Bill Maher: Bill kills

by Emma Kat Richardson

A Barack Obama presidency has, in no way, slowed down Bill Maher’s attempt to deconstruct all that’s wrong with American politics. In fact, he’s got plenty more to say. The proof is in his new live HBO comedy special premiering on Feb. 13.

There isn’t too much that can be said about Bill Maher that hasn’t already been committed to a thousand pieces of journalism. We know him best as the pot-smoking pundit who, for almost two decades, has entertained and informed audiences with a sharply critical rhetoric on everything from organized religion to the toxicity of America’s food supply.

As his HBO ratings knockout Real Time prepares for its new-season debut on Feb. 19 as well as the premiere of Maher’s ninth HBO special, But I’m Not Wrong, which airs live on Feb. 13, here’s what America’s most outspoken social critic had to say for himself in a conversation with Emma Kat Richardson. (Portions of this interview and introduction were originally published in Real Detroit Weekly.)

Do you prefer doing stand-up or doing your show, and do the benefits of one outweigh the other?
Well, you’re asking me which one of my children I like better. But since I don’t have children, I’ll answer this question. I have to say, if I had to choose, stand-up. It’s the most fun I can ever have with my pants on. It’s very pure – I’ll put it that way. Well, pure in the sense that it’s just me, my jokes, and the audience. There’s no time limit; there’s no network; there’s no people sitting on the panel, you know, cutting me off. It’s all about making people laugh out loud continually for an hour and a half. There are very few places where you can go for that nowadays: there are very few places you can go where you can laugh until you’re exhausted, and that’s my goal.

How much of your stand-up act is really you and how much is an onstage persona?
Oh, it’s all me. I have no onstage persona. Once in a while, people will not quite know who you are but will know your face, and they’ll say, “Oh, hey, I know you, you’re an actor!” That’s the one thing that makes me kind of bristle. No, I’m not an actor; I’m the opposite of an actor. I’m not acting at all, I never say anything I don’t believe. I’m a comedian and I tell jokes, and jokes are not always about [truth]: the premise may be true, but the joke part is an exaggeration, but people understand that. I am exactly who I am, I think. Even when people who’ve known me through television first get to know me later, that’s the comment I’ve heard many times: “Boy, you’re not really that different from what you are on the air.”

It’s a good thing for what I do – it wouldn’t be a good thing if I was trying to be an action movie star. Then you’d want to be, you know, larger than life. Television is an intimate medium, and what I’m doing, what I’m selling, is keeping it real. So if you’re going to be the keep it real dude, you should be real. If I came in with a facelift next season, for example, I’d understand why the audience would peel away. [Laughs]. They’d be like, “Oh, this is the guy we thought was very authentic; we’d think he was never pulling a punch when he talks, and here he is now with a tummy tuck or whatever.”

Do you ever revisit some of your material from the ‘80s?
God, no. I had an HBO special in 2007; I wouldn’t even do a joke from that! I mean, maybe one: there’s a couple that if they fit, people will say to me all the time, you know, “Do that thing!” Once in a while I will do that, but people who come to see me when I do a stand-up show are seeing almost all new stuff, because jokes are not like music. In music, people want to hear the hits they heard 40 years ago, but as a comedy fan myself, I don’t want to hear that. If I go see a comedian, I don’t want to hear his old act: I know those jokes, and when you know a joke, it’s sort of over. With exceptions, as I say – some bits, you can hear more than once. But basically, I want to keep it as fresh as I can for them.

Have you ever had to struggle to make your act so prolific?
I just stop. After I do an HBO special, then I won’t do stand-up for a while. It’s like, after you harvest a crop, you have to let the field lie fallow, so you can grow more jokes.

So that’s what you’re growing in your basement: jokes.
Well, among other things, but we don’t have to talk about that.

Do you find audiences in some of the more economically depressed areas of the country to be more or less receptive to your material? How have they reacted to it?
Oh, they love it, because I think I’m voicing what I know a lot of people are feeling, which is a lot of frustration at the corporatist scant of America right now. Back when I was starting to get on Obama’s case, my own studio audience was booing me. It’s a liberal audience, and we all like Obama – I certainly like Obama – but people are turning to the point of view that I’ve been expressing for a while: unless he gets off his corporatist ass, he’s becoming a big disappointment.

This is not change that we can believe in, that we all thought we were getting. No public option in health care – he seemed to back down on that. No real reform for the banks that caused this giant economic mess that has caused such misery in Detroit and everywhere else in the country. People are getting very frustrated with this president. He seems to always be trying to placate the crazies on the right instead of rallying the people who voted for him. I think there is a level of frustration with continued personal affection that we have for him. But you know, he’s not our boyfriend – he’s the president.

Do you think a lot of his unwillingness to stand up to corporate interests has to do with his campaign funding?
I do. He got half his money from corporations. They made a big deal about the fact that he raised more money from small donations than anybody – that’s true. He raised $400 million just from average people, and that’s an impressive achievement, but he also raised $400 billion from fat cats and corporations. I think that tells you a lot.

Did you read the article in Time about comedians having a tougher time coming up with topical material in the age of Obama?
Oh, Christ. I’ve read that in every fucking magazine. Yes, they’ve been asking that, and they’re finally starting to stop asking that: you know, can comedy continue after George Bush? Yes, George Bush was funny, but, yes, it continued. Hallelujah!

I’m having more fun than ever with the material, and I think George Bush probably was the greatest comedic punching bag we’ll ever have, but anything gets tired after eight years. I mean, I was thrilled when he left office, because there was new stuff to talk about, and of course, if you want to, as many comedians do, just concentrate on how crazy the right-wingers are, they’re more crazy than ever. When they’re out of power is when they’re really scary. When they’re out of power is when they’re really funny, because they’ve completely gone batshit; they’re absolutely not connected to reality. Tea-baggers, and Texas threatening to secede, and the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs – this stuff is very rich, so comedy is just fine.

Since we got to see your childhood background with religion in Religulous, I’ve always wanted to know whether you had a similar experience with politics. Did you grow up in a civic-minded household?
Yes, I did. My father was a news guy – my father worked in radio news. News and what was going on in the world, current events, was always something that was discussed in my house, which is something that’s not that typical in America. I think that’s much more of a European thing. In Europe, there’s a cafe society – people sit out at night at cafes and they talk about what’s really going on. We don’t do that: we sit at home and watch television.

So, in that sense, it was always sort of in my blood, that interest in the news. On Real Time, we definitely have our audience, but it will never be a cafe society. This will always be a society that prefers diversion over education. American Idol will get 30 million people and Bill Moyers Journal will get 300,000. That’s who we are.

Do you think that there’s a natural kinship between righteous anger over certain issues and the ability to make them humorous?
Yeah, probably, but what I wonder about is, why aren’t people more angry? Considering how much they’re poisoned, ripped off, and lied to in this country, why aren’t they rising up? I thought Capitalism: A Love Story was [Michael Moore’s] greatest ever – it’s the perfect meeting of a man at the top of his game as a filmmaker meeting the exact right subject matter.

Michael has always been about corporations screwing the little man: this is what Roger and Me was about 20 years ago. So in a way, he’s come full circle in this movie, and it’s a brilliant movie. He seems to want people to rise up, and seems to be asking them to rise up, and the movie is sort of intimating that they are going to rise up, but I don’t see it. I don’t see people rising up; I really don’t. Maybe they should stop giggling and get angry. I think we’re doing a disservice by making them laugh. [Laughs].

Is it difficult sometimes to form jokes around serious subject matter?
Not for me. I’ve always been interested in it. There are some comics who love the trivial. There are a million comics who have tried to be Jerry Seinfeld, and Jerry is a guy who can make the trivial into something incredibly fascinating. He can talk about the socks in the dryer and it’s brilliant. But, unless you do that kind of comedy exactly right, I find it to be shallow and corny. It’s very hard to be Jerry Seinfeld, even though so many of them try.

But that was never the kind of comedy that interested me: I never talked about trivial matters, even when I was starting out. I was always interested in religion, politics – the big issues, the big meaty issues.

I’ve got to ask you about [disgraced former Detroit mayor] Kwame Kilpatrick. I remember when he was a guest on Real Time. Have you been following that scandal at all?
Well, I certainly know what happened. He’s doing time now, is he?

He’s out, and he’s now in Texas. But he was in jail.
Yes, I remember when he was on the show. He had a whole bunch of guys with him, kind of a posse, and had on this big suit. It did appear more like he was a celebrity than a mayor. If you didn’t know he was the mayor, you would have thought maybe he was high caliber. I don’t remember anyone else with that kind of presence – certainly not in politics. He did have more of an entourage than Jay-Z did – Jay-Z was on our show recently and he came in with just one guy.

Do you have any major career plans for life after Real Time?
No, you know, my big Moby Dick was Religulous. I always wanted to get a movie made about how stupid and dangerous religion is – it had never been done, and I had it in my craw for years and years. Finally got the right director, did the movie, and the movie did really good – people will stop me every day of my life, and probably for the rest of my life, and say, “Thank you for Religulous.”

So that was like my big Moby Dick that I had to harpoon, and other than that, I’m content doing the show. Next year will be our eighth year – I mean, Politically Incorrect was on for nine years, but I never thought we’d do this one for as long. Between that and stand-up, that’s plenty for me. I’m happy to do that – I’m not going to do any more movies. People say to me, “Are you going to do more documentaries?” No; I had one subject that I wanted to do, I did it, that’s it, I think I made my point, so I’m happy to go back to what I really do, which is being a stand-up.

There’s nothing that you set out to accomplish when you started your career that you feel like you haven’t achieved yet?
Not really, no. I mean, I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I don’t want to be an actor; I was an actor in the 80s, but that was the right thing for when you’re young and don’t really know what you want to do. I’ve been on TV for… Politically Incorrect went on in 1993. We’re coming up on 20 years – that’s the big middle chunk of your life. I would never have predicted that we’d have such a long run. I’m just happy it’s lasted this long.

Do you ever think about writing a personal memoir?
Yes. I’ve thought about it. I don’t know; I’ve put out four books, and those are great, but it’s not really a book age anymore. People don’t read ‘em. It’s just different: media has moved on, people’s habits have moved on. Twitter is 140 characters, and that’s challenging for people. Everybody puts out a memoir, and it’s like, “Whatever.”

Bill Maher’s new HBO stand-up comedy special But I’m Not Wrong premieres live at 10 pm on Feb. 13. For more info on Maher, check out BillMaher.com.