Bill Maher has been a major political humorist for over 30 years. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher ran on Comedy Central and then ABC from 1993 to 2002, and since 2003 he has hosted HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also authored several books, the latest of which is What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, a collection of monologues from his present program, updated and edited.
Maher is a modern liberal who is consistently libertarian on sex, drugs, and free expression (“I’m never for censorship”). While usually upsetting conservatives with his caustic wit, in recent years he has angered leftists as well. His new book claims “it’s not me who’s changed, it’s the Left, which is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will.” Echoing Dennis Prager, Maher contends that “wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism, it is more often its opposite,” and he compares “today’s Woke Revolution and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution” for their mutual censoriousness and historical presentism.
The last fifty years of capitalist prosperity around the world has enabled us to produce more food than we need, despite major population increases. Maher hasn’t noticed that.
Though Maher’s latest book has too many f-bombs, the Cornell English graduate’s prose is generally excellent and often very funny. It is especially endearing to find an author not anchored to one political team. Asking, “When did liberals become the Fun Police?” Democrat Maher sides with Republicans against helicopter parenting, censorship, educational indoctrination, canceling academically gifted programs for “equity,” seeing “racism” everywhere, racially segregated dorms and graduations and national anthems, “diversity quotas,” men competing in women’s sports, banning various Halloween costumes, and condemning people for “cultural appropriation.” Indeed, Maher asserts that “not everything is about oppression. Stealing natural resources from Indigenous peoples: yes, that’s exploitation. But I swear, not one Beach Boy song resulted in any Hawaiian having fewer waves to surf.”
Ridiculing leftist “Guardians of Gotcha,” Maher boldly notes that “if Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they’d be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK or RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr.” Indeed, one of Maher’s more appealing traits is his occasional acknowledgement of complexity. For example, he is a football fan who doesn’t deny how dangerous the game is. Though all for gun control, he recognizes that sexual frustration and loneliness contribute to mass shootings, and he skewers Hollywood’s hypocrisy on guns: “It’s funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility. . . . But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence: crickets. Weird, the only thing we don’t call a ‘trigger’ is the one that actually has a trigger.”
His critique of universities is superb: “Let’s get real about what ‘higher education’ in America really is: a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class. . . . And yet, no one knows how to change a tire.” He chastises the “emotional hemophiliacs” too many colleges produce, observing that
the people who can’t take a joke now aren’t old ladies in the Bible Belt — they’re Gen Z at elite colleges. Colleges, where comedy goes to die. Kids used to go to college and lose their virginity — now they go and lose their sense of humor.
But Maher is far from entirely fair. He knows that a “Twitter is Outraged” headline merely means “the same three people,” but the only press outlet he censures by name is Fox News — and with not one example of negligence offered. He praises European socialism but ignores how badly it has eroded free expression. He envies Finland for allegedly charging only $60 for childbirth, yet forgets socialist countries’ far higher tax rates and lower quality healthcare. He hails US federal government “programs that do work, like Medicare and Social Security,” neglecting to mention that both are broke and the federal government is $34 trillion in debt. Maher prides himself on always being logical and factual, but his critiques of the Right come off as primitive insults based on outmoded stereotypes. The comic remains convinced that the Russians somehow got Trump elected. Furthermore, Trump is “the worst president ever” — although Maher cannot be bothered to tell us why. Libertarians will be interested to know that he dismisses Ayn Rand with jokes and no substance.
Maher repeatedly makes sweeping assumptions with no evidence, as when he states that “the best thing you can do for the Earth is to not have kids,” citing Thomas Malthus’ long-discredited theory “that population grows exponentially but water and food do not.” The last fifty years of capitalist prosperity around the world has enabled us to produce more food than we need, despite major population increases. Maher hasn’t noticed that. Bizarrely, he thinks that today’s public school teachers don’t even get “a living wage.”
He dismisses Ayn Rand with jokes and no substance.
Maher bemoans the fact that “the twenty-first century in America has been a political nightmare because the partisan hate has reached a fever pitch,” and he is big enough to allow that “there’s ample crazy on both sides.” He pleads that “we need to find a way to love and respect each other again.”
Unfortunately, Maher’s standard of civilization is simply that of the Ivy League-educated, wealthy modern liberal who piously believes that big government is the solution to everyone else’s stupidity. You see, “Americans are dumb.” We are so thick that “we have to figure out how a country can solve any problem if so many of its people are so intractably, astoundingly, mind-numbingly stupid. . . . This country just might be empirically, verifiably too f#@&ing dumb to continue as an ongoing enterprise,” since “the median voter is a white person in their fifties who didn’t go to college.” He even favorably quotes Meryl Streep’s character from The Giver: “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.” And Maher is pro-democracy?
At least he does not hide his rank elitism: “I know, gross — who would date someone who works at McDonald’s?” Acting like a sour, severely constipated version of Thurston Howell III, Maher dismisses red states as “flyover states,” and boasts, “They don’t hate us — they want to be us. . . . We have orchestras, theater districts, world-class shopping and Chef Wolfgang Puck; they have Chef Boyardee.” Just like how “Back in the day, flying was a joy” before it got ruined by having to share planes with all the hoi polloi.
Maher’s standard of civilization is simply that of the Ivy League-educated, wealthy modern liberal who piously believes that big government is the solution to everyone else’s stupidity.
But to be fair, who thinks Maher likes any part of what he berates as “this hateful, spiteful country”? Whatever his prejudices, he is often just mean. For instance, despite having fun when Texas’s junior GOP US senator was enough of a good sport to come on his show, Maher now thanks him by asserting “everyone who’s ever worked with Ted Cruz hates him.” Worse, he blatantly gaybaits South Carolina’s Republican US senator and confirmed bachelor: “Lindsey Graham would volunteer for the anal probe.” Maher may say that “no one can do hate like a right-wing conservative,” but his raw rants sure fooled me.
What This Comedian Said Will Shock You is certainly very readable, and it is especially endearing that a prominent member of the chattering class has the courage to satirize both sides of our poisoned partisan politics, however unevenly. But as compelling and amusing as Maher’s commentary can be, there is an ugly anger clothed in cartoonish arrogance that makes the comic’s cries for tolerance ring hollow. But perhaps I just take him too seriously. There are plenty of pearls in this book, but you have to wade through a whole lot of mud to reach them.
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Review of What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, by Bill Maher. Simon & Schuster, 2024, 358 pages.
