I have been fan of Bill Maher since he hosted a panel discussion show called Politically Incorrect on the Comedy Central station. I enjoyed watching that show, both on Comedy Central and then after it moved to ABC. After he lost that stint because of a less-than-politic statement about the September 11 terrorists, he got picked up by HBO with a weekly series called Real Time with Bill Maher, which is scheduled to return for its twentieth season tomorrow.
And, for the first time since he started this show, I won’t be watching.
I keep thinking about how Dennis Miller, the Saturday Night Live alumnus who went on to host his own show on HBO before Bill Maher, stopped being funny in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Everyone reacts differently to trauma. With some comedians, that includes ceasing to be funny and acting more like an old man getting angry at the clouds.
That’s what happened with Bill Maher after the COVID pandemic hit. I’m not specifically complaining about the why his show had to adapt to not having an audience in the early days of the pandemic, but that’s undoubtedly where the decline started.
I get it: if you’re a comedian, you need laughter to keep you going, and, without an audience to provide it, that can be pretty devastating. I give him full credit for making the best of the situation at the time.
But he always was at his worst when talking about matters related to health and nutrition. Hell, I called him out on that nearly nine years ago, building on another article that listed him as one of the five most awful atheists out there.
But when so much of the news is dominated by a deadly pandemic, a news-oriented comedy show (or is it a comedic news show?) hosted by someone whose grasp of matters relevant to public health makes for television that can run the gamut from boring to dangerous.
During the most recent season, he uncritically interviewed a conspiracy theorist whose sole argument is that because nobody is talking about the possibility that COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, it must have been so engineered (to which I say that the mortality rate isn’t high enough to be a bioweapon; evolution explains it just as well, and without the baggage of unnecessary assumptions) and then asked Senator Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN) if we can declare the pandemic over. (Where the only “fairness points” I’m willing to give him, are that the omicron variant hadn’t been identified yet.)
And on top of that, he has gotten quite cranky lately in his criticism of the Millennial generation. Barely a week went by where he didn’t say something casually dismissive of trends that the younger generations are causing.
And amid all of that, he just stopped being funny. His shows became painful to watch, and even the witty “New Rules”, which were a staple of every season since season 2, seemed dull and uninspired. I still chuckle over the early “new rule” that was taken from an FBI report of teenage and twentysomething girls prostituting themselves in malls so they can make money to buy things in malls. (“I’m lucky if I can find an escalator that goes down” and “If you take your daughter to see the mall Santa and she gets in his lap face first….”)
But those days are long gone. The girls he talked about in that new rule are now in their 30s and 40s, possibly with kids of their own, and he’s ranting about how they are causing a guacamole shortage because they like avocado bread.
Dennis Miller had the sense to realize his time was up in his HBO series before he moved on to other projects (including a very brief stint as a football announcer). I think it’s time Bill Maher did the same.
Ramblings and Rumblings 