I’m a Bill Maher Fan; He’s Starting to Lose Me
I imagine Bill Maher would respond to this piece like this: “I don’t care if I’m losing you. Bye-bye.”
That’s completely fair. Maher has an avid following, one which I have been a part of for the last six years, and it shouldn’t matter to him whether one random college student decides not to watch every week anymore. But in the last few months, Bill Maher’s segment on his meeting with the President and his response to Larry David’s Op-Ed in the New York Times have soured me.
When Maher announced his meeting with President Trump, I was a little surprised. Despite progressive podcasters insisting that Maher is a traitor to liberalism, he isn’t. And he hasn’t gone “MAGA” or “full Republican.” Quite the opposite. In fact, Maher has been a vocal critic of Trump, both as a person and a politician, for a decade.
However, he has also emphasized the importance of civil dialogue and the value in talking to people with whom you disagree. I couldn’t agree more. Maher claimed the meeting was in that vein — an attempt to cordially engage with the President, somebody who once sued him after Maher implied, jokingly, that his father was an orangutan. In that light, I could get behind the meeting.
Two weeks-or-so later, Maher spent 15 minutes de-briefing his dinner with the President on Real Time. Maher insisted he was “reporting exactly what happened.” I’m all for that as well. So let’s hear it, Bill. What do you got for us?
Well, according to Maher, he saw a different Trump. Maher described a person “willing to listen.” The President had “good humor,” and signed Maher’s list of insults. “He laughed, even at himself,” Maher said incredulously. “He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public.” Maher continued: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.” During their meeting, “Trump was gracious and measured.”
Look, people are complicated, and Maher seeing the positives in the President is not something to bicker about. Honestly, I’m kinda happy he went. Maher recognized the fact that the Trump that matters is the one who faces the world; the one in front of cameras.
However, Maher made a consequential error when he concluded: “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person playing a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.” Maher is way too bright to make this conflation. The implication here is clear: Trump is playing a character in the public sphere. Maher knows that people, especially businesspeople, excel at playing characters. He said as much when he deemed Trump’s TV persona a facade.
But I am baffled at how Maher did not even posit that the Trump he interacted with might be the character and the public Trump the genuine one. It seems equally plausible to me that a crazy person does live there; he just turned it off for a few hours.
The other layer to this, of course, is who cares? Maher claimed that his job was to tell us what he saw, not dictate why it matters. That’s fair. But to quote a personal idol, Batman, “It’s not who [we are] underneath, but what [we] do that defines [us].” I feel like Maher’s conflation of Trump’s public persona with a facade and the closed-doors meeting one as “real” is extremely naive. And I think too highly of Maher to let him off the hook for it.
Cut to a few days later: Larry David satirizes Maher’s characterization of his meeting with the President in a Times Op-Ed entitled “My Dinner with Adolf.”
Take or leave David’s message, but Maher’s reaction to the article went against his entire brand. He’s a self-proclaimed proprietor of common sense who has made a career out of taking shots where he sees fit — left, right and in-between. I love this about him and his show. One thing he has no patience for is people being offended by comedy. Maher has been an outspoken warrior against cancel culture and the “war on comedy.”
He went on a tirade against Will Smith after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, expressing his incredulity at the former’s reaction to a joke. Maher, to his credit, has also repeated dozens of times his willingness to “take it.” He echoed that sentiment in his response to David’s article as well: “I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. [The Op-Ed is] not exactly the way I would’ve done it.”
In that same response, however, I was baffled to hear Maher say this: “To use the Hitler thing — first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews.”
That sentiment is completely incongruous with Maher’s career-long spirit. In 2015, Maher concluded his show with a New Rules segment entitled “Learn How to Take a Joke.” He said: “Everyone gets made fun of for something and it’s never 100% fair.” Two years ago, Maher’s piece “Democracy Dies in Dumbness,” took aim at perpetually offended people who overreact and complain about jokes perceived as insensitive.
If Maher is legitimately opposed to inhibiting comedy in the name of being offended, then his response is more than a little contradictory.
As somebody who spends everyday trying not to take himself so seriously, I cannot for the life of me understand how a professional comedian, and a really funny one at that, is unable to just laugh at the article. Sure, the Hitler comparison might be unfair; Maher said himself that mockery often isn’t. Sure, he may not agree with David’s suppositions. But it’s tongue-and-cheek satire. Why can’t it just be that?
Instead, I feel like Maher is playing the game he despises so much – playing the offensive, “went too far” card when a joke takes aim at something you hold dear. In this case, himself. His response is straight out of a New Rules segment. I can imagine Maher taking aim at an unnamed comedian for refusing to laugh at himself and playing the offended card. Maybe he’d call it “F Your Feelings.”
I believe strongly in two principles Maher champions — comedic integrity and pushing back against a society too offended by everything. As a result, I feel like it’s only fair to point him out when he seemingly violates both. Comedy cannot be a boundless sphere where people take or leave what they enjoy and don’t force their feelings onto others if one’s defense to jokes that target them is to proclaim them insensitive and insulting.
That seems pretty straightforward to me. I commend Maher for meeting the President, even though I wouldn’t have. And I think his show is a tremendous vehicle for the kind of discourse he aims to bolster. But I think, to be the common sense champion he claims to be – and often is – it might require re-evaluating whether it’s fair to claim Trump is like Two-Face.
Maybe Maher saw Harvey Dent and we see Two-Face; maybe he saw Two-Face and we see Harvey Dent. Maybe Trump is really Dent; maybe Trump is really Two-Face.
But more likely than not, Trump is both. He’s probably both a charismatic businessman from New York and the narcissistic, reckless, brazen person we see at his rallies. To claim Trump is performing in public and that the Trump he saw was “playing a crazy guy” is not very Bill Maher of Bill Maher. And neither is the way he responded to David’s satirical piece about him.
In the light of this, when I tune in every Friday night (and I still will), I’m starting to think of Maher a little differently. The last few weeks have proven Maher is still unafraid to go after the Trump administration, which is unsurprising; as I said earlier, Maher hasn’t compromised his integrity.
I said earlier that people were complicated. That is surely true of Maher as well. So I’ll try not to hold this over him. But I do wish he had read between the lines and understood David’s central criticism. It wasn’t that Trump was Hitler; rather, sometimes, the “different person behind closed doors” narrative can breed some dangerous perceptions.
Around 100 days into the Trump administration, the Trump the American people are seeing, the Trump that Maher takes aim at every Friday, seems like the “real” one to me.
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