How Their Most Recent Broadcasts Tell You Everything You Need To Know About John Oliver and Bill Maher

 

I know, you’re tired of me writing about Bill Maher. So am I. But watching Friday night’s Real Time, combined with other factors, have just given me too much material.

However, I wanted to make sure I could to a reasonable compare-and-contrast with my favorite late night comic, John Oliver, so I waited until last night’s new episode to make sure he wouldn’t let me down. As is almost always the case, he did not. So I think giving you a summary the most recent episodes of Last Week Tonight and Real Time probably will tell you everything you need to know about the kind of comedians both men are, their political philosophies and I why I infinitely prefer Oliver to Maher.

Last night, Oliver gave exactly thirty seconds to the ‘major stories’ of the week – the attack on Paul Pelosi and the midterms, and only as part of a larger source. His opening sequence dealt in great detail with a recurring theme of his: ‘anarchy in the U.K.,” specifically Liz Truss’ recent resignation, which he went into great detail in as short as time a possible about how disastrous it was, the arrival of Rishi Sunak, who is inherited a bigger mess which he is less qualified to deal with and may not be even able to clear the spectacularly low bar Truss set, and just how messy this is going to get. He then devoted his ‘main story’ to bail reform, which is a critical issue in the year’s midterms. He started out by pointing out that the show had dealt with this story seven years earlier on the same night at this year’s Tonys, which had had a musical tribute to Harvey Weinstein. This was a brilliant gag on its own, but he managed to tie into to the overarching narrative he was telling. He related in great detail the unfairness of the cash bail system and that the majority of people in prison are there because they can’t meet bail rather than being actual criminals, how reform has improved immensely in some states (he went out of his way to praise Chris Christie for doing so in New Jersey, which he holds as a model for the nation) and went just as hard at New York and how the police brass have engaged in open deception with the public as to the harm its not doing and how so many other politicians conflate being charged with crime as being guilty of it. And he showed very clearly what the cost of bail can be, in a story that he didn’t include in the 2015 piece for the most gut-wrenching of reasons. That he managed to do all of this and not only make it entertain but often hysterical is proof of how good he is at every aspect of his job.

Bill Maher, by contrast, was Bill Maher. To his credit, he was willing to admit the foreboding signs of the attack on Paul Pelosi, but then he went on his tangent. His reaction to Elon Musk taking over Twitter was that we should lay off on him, because fundamentally he believe it is billionaires like him who can save the planet from climate change. This is simultaneously deeply cynical of politics and humanity in general and incredibly naïve in the idea that corporations and billionaires are humanity’s last, best hope. But what do you expect from a man who doesn’t think that if it came to a choice between giving up TV or saving the planet, no one would give up the remote? (His words, not mine.)

But the piece de resistance came in his final segment – where he decided the most pressing issue of the day was how millennials don’t appreciate Halloween. Seriously, he spent as much time dealing with this as Oliver spent dealing with the situation in the U.K. You need to hear this because you won’t believe me otherwise. Bill Maher  - or more likely one of the staffers whose job it is to do this – tracked down a list on Buzzfeed written about 21 Halloween Costumes You Shouldn’t Wear.

Now because I wanted to give Maher the benefit of the doubt, I tracked down this list. It took some doing because there were dozens of others lists about Scary, Funny, and appropriate Halloween costumes you should wear, but I found it. And yes, it is ridiculous, saying that dressing as the Queen, as Covid, anything related to the Will Smith Oscar slap, anti-vaxxers or the Handmaid’s Tale is inappropriate. Indeed, it is so ridiculous that I actually read some of the comments. Of the fifty I read, almost all of them were of the same nature: “Is this a joke?, “dressing like Covid is funny,’ and ‘this is why no one likes millennials.”

But Bill Maher, who never let nuance or even the facts get in the way of something he believes him, naturally picked this out. This one list appear on a site millennials frequent, therefore is the point of view of this site, therefore every single millennial on this list believes this. Since Maher’s act is now almost entirely centered on how anyone who is younger, a different gender or race then his is stupid, he leaned into this hard. Naturally, he defended even the worst aspects of the lists, including the racism, sexism (he will always defend Playboy) and pedophilia. (No I’m serious. His costume ideas included Kevin Spacey slapping a mariachi band.) Why Maher should care so much about Halloween is another question – he has always been anti-children, and this is their major holiday – but Maher never notices contradiction. And of course, he decided that he would dress up as a millennial, making every single unpleasant reference including against masks and called them wet blankets. I didn’t laugh once during this routine. But that’s okay. Maher laughs enough at his own jokes for everybody.

In the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, one of the new cast members reacted to Colin Jost calling himself a ‘Bill Maher liberal,’ by responding: “So, you’re a Republican.” That got one of the biggest  laughs of the night because at this point as much Bill Maher claims to loathe every aspect of what Republicans stand for, at the end of the day, he basically agrees with every part of the platform expect being against climate change and democracy. (I’ve never understood why Maher cares so much about climate change. He cares about no other aspect of human life and is almost certainly going to be dead when it finally reaches critical mass. This is going to be a problem for the next generation and he’s made a career of attacking them. I digress.)

And the thing is Bill Maher is a specific type of Republican. His politics at their core are closest to Robert Taft, an Ohio Senator from 1938 to 1953 who was actually known as Mr. Republican. Taft was anti-New Deal and the most famous act of legislation he sponsored seriously curtailed unions ability to negotiate with management. He was an isolationist during the lead up to World War II (he even ran a presidential campaign based on it) and well after the fact, arguing against the U.S. involvement in organizations like the U.N. and NATO and signing on to the Marshall Plan. In private, he loathed the demagogues like Joe McCarthy, but never made a stand against them because he thought it politically beneficial. The most you could say in his favor was that he was not a social conservative, but back then that only meant giving lip service to civil rights and most African-Americans were voting Republican anyway.

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see that this philosophy matches with Maher’s. He has never been favor of government spending during major crisis (he argued against repeatedly during the pandemic) and doesn’t have much to say about labor. Maher fundamentally argues that it is not America’s place to be the world’s policeman (admittedly coming from a stronger place than Taft did at the time) when he talks about international affairs at all. Maher has never been a progressive or civil rights advocate at any time and uses the term ‘woke’ in the same derogatory fashion that so many who argued against the civil rights movement would use the term ‘communism.’ His arguments for people like Musk indicate just how pro-business he truly is. And for all the rants and arguments he has made against right-wing media and Trump in particular, the fact remains he appears on more far-right shows that any other entertainer and has just as many on his show. I’ve heard the interviews. It’s not because he wants to yell at them. And sure, he ranted against Trump as much as any of his fellow late night entertainers, but I remember watching a standup special he did in 2017, in which he said that Trump was like Bernie Sanders in that they were both ‘authentic’ and ‘not typical politicians.’ He is the kind of person who can ridicule Fox News on a Friday and appear on it on a Saturday.

Oliver’s politics, by contrast, most closely resemble that of Hubert Humphrey, a man who began his political career advocating in the strongest possible sense for civil rights (he gave his address at the 1948 Democratic Convention that caused several southern delegations to walk out) and spent  twenty-two of the next thirty years representing Minnesota in the Senate. (There was, of course, an interval as LBJ’s vice president that has permanently dulled the luster of his liberalism.) He spent his entire career advocating for the rights of minorities and for the rights of labor. He was known for memorable, delightful speeches and while he was anti-Communist, he was more than willing to vote to censure Joe McCarthy when his attacks became too prevalent to ignore. He spent much of his later career trying to become president, losing the nomination to JFK in 1960 because he wasn’t glamorous enough, being nominated in 1968 but losing to Nixon because he was viewed as too loyal to his mentor, and trying for the nomination in 1972 but losing to McGovern because by that point he was considered ‘part of the establishment.’

You watch any episode of Jon Oliver, you see a man arguing against the inequities of the system, not just America, but around the world, including his home of England. (He recently did a special on museums that you wouldn’t have thought deserved forty-five minutes, but by the time it was over, you wished it would be a series.) He speaks up for the voiceless, talking for all the problems of the world today, advocating for institutional reform, and frustrated that it is unlikely to happen. And as much as he has been an entertaining, Oliver has achieved reform, almost despite himself. In one of his first shows, he introduced to his viewers the problems facing net neutrality. He galvanized an internet campaign that made the Obama administration do an about face. To show the flaws in television ministries, he created his own church. He exposed the flaws in FIFA before it ended up collapsing. And not only did he make an argument for debt forgiveness, but he also actually put his money where his mouth was and helped forgive some -$15 million worth.

. Bill Maher thinks the world is flawed because no one is listening to what he has to say. There’s a much better argument that more people need to listen to Oliver. He tells us about the flaws in the world we don’t know about but that we need to. Oliver’s act is about self-awareness and self-deprecation. Maher’s is pure self-righteousness.

In his campaign for President in 1968, Bob Kennedy would end his speeches by saying: “Some people see the world for how it is, and ask ‘why?’ I see the world for how it could be and ask, “why not?” (Oliver would know this was a Shaw quote without having be told by the way.) Those two views show how Maher and Oliver see the world. With one major difference. Maher doesn’t ask or even care about why the world is the way it is. He’s actually built his act on it. Oliver is still hoping for the why not, even though he knows better, and that’s what he has built his show around. No matter how grim the outlook, he advocates for change because the status quo isn’t working. Maher believes just as firmly that any change will only make things worse.