In his 11th stand-up special for HBO, Bill Maher will finally have a reason to talk about his personal life. Not necessarily because he’s ready to open up—but because after several years of focusing on politics, he’s pretty sure there’s nothing that would rankle Donald Trump more than not being the center of attention.
“I think everyone in the media faces the same problem with Donald Trump, which is the dilemma of: we don’t want to give him all the oxygen, and it’s very easy to, because he is so dominant, and it’s amazing how much every issue involves Donald Trump in some way,” Maher said during a recent phone call. “On the other hand, we wanna cover him. We’re derelict in our duty if we don’t cover him.”
Bill Maher: Live from Oklahoma—previously titled Bill Maher: Triggered—debuts on HBO July 7. Last week, HBO also announced it was renewing Real Time with Bill Maher, giving Maher at least two more seasons to continue his mission of battling bullshit—though his methods sometimes undercut his efforts. Maher is a self-identified liberal who has built his brand on provocation, and he’s remained committed to this schtick, even as many of his peers have grown more careful about their language and the power dynamics at play in their comedy.
Speaking with Maher, though, it’s also clear that he is deeply, earnestly invested in being a comic voice of reason during what he considers a perilously dark time. As Maher sees it, his show dares to say things that no other series will, and not just because he’s unwaveringly committed to political incorrectness. “Very often,” Maher said, “what we’re saying is completely contradictory to what you’re hearing everywhere else”—i.e. on his ever-proliferating late-night competition.
“I’ve done all these other shows,” said Maher. “I know how they think; I know the atmosphere. And the last thing in the world that they ever want to do, the most important thing is, just do not say anything that will upset the audience. Make them cheer like fucking seals for everything we say. Well, that’s just not interesting to me . . . And it doesn’t have a hell of a lot of integrity, I don’t think, either.”
Maher’s old-school bravado informs much of what he says—though he’d argue he comes by it honestly. “It’s my show; of course I think it’s funnier than anybody else’s show,” he said. “But I do. I think it’s just flat-out funnier. I think my monologue is funnier.”
Maher also thinks Real Time is better at not only making viewers laugh, but telling them what’s important. Other shows, he said, play into liberal fantasies that the Trump administration will be brought down any day now: “‘And Trump’s going to jail—it’s just a matter of time,’ and then the audience applauds. I keep telling them every week: he’s not going to jail. Dream on.” It’s a bold statement, but one that’s not entirely borne out by recent history; though other hosts have periodically seized on promising beats in Robert Mueller’s investigation, they’ve also turned Trump’s Teflon nature into its own running gag. After noting something bad Trump did, Maher’s network-mate John Oliver likes to facetiously announce, “We got him!” before dropping a reality check on his audience; Stephen Colbert enjoys narrating Trump comeuppances that sound reasonable before pausing and saying, “I’m just kidding.”
Maher is notoriously anti-religion—but as an Esquire profile pointed out last year, his particular brand of contrarianism “is, in its way, as rigid as any dogma.” He lost his first late-night series, ABC’s Politically Incorrect, in 2002, after questioning the idea that the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks were cowards; he sparked outrage again last summer, when he used the n-word on-air. (Maher declined to speak about that moment during our conversation, but did apologize for it after it happened.)
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that at a time when most of his competitors are also outspoken liberals, Maher has seized upon opportunities to call out both sides of the political aisle—to blast conservatives for actively dismantling American democratic tradition, and liberals for being overly sensitive. As the comedian put it, “I don’t really have a tribe. I certainly consider myself a liberal, but I’m not afraid to criticize the liberals when they’re wrong—and in that, I’m fairly unique.” And don’t accuse him of falling into a false-equivalence trap, either: “I don’t do that, and I’ve never, ever said that part of the liberals that I criticize is in any way as bad as what the conservatives do,” he said. “I am a liberal.”
“But they’re wrong about certain things,” Maher continued. “They just are. And also, in a time like this where we can’t afford to lose any more elections, they gotta get their shit together. And it’s not that hard. There’s not that many things that liberals actually can do besides voting, obviously . . . One thing we can do is stop being obnoxious. Stop looking like these ridiculous, hypersensitive, nothing-is-funny people.”
It’s no surprise that Maher has courted plenty of critics on the right, who have called for his firing as recently as a few months ago, shortly after Roseanne Barr was fired from ABC for a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett. (Why, they wondered, had she been booted, while Maher remained at his post even though he had also compared political figures to apes?) But Maher’s free-speech absolutism—and humor like that n-word joke, as well as his history of disparaging remarks about Islam—have earned him plenty of detractors on the left as well, many of whom could be seen shrugging on Twitter when conservatives were calling for the comedian’s firing. Their collective response? “Go ahead. Get rid of Maher.”
Still, that no-punches-pulled approach has earned Maher his defenders, like the Daily Beast’s Matt Wilstein—who recently argued, “Even if [Maher’s] critiques often come off as ‘This is why Trump won’ moralizing, there is value in acknowledging that Republican incompetence does not negate Democratic mistakes.” And Maher said he isn’t too worried about what the media has to say about him either way.
In another era, he believes his show would be covered more appreciatively. Now, though, “I think the last thing in the world that the media cares about covering is ideas,” Maher said. “In the tribal era we live in, yes, it will upset a lot of the liberal people in the media, so then they just won’t cover the show or won’t write about it. But it certainly doesn’t seem to affect the fan base, which just gets bigger. I mean, I’ve been on TV for 25 years and on this show for 16. My side is, ‘What’s the truth?’”
It’s true that regardless of what Maher’s critics think of his approach, his fans—more than 1.6 million of whom turned out for the most recent Real Time broadcast—have remained loyal. And while Live from Oklahoma might offer a more personal glimpse at an often-controversial comedian, Maher is pretty sure his longtime followers already know all the important stuff: “They know I’m single. They know I’m probably never gonna get married, and don’t have a desire to do that. They know I’m not a fan of children. They know I like pot. That’s enough.”
