're fooling yourself along with a bunch of other liberals."
I began to mount a counterargument—that many of Le Pen's remarks on immigrants were proto-Trumpian, that France was, at present, just 7.5 percent Muslim—but Maher had turned back to the National Enquirer. An hour later, we arrived at the Four Seasons in Dallas.
With the Trump ascension, Maher's ratings have never been higher. HBO has already renewed "Real Time" through 2018. Over four decades, he has honed a comic style that might be called contrarian chic: He views himself as the ultimate truth teller and takes special pleasure in playing the liberal apostate. Chelsea Handler, the comedian and television host, told me that "Real Time" is the only show she aspires to emulate, because Maher is "relentless, and he knows what he's talking about."
Maher's signature is presenting an eclectic range of views, even if it means giving airtime to folks you wouldn't say hello to at Chipotle. In the nineties, Politically Incorrect incubated a group he calls "the blondes," which included Ann Coulter and Kellyanne Conway. More recently, his guests have included Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks; Louise Mensch, the anti-Trump conspiracy-monger; Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and atheist know-it-all; and Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British extremist who was banned from Twitter for insulting "Saturday Night Live's" Leslie Jones.
When Yiannopoulos appeared on "Real Time," in February, he was still a contributor to Breitbart News and a star of the alt-right. "Having Milo on was a no-brainer," Maher told me. "Once I watched clips of him, I realized that a lot of what the Left is upset about are jokes." On a segment posted on Real Time's YouTube channel, Maher shrugged when Yiannopoulos argued, without evidence, that transgender people are responsible for a disproportionate number of sex crimes. It was left to Larry Wilmore to suggest that similar stereotypes were once used to stigmatize gay men and women. When Yiannopoulos said that his fellow panelists had low IQs, it was Wilmore who told him, "Go fuck yourself." Working to restore order, Maher said Yiannopoulos reminded him of "a young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens."
"Bill and I agree on the two major issues of the day: free speech and Islam," Yiannopoulos told me later. "He is one of the few people, left or right, not afraid to express themselves on difficult subjects." (When I asked him about his slur on transgender people, he said, "I don't give a shit.") Maher, he said, "should be glad he had me on, and America should be grateful. Bill did a big service to speech in the public square."
I asked Wilmore if he regretted appearing with Yiannopoulos.
"I'm a grown-ass man. I can handle myself," he said with a laugh. "To me, it's like the barbershop. The barbershop mentality is: People are going to talk shit. You've just got to bring it."
Maher likes to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and he told me that having Yiannopoulos on his show "could not have played out any better, because within forty-eight hours he had lost all his jobs." This was literally true: A few days after joining the "Real Time" panel, Yiannopoulos lost his position at Breitbart and was disowned by much of the alt-right.
As Yiannopoulos told me, however, his disgrace "had nothing to do with Bill whatsoever." Instead, it followed the revelation that he had once endorsed sexual relationships between adult men and teenage boys, a scandal he blamed on Old World globalist conservatives out to sabotage his career. Appearing on "Real Time," Yiannopoulos said, was "a significant victory," and in retrospect it looks a lot like his high-water mark.
Now Maher says that he'd like to help rescue Yiannopoulos from his tumble out of the spotlight. "I actually want to have him back," Maher told me. "I don't think he would be that hard to bring around to a much more reasonable position." (Yiannopoulos says another appearance is in the works.)
Maher's defense for inviting unseemly, ratings-pumping guests on his show is that America is doomed if it lets free speech die. He has no patience for what some call "no-platforming," which maintains that a commitment to free speech doesn't mean you have to give bigots the opportunity of appearing, say, on a show watched by four million people.
Maher also admitted to me that he feels "a little pride anytime someone whose career we started—Arianna Huffington, Kellyanne, Ann Coulter—makes good." But when I asked him whether he regrets launching the careers of the people who launched Trump into the presidency, he rolled his eyes. "They didn't create Trump! Ann Coulter didn't create Trump. She was the first one to predict him accurately, and is a Trump backer and a backer of everyone who is wrong. And she's wrong on every issue. And her books are horrible venom. But that's the system we live in. Should we stop people from talking who we don't agree with?"
Maher's bond with Coulter has both dismayed and impressed his admirers. (Coulter did not respond to an interview request.) During his performance in Chicago, he was heckled for having her on "Real Time." Handler, meanwhile, told me that while she thinks Coulter is "a fucking terrible person," she also "liked the fact" that Maher is friends with her.
Maher was raised Catholic, and he didn't find out his mother was Jewish until he was a teenager, around the same time his dad ceased taking him and his sister to mass. He attended Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. Like many comedians before him, he was bullied when he was young. But unlike Chris Rock, who dodged bags of urine at school in Brooklyn, Maher mostly feared being ostracized. "They would just pick a kid, and sometimes I was that kid, and give them the cold shoulder," he told me. "No one would talk to you. I used to go to school with a knot in my stomach, just hoping I'm not that person today. 'You can be mean to me, but just talk to me.' " He offered a wan smile. "I'm like a dog: Beat me, just don't leave me."
At Cornell, where he studied English and history, Maher was even lonelier than he was in high school until he realized that one remedy was to be the guy with something to sell. He became a pot dealer and learned to split a pound of weed into seventeen ounce bags, so that he could smoke for free. Smoking gave him a community, and he found another when he started doing stand-up in New York in the late 1970s.
Maher's early comedy was neither political nor sophisticated. For one of his first bits, he told me, "I just memorized in the thesaurus twenty, thirty names for 'penis': prick, dick, cock, schlong, schmuck, peter, pecker, dipstick, dingus, tool, pud, putz, dangler, kielbasa." He smiled proudly. "Look at that, I still remember some of that list!"
Maher's hero was always Johnny Carson. "He was not just funny but cool and sexy, kind of like the James Bond of comedians," he told me. Maher got his break on "The Tonight Show" in 1982, with a bit about being half-Catholic and half-Jewish. Around the same time, influenced by George Carlin records, he began inching toward social commentary.
"Politically Incorrect" debuted in 1993 on Comedy Central. The show's guests included Carrot Top and Jerry Seinfeld and was more glib and showbizzy than "Real Time": It had a cocktail vibe that recalled "Playboy After Dark," Hugh Hefner's short-lived late-sixties talk show.
ABC picked up "Politically Incorrect" in 1997. It aired for five seasons until, in the wake of 9/11, Maher said that the nineteen terrorists who perpetrated the suicide attacks might be many things, but they were not cowards. It was a defensible, even courageous point, one that was also made by Susan Sontag in the pages of The New Yorker. But it led ABC to cancel his show after sponsors fled, and Howard Stern and other comics to turn against him. "I've never forgiven him," Maher said of Stern. "He has that nest of vipers."
Maher has maintained an office in a bungalow on the CBS Television City lot in Los Angeles for almost two decades. He keeps the office sparsely furnished in case he has to vacate it quickly, a residual psychological scar from the cancellation of "Politically Incorrect." The most notable piece of art is a framed photograph of Johnny Cash giving the camera the finger, which hangs next to a photo of Maher doing the same.
It was in this office, Maher said, that he fretted away the final days before the election last fall. He worked himself into such a state that he drank tequila before his election-preview episode. "I'm shitting in my pants," he announced on air before talking about the possibility of a coup by Russia or the right wing. It wasn't clear if he was joking.
"I was in a dark place," he told me. He said Hillary Clinton's poll numbers hadn't reassured him, because he'd witnessed the hopelessness firsthand on his stand-up tour. "When you travel the country, you see it," he said, laughing. "And a lot of it looks like shit. Trump was giving his speeches at the convention and so forth about the bleak America, and everybody was making fun of him. I'm sure I did jokes about it, too, but I also knew: He's right. It does look hollowed out in a lot of places, and that is an opportunity for someone, especially with his message."
Maher's spidey sense started to tingle during the primaries. Trump, he says, is "a con man, so he hasn't followed through on things, but that message that he gave in his final commercial was powerful. 'Wall Street is fucking you and China fucked you over and I'm going to stand up to that.' Compared to Hillary's Pepsi commercial, I could see why it moved people."
Maher often talks about the liberal bubble—a real problem, he says, even if it's not as impenetrable as the conservative version. After the election, he accused the Democratic party of no longer protecting people; now, he said, it was about protecting feelings. He showed a series of celebrity tweets apologizing for insensitive Halloween costumes and for appropriating black slang.
Actors are frequent guests on Maher's show, but that doesn't mean they should expect him to be kind. He appears to have a pathological need to bite the hand that feeds him, and one of the great pleasures of "Real Time" is watching him jab at the same Hollywood elite that has given him a show for a quarter century. "The people you're talking about in show business," he told me, "even the ones who seem to be informed, a lot of times they're actors playing an informed person."
In contrast to his office, Maher's house, in Beverly Hills, is blanketed with art. Much of it he picked up at a steep discount, including several pieces he nabbed for $300 when Budd Friedman, the impresario of the Improv, was selling off some possessions. In Maher's living room, there's a giant carving of outtakes from the Kama Sutra—later, I spotted a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex in his library—as well as a surreal mural behind a little-used bar. On the wall above us was a giant clock that he was told once presided over a British train station. "That's another case of Mr. Cheap going through somebody's house who had fallen down on his luck," he told me with a chuckle. "Like a vulture, I swooped in."
A few years ago, Maher could be seen at LA clubs with his friend Christopher Reid, one half of the 1990s rap duo Kid 'n Play. Those days, he says, are over. "I don't go out anymore," he told me with a sigh. "I will be the first to admit, I was probably in nightclubs a little too late." After a pause, his voice rose. "I don't give a shit!"
Maher spoke dreamily about hosting dinner parties, but I noticed that there were only three chairs at his dining-room table. He's never been married, and his predilection for dating young women is well known. His last serious girlfriend was a Guyanese-Canadian musician a quarter century his junior. But while Maher readily admits that he's spent much of his adult life making up for his crummy adolescence, he thinks he's taken way too much shit for the age of his companions over the years. He's convinced most of the grumbling comes from people in bad marriages who are jealous of his libertine ways. "It looks to the outside world, I guess, like sexism," he said.
Maher was familiar with that charge long before he called Warren "Pocahontas." In 2011, he was roundly criticized for calling Sarah Palin a "twat," though he insisted to me that he didn't realize how offensive it was. He says the accusations of sexism are belied by his efforts on behalf of women such as Conway and Coulter. (This didn't stop Coulter from calling him a misogynist a few years ago, citing—hyperbolically, no doubt—"every single thing you say about women.") "I don't take offense to anything he says to women," Handler told me. "He's a comedian. Don't forget that. He's not a journalist."
In any case, Maher feels no shame for dating outside his demo. "You know the definition of sleazy, don't you? That's anyone who's having more sex than you are."
He mentioned a quotation from Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist, that he once read on his show.
"I think he's gay, right? He's out," Maher said.
I thought so, I told him, but said I'd have to check.
Maher laughed. "His name is Blow, come on."
Eventually Maher gave me the cue card with the quotation from Blow, in which the columnist talked about being bisexual. The passage read, in part, "No one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person's attractions, love, or intimacy. . . . Attraction is attraction, and it doesn't always wear a label."
"That applies to everybody but me," Maher said with a hint of complaint. "Everybody but a man my age who wants to go out with younger women. That's the last politically incorrect thing you can do in America, and it is not forgiven." He paused. "It would be okay if I came out as gay on my sixtieth birthday," he said, before offering himself a round of mock applause. "Well, fuck you, I'm going to do what my body wants—like everybody else in America."
Now that the late nights and, to some extent, the ladies have melted away, Maher insists he has no regrets on the domestic front. He told me more than once that his show was his family. Comedy has always been Maher's ticket to relevance, fame, and a small fortune, and comedy is what remains.
"Some people love waking up next to another human being," Maher said, petting one of his two dogs, who are both rescues. "I do not. I just want to be alone. When you're in a relationship, my problems become your problems, and your problems become my problems. And that has always, eventually, weighed me down."
Besides politics and women, health is Maher's other obsession. Our conversation migrated to seeds as he took me to his kitchen and showed me how he makes lunch. Meanwhile, Chico, his one-eyed dog, nipped at my shoes. (Chico is Maher in canine form, alternately charming and, as his owner warned, ready to bite.) Maher, who is impressively trim for his age, placed a series of containers on the counter. "There's sesame seeds, flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, millet, barley, rye," he said. "They're very good for you." He mashed the seeds with water in a machine that looked like a coffee grinder. After the mixture sits for a few hours, he adds black-cherry concentrate and—voilà!—there's Bill Maher's lunch.
"That's one meal a day," he said. "Then I have a shake with a raw egg and flaxseed oil, brown syrup, more seeds, and almond seeds."
In addition to the seed regimen, Maher has recently taken a drug called DMSA to rid his body of what he says were his unacceptably high mercury levels. He opened his refrigerator and showed me a container of goat yogurt "that is literally illegal because it's not pasteurized or homogenized, which they say we have to because it kills the bacteria." As if lecturing a slow child, he spoke methodically: "And we say, 'But that's what we want. The bacteria. Because not all bacteria is bad.' "
Western medicine is another of Maher's bugaboos. He can filibuster for hours about what medical science doesn't know and calls flu vaccines a "scam." (The only pharmaceutical medication he says he uses is for his thinning hair.) Not even Jonas Salk gets off the hook. "I'm glad I got the polio vaccine, and I think it did put the final kibosh on it," he told me. "But polio was going down, dramatically, even before the vaccine." (Not exactly. In each of the twelve years before 1955, when Salk's vaccine became widely available, there were at least 10,000 cases of polio in the United States. Since 1964, there has not been a year with more than 115 cases.)
Maher peered deeper into the refrigerator and pulled out something that landed like a rock on the counter. It was a loaf of veldt bread, popular among European settlers in nineteenth-century Africa. "I try to stay away from bread that has wheat or yeast in it. This is veldt, but it has wheat. This is what I have when I feel bad. It's my comfort food."
I spied potato chips in a cupboard and wondered if the food thing was a grand put-on, but Maher admitted they're for when he's feeling snacky after getting stoned. "I do get the munchies," he said. "Pot just does that to you."
Weed is Maher's steadiest companion, more reliable even than comedy. He was advocating its use long before it became acceptable in polite society, and he credits it for much of his creativity. He told me that he writes two variations on his opening and closing monologues, one sober and one stoned. The pot, he says, helps him "see and cut little things I couldn't see two hours ago."
After some prodding, Maher let me into his home office, which is adjacent to a bedroom with a king-sized bed, a giant television, and a little bed for his dogs. There was some pot in a medicinal container on the desk, but that wasn't what he wanted to show me. He skipped over a picture of him and Seth MacFarlane serenading Jay Leno and picked up a giant frame that holds World War II medals earned by his father and his mother, neither of whom is still alive. "He was with Patton, and she was a nurse, and they first fell in love in Europe," he said.
In his office, Maher also showed me a vintage microphone his father used at NBC, where he worked as a broadcaster after the war. The largest display was a photo collage that Maher made for his parents' twenty-fifth anniversary. Sections of the collage were labeled LOVER, SPORTSMAN, FATHER, with pithy commentary by a twenty-year-old Maher underneath. I asked if his parents found it funny.
"Well, of course they're going to like it. I'm their kid," he said. "But I was really honing. I was itching to be a comedian." He walked me down the stairs and out into the night, to where my car was parked outside his compound.
"I was lucky with parents. So many are not," he said. "I had the last of the "Leave It to Beaver" childhoods."
I reminded him that he'd told me how miserable he'd been in high school and college before discovering pot.
Maher's face compressed as if he were processing some new data point that didn't square with his worldview.
"You know, that is true."
Maher hasn't been back to church since he was fourteen, and his jihad against organized religion predates his obsession with Islam. (His relish for drop-kicking Catholicism caused Kellyanne Conway to avoid "Real Time" for a while.) In 2008, Maher and Larry Charles, the comedy legend who directed "Borat," filmed a documentary called "Religulous." In the film, Maher tells believers from American truck stops to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem that they're stupid, and its central drama is whether Maher can make it through all hundred minutes without getting his lights punched out. (After the movie's release, Maher added another gate to his property and began traveling with a bodyguard.)
One of "Real Time's" most notorious exchanges came in 2014, during an argument with Ben Affleck. Maher told Affleck that Islam "is the only religion that acts like the Mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book." Affleck responded by calling Maher's views—as well as those of Sam Harris, a fellow panelist—"gross" and "racist." Their attacks on Muslims, he said, were like calling someone "a shifty Jew." (When Harris made a provocative remark on "Real Time" earlier this year, he mocked Affleck, who has not returned to the show. "If Batman were here," Harris said, "he'd call us a racist.")
On "Real Time" and in his stand-up, Maher insists that his views of Islam do not amount to Islamophobia. And yet he finds it ridiculous that many liberals respond to terrorist attacks by saying that the actions of the few don't represent the entire Muslim population. "I think if you poll the majority of Muslims in the world, they want sharia law," Maher told me. He is particularly disgusted by burqas. He doesn't think they should be banned, but he does not like them. "They talk about Donald Trump not being normal? It's not normal to throw a tarp over a human being like she's a motorboat."
When I was with Maher in Chicago, after his stand-up show, I mentioned to him that his riffs about Islam—how liberals should be fighting the antigay, misogynistic aspects of the religion—left the audience quieter than, say, the Ivanka handjob joke that he was test-driving for "Real Time." I meant to suggest that the subject was complicated, but Maher took it as criticism. His blue eyes glared at me.
"I don't know what you're talking about. You're wrong," he said.
In Dallas the next afternoon, I met him at the Four Seasons. I thought we'd drive to the apology barbecue a little early so that I could see him mix it up with the regular folks who give him a special insight into the nation that elected Donald Trump. It didn't happen.
"What, you think I'm going to put on a chef's hat for two hours?" Maher laughed. Instead, he called Marc Gurvitz, his manager, who had been supervising the cookout. He asked Gurvitz to send photos for his Instagram account. The connection wasn't good, so Maher yelled into his phone, "Thank you, Marc! You can take 11 percent this month!"
The Texas crowd was electric in comparison with the one in Chicago. A couple behind me hissed when Maher described Christianity as a Bronze Age myth, but they were in the minority. Everyone else howled at the Ivanka joke and his guitar-solo bits on Islam.
After the show, Maher looked tired as he plowed through some whitefish. I sat quietly in a chair while he ate. He broke the silence.
"After what you said, I listened, and they laughed just as hard at the Islam stuff as anything else," he said with a smile.
He told me that he'd read the Marine Le Pen op-ed we'd discussed on the plane. Its author, Ross Douthat, he said, had been on "Real Time."
"It's not exactly what I said last night," Maher admitted in a hesitant tone. "I don't know much about her." Maher seemed to be on the verge of correcting the record, but stopped himself. "I'm not saying I'm a fan, but liberals have decided she's Hitler. I don't know if that's true and I feel like I honestly keep an open mind."
He eyed me up and down.
"Party matters. It matters that her father was a Nazi. But it also matters that family going against family is the rarest form of bravery. I remember the Unabomber's brother." He trailed off before making explicit a moral equivalence between Marine Le Pen—who broke with her dad for what appeared to be politically expedient reasons—and Ted Kaczynski's brother, who turned in his terrorist sibling to the FBI.
Instead, Maher zeroed in on the disgust for Le Pen that I'd displayed the night before. "You didn't have an argument," he told me. "You had a reaction."
I wanted to tell Maher that my "reaction" was based in part on the knowledge that Le Pen had recently said the French were not to blame for shipping Jews to death camps during World War II. (That crime belonged to the Vichy regime, an illegitimate government, she said, neglecting to mention that it was staffed at every level by French citizens.) But I was exhausted and the room was soon full of people, including the grateful beneficiaries of Maher's philanthropy.
Maher returned to the subject in the van on the way back to the airport. "I just want you to keep an open mind until you really know. Just don't jump on a team—everything in this country is team," he said. "Look, she may turn out to be fucking Hitler in garters, but it's unfair to ask her to suffer the sins of her father."
I tried to argue that Le Pen's nationalist rhetoric was worrisome, but Maher cut me off.
"Nationalist, it's just a word," he said with disdain. "We get all freaked out because they say 'Death to America' in Iran, but Persian people will tell you that it doesn't really, actually mean what you think it does."
It was at this point that I realized Maher's Doubting Thomas ideology is, in its way, as rigid as any dogma, a reflexive contrarianism that works spectacularly well for him right up until it convinces him that it's okay for a white person to call himself a "house nigger." He can be just as dependent on slogans and talking points as the politicians he skewers on his show. And here, perhaps, was another important difference between him and his peers. Unlike John Oliver, who did seventeen minutes on the French election, Maher clearly had not done his homework about the most important European election of this century so far.
We got on the plane. There was talk of Barbra Streisand's birthday party, which Maher attended, but his thoughts returned to Le Pen.
"Look, I'm not her fan," he said, adjusting a baseball cap. "I'm just keeping an open mind and not swimming with the tide."
A computer readout showed our flight trajectory. We were still two hours from home. # # #
[Stephen Rodrick is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor for Men's Journal. He also writes for Rolling Stone. Rodrick writes mostly about politics, film, and sports, often following his subjects around for months before writing. Rodrick received both a BA and an MA (political science) from Loyola University [IL] as well as an MS (journalism) from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University [IL].]
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