Real Time with Bill Maher

Conservatives who complain about Bill Maher are missing the point

Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be.  Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.

bill maher

Bill Maher lays bare Sweden’s refugee problem

Comedian Bill Maher is often a fascinating person to watch. His show, Real Time with Bill Maher, airs Friday nights on HBO and features monologues and a panel of guests who discuss the week’s news stories. What is interesting about the program is that Maher is a sort of “anti-woke” liberal — the weed-smoking, pro-choice, left-libertarian kind — that despises political correctness. This makes for entertaining viewing because Maher alternates between spitting out hideous ideas, hilarious jokes that cut both sides of the political aisle and occasionally stumbling upon — and being willing to vocalize! — an important but perhaps inconvenient truth.

A hazy afternoon with Bill Maher

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills and Bill Maher — stand-up comedian, late-night television host, prophet of the great American silent majority — is ruminating on what the hell has gone wrong with the left: “It all comes, I think, from two terrible sources: bad parenting and insane universities. That’s where the craziness is coming from.” Maher is sitting with me in “Club Random,” the neon-light-festooned, decked-out bungalow he converted into a television studio in 2020, after social distancing requirements forced his weekly HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, to shoot remotely.