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| Bill Maher | Bill Brioux
Movie Entertainment
February 2010
You don’t want to be told you have just five minutes with Bill Maher. Then again, when you’re dealing with one of television’s quickest minds, five minutes of “real time” is plenty.
The stand-up comedian and talk-show host was in Toronto recently to talk about his latest HBO comedy special, But I’m Not Wrong, airing Feb. 13 on HBO Canada. His provocative talk show, Real Time with Bill Maher, returns for an eighth season Feb. 19 at 9 p.m.
Maher was on a tight schedule and the warning came from the publicist before entering his suite – five minutes. We got right into it, talking stand-up. Why does he still work 50 to 60 road gigs a year? “It’s a great purifier, stand-up comedy,” Maher says. “There’s no guest, there’s no clock, and there are no other considerations. I don’t have to worry if I’ll offend the governor. There’s just you and the audience.”
Besides, it sharpens his edge. Maher will take on any taboo, pummelling political correctness with guests as diverse as Alec Baldwin, David Frum, Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington on Real Time. In the new HBO special, shot
in Raleigh, N.C., he’ll aim some of his sharpest barbs at a new sacred target: the Barack Obama administration.
Maher was quick to express disappointment with the speed of reform coming out of Washington, declaring on his show, as well as on Larry King Live, that the same old lobbyists seem to be paralyzing things like healthcare reform. As he so succinctly put it, “The new sheriff is still way too cozy with the corporate bloodsuckers who have uninterruptedly continued to suck (America) dry.”
Many late-night talk-show hosts have expressed reservations about mocking the agent of Hope and Change after the eight-year field day that was the Bush administration, but not Maher. If anything, his presidential attacks now are even more pointed. “It’s a terrible thing to have your hopes built up,” he says, “and then to feel you’re being let down.”
Sometimes audiences boo him when he starts picking on Obama. “He’s not your boyfriend,” he tells them. “He’s the president, and you can’t treat him like your boyfriend.”
Besides, Maher is just as eager to go after the conservative right. “When the Republicans are out of power, they’re even funnier than when they’re in power because they’re desperate and they’re crazy,” he says. “We would never have had (Fox News commentator) Glenn Beck if Obama hadn’t been elected.”
Like David Letterman, Maher has gone from being a comedy-club heckler to a voice of conscience in the U.S., a witty truth-teller in the tradition of Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl and George Carlin. “Part of that is age,” says Maher, 54. “When I was a young comic, I was talking about politics the way I do now but the audience didn’t accept it – as they probably shouldn’t have: ‘You’re 25. What do you know about the world?’”
Now he can let it rip and people buy it. “You cannot accumulate gravitas without a little grey and I, obviously, have more than a little grey.” Which is why he wanted to call his HBO special But I’m Not Wrong. Maher explains: “You may not have liked what I said before, but I’m not wrong.”
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