It’s been a long time coming, but his latest comedy special confirms the inevitable has finally happened — Bill Maher has completed his metamorphosis into Abraham Simpson.
“Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” may be improved by picturing Bart and Lisa's Grandpa muttering the “Real Time” host’s ramblings to himself while Homer, Marge and the kids go about their business, occasionally interrupting them to loudly blurt stream-of-consciousness laments such as, “Five years ago penises meant something!” That would be a riot.
Many topics Maher tries to reheat in "Is Anyone Else Seeing This?" are hangovers from Trump’s presidential campaign and the end of his first presidency — topics that better jesters composted years ago.
Hiring Dan Castellaneta in the future to read Maher's bits is an option worth considering for the performer's 14th mass hostage-taking, whenever that happens. Alas, it's too late for the Chicago audience he recently subjected to his 67 minutes of unlawful imprisonment.
I kid, sort of. Maher's people get him and rewarded enough of his mockery with laughter for this special to be recognizable as a stand-up, one he filmed after the election. Maher claims he’s done brooding about Donald Trump's return to the White House. “He got the White House again, but he’s not going to get my mind!” the HBO star declares to hoots of approval and roaring applause.
If only that were true. Many topics Maher tries to reheat in "Is Anyone Else Seeing This?" are hangovers from Trump’s presidential campaign and the end of his first presidency — topics that better jesters composted years ago.
How's this for breaking news? Maher hates cancel culture, which doesn’t exist, and “woke-ism,” the exhausted right-wing specter none can define. Maher announces his professed support of the trans community in the same way every other hack comic does, in that he says the obligatory words to make the audience comfortable with the uninspired observations that follow them. He defends his slants by saying, “I’m a noticer. That’s what I do. That’s what I’m supposed to do!” and leaves out that what he’s mainly noticing and passing off as truth is Fox News’ rage fluffing.
To take everyone’s mind off the prospect of Trump 2: Electric Waterloo, Maher takes shots at — among other crusty warts — QAnon, people wearing masks in public and the fallibility of science. Drag Queen Story Hour is OK by him, but "do we really need to be loud and proud with five-year-olds?" Gen Z, the “they” that “went after” Dr. Seuss, is as unreasonable and weak as the “they” asking to be identified by pronouns of their choosing.
Maher still pummels conservatives for their hypocrisy, but the suppurating heart of his act panders to the ironic lie of associating liberalism with elitism, particularly by insisting the kids have been raised wrong and educated wrong. “Lemme tell you, if ignorance was a disease, Harvard Yard would be the Wuhan wet market,” he huffs, further deeming universities to be “four-year daycare center[s] for the crybullies of the privileged.”
The Cornell-educated Maher, in contrast, is just your average Joe Ivy League school alumnus who thinks “a lot of people are just tired of having to pretend that things that are crazy aren’t. Tired of being bullied by the most unfun people in the country. Tired of walking around on eggshells because of the hyper-fragile and the oversensitive.”
Left-wing quackery is a target-rich environment for jokes. Wouldn’t it be tremendous if Maher told some?
He continues, “These people who have such a sense of entitlement about never having to feel a moment of discomfort from encountering a thought they don’t already have, or a joke they don’t like.”
I, too, am tired of white fragility being wielded to justify scrubbing hard truths from history texts, book banning, and everything the white Christian Nationalist culture police are inflicting on us. But that bit doesn't refer to any of those ills. No, Maher's decided it's time to take no-fun progressives down a few pegs.
“You wonder why the left catches more jokes from me? They changed, not me, OK?” he boldly claims, repeating for emphasis, “They changed.”
Maher's supposedly new-ish persona is that of an “old-school liberal” gunning for the left's “wokeness," which he's told The Wall Street Journal is "a gold mine for comedy.” And you know what? He's not wrong. Take it from someone who lives in one of the bluest and whitest cities in the country. On the daily, I encounter cars covered in more "Coexist," Phishy-lefty stickers than scales on a carp and assume their drivers are serving a level of crunchiness I am never in the mood to chew on.
Left-wing quackery is a target-rich environment for jokes. Wouldn’t it be tremendous if Maher told some?
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Instead of giggles, the man ABC fired from “Politically Correct” a quarter century ago for saying, “Say what you want about it, [it's] not cowardly" of terrorists who piloted the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2011, wants us to know that although he’s still liberal, he’s always right.
That’s why he can take to task college students protesting the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza thusly: “Really? Marching for Hamas? It’s like rooting for the planes on 9/11!”
Silence meets that punchline, so Maher repeats it to cue the audience to snap out of their dissociation and applaud.
“Real Time with Bill Maher” viewers may recognize most of what Maher smugly blathers about in his new special as a string of plastic wisdom pearls he’s previously belched on his show or his podcast. Lots of comics test material in other forums to build their sets, but there isn't much here that hasn't been extensively covered before and more imaginatively by other performers.
It takes time and talent to blaze new approaches to headlines we’ve forgotten about. Railing against trans fats — “which are fats that hate Dave Chappelle,” Maher quips through a self-satisfied half-grin – doesn’t qualify.
And any topical satirist introducing a “Mars is having a tough time prying open Venus’ clamshell” segment with “Did you see ‘The Shape of Water’? Won the Oscar a few years ago?” might pause to wonder if they're engaging in some version of comedic necrophilia. The pandemic messed with our ability to track time, sure – but Bill, that movie came out in 2017.
In addition to its title doubling as a cry for attention, “Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” is Maher’s way of mass platforming the message that Maher is not and will never be a Republican.
Maher’s latest comes off as if the basics of the craft are beneath him, that lecturing instead of entertaining is sufficient.
Although he has a yen for parroting right-wing talking points down to the misinformation, Maher assures his audience that he’s on the same side as Democrats, Independents, and “non-drooling Republicans” who aren’t in denial about climate change and racism, which he generously notices is “still a thing.”
As a whole, this hour-plus validates NIMBY moderates who feel they did their part by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2020 and need someone to tell them it’s still OK to refer to where they sleep as the master bedroom. I’m sure it’ll be quoted back to me by some insufferable person at some function I’ll regret attending in the near future.
Maher insists he wants everybody to come to his shows. Any sensible performer would, including people who disagree with views Maher espouses as truth based on topical takes that don’t entirely withstand a good faith Google search. A solid zinger is undeniable, and fact-checking is not a requirement for most comedy acts. There, I said it. The greatest jokes are absurdly unreal flights of lunacy. But when a news-adjacent entertainer who hobnobs with experts and politicians is representing a real concern dishonestly to serve his cranky farce, that person is contributing to a dangerous, pervasive problem. If he can't at least coax out a couple of giggle-snorts in the process, what's the point?
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Maybe I'm overthinking it. People crave some version of centrism rooted in common sense that isn’t toothless or meanspirited, and Maher’s tried to plant his flag in that territory while selling the pugilistic assurance that he is the one-eyed man in the Valley of the Blind. Such pomposity is extremely appealing to anyone who has tuned out a broader information space suggesting people need to commit to some of the work Maher points out still needs doing.
But Maher’s latest comes off as if such basics of the craft are beneath him, that lecturing instead of entertaining is sufficient. “Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” is foremost an exhibition of a man who considers himself to be above it all and above us all, save for the obligatory sex yuks (some of which cracked me up, which should let you know just how low the bar is for my sense of humor) in its last 10 minutes.
“I mean, is it really so hard in this country just to not be exotic?” Maher asks, in defense of averageness, knowing that the answer is no. Neither is it too much to be asked to do more than the least, or more conscientiously than what we've long done without question.
Living in a better world takes exertion, and surviving a bad one will take a lot of fortifying hilarity. If this highly paid professional clown is too annoyed to devote energy toward the former, the least he can do is put some honest effort, or any at all, into doing his job well enough to justify our attention.
"Bill Maher: Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” is streaming on Max.
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