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.”

“Corporate media,” White added, “gratefully follow Maher whenever he deigns to criticize fellow leftists.”

There was another piece in the American Spectator titled, “No, Bill Maher Is Not Your Friend.”

“You should see Bill Maher as something of a weathervane. Maher represents the Hollywood left’s limited ability to recognize how out of touch it is with the rest of society,” wrote Scott McKay. “But it’s all fool’s gold. Bill Maher is not somebody you can do business with.”

All of the criticism registered online always seems to boil down to one point: Maher is not a conservative. But when has he ever said he was one? Are conservatives so anxious about someone on the left making so much sense occasionally that their followers will drift away from the right? Maher is clear about his life-long pledge to liberalism in his latest book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

“I know that some people think it’s me, that I’ve ‘taken the red pill,’” Maher wrote in the introduction. But added after reviewing his program’s editorials over the past twenty years, “I feel fundamentally the same.”

“The Democrats are without a doubt a nuttier mess than they have ever been before,” he said. 

Maher is respected with a popular platform that reaches a broad audience for three reasons: 1) he’s authentic, 2) he engages with guests who think fundamentally differently, and 3) he’s funny while he does it. How many shows in the obnoxiously hyperbolic genre of political television will still have Ann Coulter and Van Jones on at the same time? And why is that programming all of a sudden so offensive to the sensibilities of those on the right who constantly complain about the lack of representation in mainstream media?

Maher’s book exemplifies what used to be a defining ethic of American discourse: we have to be able to make fun of each other and we have to be able to get over it. It’s a book where the author will dribble down something to trash Christians as a conspiratorial religious fanatics and then go on to offend the pro-Palestinian pronoun people. 

“Show me a god, and I’ll believe Him,” Maher wrote. “If Jesus Christ comes down from the sky during the next Super Bowl and turns all the nachos into loaves and fishes, I’ll think two things: ‘How dare He interrupt Harry Styles’s Gender-Fluid Halftime Show’ and ‘Oh, look at that, I was wrong. There He is. My bad. Praise the lord.”

The audiobook is even better, which he narrated himself, characteristically complaining about everybody in politics like some cranky uncle who got pissed on at Christmas. 

“J.K. Rowling used to be a villain to the right because she wrote books about witchcraft,” Maher wrote. “Now she’s a villain to the left because she has this crazy belief that there’s more to being a woman than pronouns and lipstick.” 

Maher does the same with climate change, police reform and obesity, admonishing the extremes on all sides. 

“Keeping people unhealthy is our most successful bipartisan enterprise,” he wrote. “To conservatives, any attempt to even offer guidelines smells like social engineering, as opposed to freedom, which smells like bacon. And in liberal circles the worst thing anyone can ever do is even bring up the subject, because that’s fat shaming.”

Maher’s book is about offending everybody and making some jokes along the way so that people will actually be entertained while they listen to what seems like today is contrarian comedy. In that respect, what Maher does is no different from Greg Gutfeld on Fox News, whose overnight success says so much about the appetite for people freely airing their grievances without fear of being canceled. Gutfeld just happens to air less criticism against conservatives as much as Maher does liberals. But imagine if liberals reacted to Gutfeld the way conservatives react to Maher: it’s an odd impulse that exposes unchecked tribalism. 

Here’s what the far-left Media Matters for America had to say about Gutfeld in November: 

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld regularly spreads the network’s brand of hateful attacks against marginalized groups, only disguised as “comedy.” During his nearly two-decades-long career at Fox, Gutfeld has capitalized on his power and influence to belittle marginalized groups and others for cheap laughs.

Media Matters went on to list every joke that the paper’s leftist reporters found offensive, including tongue-and-cheek segments such as a line from 2022 when Gutfeld said, “Not only is ballet racist, it’s transphobic too. Just look at the title The Nutcracker.” The paper also referenced an innocuous joke about dolphins swimming as an example of “speciesism” as evidence of Gutfeld’s “bigotry.” But it’s also the kind of ridiculous commentary that raises the question to anyone complaining about something as benign as an opposing comedian who sometimes makes a good point: do you actually care about this or are you just so bored in your life that you need something to bitch about? 

In a sane country, no one needs the validation of their opponents’ “lived experiences” to be their neighbors, let alone from a comedian on television. Maher understands this, which is why he doesn’t feel compelled to remain loyal to any particular tribe. 

“I asked an old friend recently if he wanted to come by for a little party I was having, and when he found out one of the guests had voted for Trump, he told me he wasn’t coming, saying, ‘I wouldn’t breathe the same air,’” he wrote. “There’s a word for people like this: ‘assholes.’”

“When we confine ourselves to bubbles, alternate points of view become not just objectionable — they become unfathomable,” Maher continued. “In a nation based on pluralism, it’s very dangerous that Americans are so in our silos, and it’s largely because we’ve stopped living among each other.”