OPINION
MAUREEN
DOWD
The Truth Hurts — Especially When Bill Maher
Dishes It Out
With old, one-eyed Chico, a rescue dog.Credit...Balazs
Gardi for The New York Times
Maureen
Dowd
By Maureen
Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Los Angeles
May 18,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/opinion/bill-maher-book.html
Back in
2013, I got a call from Bill Maher.
He was
being hit with a lawsuit by Donald Trump and thought it would be “comedy gold”
for my column. The host of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” had joked that
Trump was the love child of a human woman and an orangutan — what else could
explain the tangerine hair? Maher offered to give $5 million to charity if he
could see the birth certificate of Trump, who had offered $5 million to charity
for records to verify the birthplace of President Barack Obama.
Trump
failed to see the parody and thought the joke was mean. The flamboyant mogul
told his lawyer to answer Maher with a letter: “Attached, hereto, is a copy of
Mr. Trump’s birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump,
not an orangutan.” Then Trump sued Maher for $5 million, before dropping the
suit eight weeks later. (The Trump representative who threatened to refile the
suit was none other than Michael Cohen.)
“He’s not
even a real person,” an exasperated Maher told Conan O’Brien about Trump at the
time. “He’s just like a pop reference from the ’80s.” It was like beefing with
J.R. Ewing from “Dallas,” he said.
I told
Maher that it wasn’t worth writing about Trump and his silly lawsuits and
risible presidential aspirations.
“Forget
it,” I said. “Trump doesn’t matter.”
Oh, well.
Nobody gets it right all the time.
At 68, the
comedian is still a thicket of thorns in Trump’s side. He led the pack in 2015,
taking the threat of Trump seriously. He led again in 2020, warning that Trump
would not accept the results if he lost. And he predicts the same this time if
Trump loses again — two grooms showing up at the altar on Jan. 20 (which
happens to be Maher’s birthday).
“It’ll be
disputed and it’ll be ugly,” he said over a recent dinner at Craig’s, a
Hollywood show business canteen.
Maher has
fun comparing the heavily made-up Trump to a drag queen. After Trump’s team
asked for a mistrial in the New York hush-money case, Maher japed that the
former president’s drag name was “Miss Trial.”
But the
comedian is about more than one-liners these days. He has become our own
prickly, patriotic Will Rogers, drawing acclaim — and fire — for his yeasty
interviews and his lacerating editorials at the end of “Real Time,” taking on
the right, the left, the media, romance, college campus protests, cancel
culture, victim culture and technology gone awry.
His new
book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You,” is the “crème de la crème,” as
he says, of a decade’s worth of his editorials intended to “break through the
bubbles.”
“If he sees
hypocrisy, disingenuousness, cruelty or intellectual dishonesty, he calls it
out,” said Richard Plepler, who worked with Maher as head of HBO and now heads
Eden Productions at Apple TV. “We’re living in an environment where nobody
seems willing to listen to anything but their own tribe, and Bill has this
really preternatural ability to open up people’s ears so they maybe, God
willing, learn something.”
Maher
evokes the twin archetypes of the wisecracking kid who sat behind you in school
and the grumpy uncle who sits next to you at Thanksgiving. He’s a rebel with a
cause: He actually cares about the things he complains about, so there’s heart
behind the cynicism.
Jerry
Seinfeld called the consistently high level of Maher’s editorials “shocking.”
“Your brain is worthy of all the attention it gets,” he teased Maher on “Club
Random,” Maher’s podcast.
His range
may be explained by something Maher, a Cornell history major, writes in his
book: “I watch the History Channel like most guys watch Pornhub.”
He is not
universally beloved. Some people find him smug; some think he has been
red-pilled. His show has been nominated for an Emmy 21 times without a win.
“I am the
love that dare not speak its name,” he said, laughing. “It’s almost ridiculous;
I should have won 20!” Growing serious, he said that it no longer stings as
much: “What I really have learned now is that, it is good being old when you’re
smart in a way you weren’t when you were young. The dumbest thing you can do in
life, I think, is to have almost everything and then obsess on what you don’t
have.”
But even
without a fistful of gold statuettes, he is undergoing what Katie Couric, a
guest on “Club Random,” called a “Bill-aissance.”
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He seems to
make more news than all of the other night-owl comedians combined, no doubt
because he breaks free of comedy’s congealed partisan worldview. Unlike most
other political commentators, he does not pander to the left or the right.
“Let’s be
honest,” he said. “The only thing that the two parties really have in common is
that they’re both hoping their candidates die.”
Sometimes
Fox (which he says he rarely watches) loves him and MSNBC is mad at him, and
sometimes it’s the reverse. In a world awash in disinformation, Maher gives
blunt, practical opinions, not filtered through ideology or likability, on
everything from “Barbie” to Bibi to babies — and why he never had them.
“Why can’t
everybody live in my world, in the middle, where we’re not nuts?” he wondered,
ordering a shot of tequila to go with his margherita pizza. The dedicated
health freak, opponent of treating obesity as body positivity, and Ozempic
skeptic has a small bottle with a dropper, dripping into his sparkling water a
product called Jing, a bubbly water enhancer with no aspartame, gluten or
carbs.
Maher is
constantly asked why he makes fun of the left more than he used to.
“Yes, I do,
because they’re goofier and more obnoxious than they used to be,” he told his
guests, Frank Bruni and Douglas Murray, on his show recently. “They also just
became weirder.”
“I’m a
comedian,” he told me. “I’m going to go where the ridiculous is.”
About the
fans he has lost for not toeing the blue line, he writes in his book, “I do not
miss them.”
He thinks
that the right is more dangerous and he espouses “the Blue Liquid Doctrine”:
“If it’s Trump against Biden, I will vote for Biden’s head in a jar of blue
liquid.” But that’s not good enough for his liberal friends in Hollywood, who
pester him to shut up about President Biden’s age and gait. (Maher kids that
Biden should lean into it and say, “I walk like a toddler with a full diaper,
but I believe in democracy.”)
He believes
it’s not the job of the liberal commentariat to shore up, and cover up, the
weaknesses of the Democratic candidate.
He credits
Biden with a fierce, Dracula-worthy will to hang onto the Oval: “He has crossed
oceans of time to be where he is, and he’s not going to give it up now.”
The
Trump-dictator-we’re-doomed narrative bores him. “When people come up to me and
say, ‘What are we going to do?’ I’m like, ‘It doesn’t look to me like the world
is just falling apart. Maybe it will tomorrow,’” he told me. “Look, I lost my
nervous system under Trump once. I’m not doing it again. When he blows up the
world, wake me. I can’t put my nervous system on the line every day for every
stupid tweet and every bonehead thing he does.”
While he’s
a jade, he admits to “a soft spot for this crazy, mixed-up country of ours.”
He thinks
we should stop acting as if we’re heading to a civil war and start talking to
each other. He loves his stand-up gigs in red states.
“We have to
see each other not as mortal enemies,” he writes, “but merely as roommates from
hell.” (He has been in that “bad-roommate situation,” putting white tape
through the middle of the apartment.)
At dinner,
we talked about the eruption of antisemitism.
“It’s hard
to get your head around the thought of people yelling ‘Death to America’ on
American soil,” he said.
He is
disgusted with progressive students who, as he writes, cheer on Hamas to
preside over a country with few constraints against sexual harassment, spousal
rape, domestic violence, homophobia and child marriage.
He calls
elite universities “the mouth of the river” from which nonsense flows,
producing “American-hating hysterics devoid of knowledge. If they had any
knowledge about the Middle East or what apartheid really means or genocide,
would they be on the side of Hamas, really?”
In ancient
courts, the jester could speak the truth to the king with impunity, like
Shakespeare’s fools. But, given safe spaces and trigger warnings, being a
jester isn’t what it used to be.
“He
survived his first cancellation,” said Tina Brown, the media duchess, “and now
has become a warrior for the rest of us, absolutely refusing to be careful.”
I got to
know Maher after his first cancellation, in 2002 — the literal one of his ABC
show, “Politically Incorrect.”
Proving
that a 90 percent approval rating is a dangerous tonic, the Bush-Cheney White
House decided after Sept. 11 that it would brook no criticism. Ari Fleischer,
the White House press secretary, haughtily dressed down Maher when he agreed
with a guest that, while they were fiends, the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards.
Maher, and
all Americans, Fleischer said, needed “to watch what they say.” ABC dropped
Maher’s show.
I wrote a
column pointing out that, especially when our country is a target, “we should
not suppress the very thing that makes our foul enemies crazed with twisted
envy — our heady and headache-inducing clash of ideas. We should dread a
climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent.”
My idol is
Jonathan Swift, so I think that satirists — the other “Swifties” — should be
given a long leash. Sometimes they’ll miss the mark, sometimes they’ll be
offensive. But we need our jesters to hold up a mirror to our society, now more
than ever.
Maher was
moved when his producers recently gave him a box that looked like an engagement
ring box, with a ring on a chain symbolizing his attachment to his fans.
“This is
the relationship of my life,” Maher told me about his loyal audience. “Not that
I really wanted kids to begin with, but I would have ignored them anyway if
they were tugging on my pants because I had to rewrite this editorial.
“I think
that’s a chip in your head that you’re born with: You either like babies or you
like fur,” said Maher, a PETA board member. “I just love fur. I can watch
humans suffering in a movie, but I cannot watch animals suffering in a movie. I
can’t even watch ‘King Kong’ or ‘Godzilla’ or ‘Planet of the Apes’ or
‘Seabiscuit.’”
He was
brought up in New Jersey by a nurse and a radio broadcaster (and later editor).
“I still have some tapes of him doing the top-of-the-hour news,” he said of his
dad. “I have one the day Mickey Mantle retired.”
Maher
recalled that he went to school “scared all the time” of the bullies.
“I wasn’t
the most picked on,” he said. “I might have been the second most, which puts
you in a very precarious position. It’s like the mother dog has a litter of
nine and she has eight nipples; the eighth guy’s going to be very insecure. I
was the eighth nipple.
“It just
put a knot in your stomach all the time. Kids are feral. You have to teach them
to be decent.”
He didn’t
have much of a social life at Cornell, either. “At the time I was there, I
would say it was probably four or five to one, men to women,” he said. “You
take a guy who has no game and put him in those odds. Of course you’re going to
be lonely the whole time. I was really slow to learn how to just even talk to a
girl.”
He was
raised Roman Catholic before he was shocked by some news. “I was 13 when it
came up at Christmas that my mother’s family side was Jewish,” he said.
“It never
even entered my mind to ask why my mother never went to church with us,” he
said. “It’s very strange when I look back on it, but back then, it was, ‘Don’t
talk about politics or religion.’ Now it’s all we talk about. We’re always at
each other’s throats because these are things you’re never going to really
agree on.”
He is
thinking of giving up stand-up after his next HBO special. “It’s like playing
the cello,” he told me. “You got to always be working at it.”
On “Club
Random,” where he gets stoned and sips tequila and invites guests to partake of
pot or their drinks of choice as well (Seinfeld had coffee; Couric had a
paloma), Maher can get downright sentimental, and confessional. He spoke to
Martin Short about waking up in the middle of the night with morbid thoughts,
by which he meant death. He fretted to Seinfeld that “men have been ruined by
the phone and pornography. It’s rapey. It’s domineering. And this is what young
men see.” The old days of Playboy, he said plaintively, have been replaced by
“horrible things, choking and spanking.”
He has a
stake, with John McEnroe, in Woody Harrelson’s Hollywood pot dispensary, the
Woods, and recently hung out there with Paul McCartney. “I got to say, he was
great,” Maher said.
He sleeps
until he wakes up naturally, at about 11 a.m. or noon; then he fasts most of
the day because, he said, eating slows you down. “Three meals is just something
somebody made up,” he said. “God didn’t put it on a tablet.” He takes his two
rescue dogs, Chico, who has one eye and is about 15 years old, and Chula, 10,
and shoots baskets and gets high and writes; about 3 p.m., he has a shake with
protein powder, yogurt, pumpkin seed butter and chlorophyll, with avocado and
tomato “because I was told Hispanic men have very low rates of prostate cancer”
— and a light meal at night.
As we left
Craig’s, with Maher heading to his gray, all-electric Mercedes, I asked him if
he ever felt as though he were beating his head against the wall. He does. But,
he said dryly, he’s willing to tie himself to the mast and “keep sailing
onward.”
“I don’t
want to hate half the country,” he said. “I don’t hate half the country. And I
don’t want America to get a divorce.”
Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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