It's Time to Get Real: Bill Maher Should Retire

In my years of writing about television, there have been a few areas that I have not written about even though they are among my regular viewing habits. But now that I, like so many of us, have time on my hands, I figure now is the occasion for me to look at those areas. And one of them happens to be late night TV, which I sporadically but occasionally enjoy.

This is the beginning of a series on late night television: those who I’ve enjoyed, and those I think really are past their prime. I begin this series with one of the latter:

Earlier this year, I came to the conclusion that it’s time for Bill Maher to retire. He’s had a good run – bordering on thirty years – but I think even the most rigorous fan of his would have to admit he has passed his expiration date.

To explain why, I have go back to his early days: when he was one of the biggest voices on a fledgling network called Comedy Central.

At the time, Comedy Central was still little more than every other cable network that starts out; it relied on nostalgia from the seventies and eighties. Most of its highlights were reruns of SCTV, Saturday Night Live and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Occasionally, it would venture into something imaginative – Mystery Science Theater 3000 was one of the great accomplishments in TV history – but it basically relied on reruns, stand-up comics, and clip shows. (One of their major accomplishments Short Attention Span Theater was best known for helping launch an unknown comic named Marc Maron.)

I don’t know if it’s entirely accurate to say that the arrival of Bill Maher’s changed the network’s fate, but as someone who watched Comedy Central almost from its inception as a network, there is definitely an argument to be made for that. When Maher launched Politically Incorrect in the summer of 1993, it was really something that hadn’t been seen before. It was a panel show played for laughs in a world that hadn’t even considered it before. Maher was very good at making a good mix – he would have Patty Hearst and Robert Townsend appear on the same show; have G. Gordon Liddy and Harvey Fierstein discuss the State of the Union, and put Chris Rock a comedian who had mostly been wasted on Saturday Night Live doing his real great material. It was something that hadn’t been seen before, and despite many networks attempts to recreate the format, would rarely gel the same way again.

It may just be the haziness of my memory, but Maher seemed to have a measure of cynicism without being completely depressing. He truly seemed to be enjoying what he had put together, and he rarely made himself the center of the show. And that level of behavior was maintained when the inevitable call up to network television came in the winter of 1997.

Many comedians have changed their basic behavior when they move from cable to network – I’m still not entirely used to how Stephen Colbert has shifted formats.  Maher stayed true to himself. Part of that no doubt had to do with being a little later (ABC was still devoted to having Nightline at 11:30pm, so Politically Incorrect came on after midnight), but most of it was due to Maher’s nature. His personality did change much and his cynicism (particularly at the hypocrisy of the Clinton impeachment, which was the high point of his series) at the political process remained undiminished. But despite that, he always seemed to view things through a steady view. And he might well have managed to maintain that viewpoint had outside events not intervened.

The remarks Maher made and the fallout from them have been told and retold so many times that it is hardly worth repeating them. So I’ll just say this: What happened to Maher in the media and in the country was an absolute kangaroo court and an utter travesty of the 1^st Amendment. When Aaron Sorkin and David E. Kelley write about just how badly the media has pilloried you, you’ve reached a level of unfairness that can not be made right. The show was called Politically Incorrect, for God’s sake! Did our desire of irreverence go out the window after 9/11? Or were we supposed to only joke about the subway in New York?

One can’t imagine that this would’ve had on Maher as a person after that or indeed as a comedian. But having seen a lot of the specials he did on HBO before and after his firing, his general irreverence can be seen as taking a far darker tone. Maybe what happened to him left a bitterness that has never gone away; maybe he was always this dark and being free of a network (particularly one such as HBO whose attitude in groundbreaking comedy pre-dated its original programming by at least a decade). Whatever it was, Maher’s comedy was never the same, and there’s an argument to make that he’s never been anywhere near as entertaining since.

Last week in the New York Times, a reviewer of Woody Allen’s autobiography called him ‘a 20^th Century man in a 21^st Century world.” I can not think of a more fitting epitaph for Bill Maher, albeit in a completely different context. I realize that Maher’s show may have been title Politically Incorrect, but his entire lifestyle has been raging against so many of the people he thinks have been destroying our safety – families. I remember him saying in a 2002 routine: ‘Safety is more important than fun” and ‘Children are more important than people”, something that still makes no sense to me. It’s worth that noting that Maher has never seriously dated or even been involved with any woman, even in his sixties, and I can’t help think that some part of his comedy has always been trying to justify his own lifestyle. Everyone knows how much of an atheist he’s been, even before his documentary Religulous came out in 2008, but the longer he’s been on the air, it’s harder to find if he supports anything – aside, of course, from the legalization of marijuana.

Maher claims to be a libertarian and a Democrat, but I think he only supports Democrats when Republicans were in power. He may have hated George W. Bush from the beginning (that’s understandable given what happened to his career) but it’s worth noting that he advocated for Ralph Nader in 2000, and was lukewarm towards John Kerry throughout the 2004 campaign. (I’m relatively sure at one point he advocated for W’s reelection so ‘he could clean up his mess.’ The fact that he argued the week before that W’s reelection was based on running ‘on a mistake’ apparently didn’t seem to bother him.) And sure, he was in favor of Obama in principle during his Presidency, but throughout the entire Obama administration, he continuously railed against the Democrats in power, at one point actually saying: ‘Democrats are the new Republicans’.

Some people have occasionally referred to Maher as a misogynist. I really think he’s more of a misanthrope as much as a reactionary as so many of the Fox News broadcasters he will constantly rail against. The fact that he’s nothing more than an old white man who doesn’t like the way the country’s going doesn’t help his cause that much. In that sense, I think the humorist he resembles the most is H.L. Mencken, who believed the people in general were reactionary, but had huge problems with the Progressives who dominated much of the political era he wrote in. This was, after all, a man who believed in Harding and Landon, and whose last political campaign was spent advocated for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

All of this I could forgive Maher’s political views if he were at least funny. And that is perhaps the biggest problem I’ve had with Maher ever since he went to HBO and Real Time. He hasn’t been. All that allowing him to be unchained and uncensored has just made him meaner and more unpleasant.  And his railing against all of the problems that plague America hasn’t been the least been entertaining. Some have admired his openness in an age of everybody being in the bubble in continuing invite political figures who disagree with him virulently. Ann Coulter has been a frequent guest, as have Geraldo Rivera and many Republican leaders. And while I admire his willingness to at least hear out the opposition, in a sense his continuing to pillory them and smear them in his nightly monologue and ‘New Rules’, just basically tells you more about his guests than it does about him.

I do give him credit for recognizing Donald Trump’s rise before everyone else, but you know what they say about a broken clock. And if anything, he’s become more unpleasant to anybody who dares contradict him since Trump took office. In that sense, he’s a little like so many of the newsletters who’ve rail against everything Trump does (except ironically, they’re often so woke they don’t appreciate him either).

And what bothers me the most about Maher is how negative he is. Now that’s nothing new in the age where its getting harder to find optimism, but at least Seth Meyers and John Oliver offer some hope occasionally. Maher just keeps saying things are going to get worse, and no institution will ever work any more, and worst of all he’s not even trying to be funny or entertaining while he does it. He sounds so much like a tired, bitter old man that in an age where there are so many of them dominating the air waves, one wonders why we need another one on HBO.

He doesn’t seem to care about his own contradictions. For years, he’s been railing against the superhero films and TV that dominate every aspect of entertainment, at one point, even saying that they helped lead to the rise of Trump. But he never had much use for entertainment when it wasn’t all blockbuster base. He denounced the Oscars more than once as ‘the awards show for movies nobody watches.’ I don’t think he watches much television outside of the political world he lives, or perhaps even the comedians he performs wits, and he doesn’t seem to have much use for the people in the world, outside his own studio or audiences. In a monologue fairly recently, he argued that ‘fatshaming’ should come back to get rid of the obesity epidemic – something that was so harsh, the normally placid James Corden had a monologue on his own Late Night show to call him on it. My guess is, if the Democrats win the 2020 election even by landslide margins, he’ll still be railed against whatever Republicans are left. He needs someone to rage against as much as any pundit does.

I don’t deny Maher was a great talent once. Unfortunately, that period was the Clinton era, and he doesn’t seem to care that it’s never coming back. We’ve got enough good comic performers in late night these days; I think the last thing we need these days is another white man; especially one who doesn’t even try to care for his own audience. Maher needs to hang it up. Sooner rather than later. Maybe give a regular show to Two Dope Queens or Black Lady SKETCH Show. There would be an irony that I could really get behind.