Never one to censor himself, Bill Maher has been at the top of comedy’s political food chain longer than Jon Stewart and shows no symptoms of his appetite for political incorrectness being satisfied. The host of HBO’s Real Time resumes his residency at the Pearl at Palms this month, and spoke to Las Vegas Magazine’s Matt Kelemen about keeping his comedy sharp.
How did your Valentine’s Day appearance at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Winter Comedy Arts Festival go?
It was five degrees below zero. I would think anything would go over well there. As long as I was indoors.
Yeah, I saw a picture of you. It didn’t even looked like you were bundled up. It looked like you handled it OK.
Well, you know, you go right from the part inside … if you walked around the block you’d be like, “Are you crazy?” to the people living here in Michigan. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. I had never really sat down and done a long interview with Michael Moore, which was great fun. That was most of what we did. We just talked on stage together. Yeah, we got a lot of laughs. It’s all good.
An extended interview with someone else guiding the conversation must have been a relaxing change of pace.
Yeah, it was really fun. Of course, Michael is someone I’ve known for a long time. I count him as a really close friend at this point.
I imagine it was a progressive-leaning crowd that came out to the Arts Festival, or at least your show?
Yes, I do think so, but everybody in that town is indebted to Michael, because he has single-handedly saved that town. I mean, he has put so much into that place. And those festivals—he not only has that one in the winter, he has the film festival in the summer. Between the two of them, they’ve really reinvigorated what was really a sluggish economy.
The reason why I asked was Vegas seems to be enjoying a resurgence in stand-up right now that also includes, I think, some conservative-leaning comedians that conservative audiences feel comfortable with. Do you get a mixed crowd, or one more sympathetic to your viewpoints?
(Laughs) I think people generally buy tickets to people they like. I just don’t think my fans are probably also going to go to the Jeff Dunham show. Comedy, when it’s brand-name comedy as opposed to when we started out, when it was generic comedy, you’d go to the comedy club and people didn’t know who the f*ck you were. It was just generic comedy, and then whatever the hell it was they had to live with. But, you know, when you get older and you’re known, they know what they’re going to see. Just like people don’t say, “Hey, do you want to see music tonight?” (Laughs) What kind of music? Are we talking about country music? Are we talking about rap? And then they go pick what they like.
The Vegas audiences have been, for me, absolutely awesome. But I also think I draw more from the town, from the locals, than most acts that play Las Vegas. I may be wrong about that, but when I ask the crowd, “Who’s from around here?” it seems to be a pretty significant number of people in the audience.
I think that would be a fair assessment.
Vegas is a big city aside from the tourists now.
I’ve been in red-state comedy audiences and it can be a surreal experience.
I’m always in red states. I played Macon, Georgia last weekend, Wherever I go, as long as you stick to a city of some size—and Macon is hardly Shanghai, but it’s a couple hundred thousand people—you can always find 3,000 screaming liberals. They’re there, they just don’t normally have a reason to come out of the woodwork except when I come to town.
Do you ever find people infiltrating your show to heckle it?
That happened in Vegas once. I can’t remember the douchebag’s name, but some conservative guy—I can’t remember, I think he’s a radio guy—he tried to stir up some trouble about some Sarah Palin joke I was doing, trying to portray me as attacking the retarded or something like that. It was a big nothing, but that’s the only time I could remember it happening. Other than that … you know, we need a word for people who yell out, but not in anger or hostility—in love (laughs). It’s not really a heckle, because “heckle” is hostile. Just people who are enthusiastic, and they love you and they want to tell you. “Yeah, Bill!” What is the word for people that love you but are annoying?
Maybe they used to call them “yahoos”? We need something more contemporary?
Yeah, you get that sometimes, but not a lot of heckling.
If it was gonna happen I think it would happen in Vegas, where you’ve got that guy that might go see Jeff Dunham and then he gets a little liquid courage and says, “You know what? I’m going to see Bill Maher.”
That almost never happens. What I do see sometimes, and you can see exactly what’s going on in this situation, is a woman, usually in the front row, and next to her is a man who is obviously not happy to be there. And he’s got his arms folded and he’s trying to stare me down, and that’s obviously some liberal woman married to some knuckle-dragger husband, and it always amuses me because he thinks of himself as this big tough conservative and yet he let his wife drag him to a show he doesn’t want to see. (Laughs)
There’s a lot more matriarchal influence in society than a lot of people want to believe.
That’s a very kind way to say that, Matt. That’s a very charitable way to say that.
I read an article in New York magazine that said your Real Time writers have also co-written jokes for your stand-up. What’s kind of practices and processes do you guys have?
Well, I’m not sure exactly what it said in the article, but my writers do not write my stand-up. What happens is we generate material for Real Time. Not all of it makes it on Real Time. Some of it, believe it or not, is too outrageous even for HBO. I mean, there are jokes like that, that come down my path that I can’t even do here, because I’m sitting on a panel with a senator or something, but I generally take care of the stand-up. I certainly curate it. If you want to talk about process, I mean, I work on it endlessly. It is a passion of mine. It’s like a hobby except it’s really my living, but I like to think of it as my hobby because then it’s more enjoyable, but I’m always tinkering.
I’m always working on my act, and I do my act from a music stand. I have a music stand on stage that I put on my little notebook with my bullet points. I’ve done this for 15 years or something now, and this is great because, one: I’m a pothead and I couldn’t possibly remember 90 minutes to two hours of material. But it also allows me to work so much faster and give the audience so much more because you’re never fighting memory. I hate it when comics are up there and go, “What else, what else?” You know what? This is a show, you should know what else.
So I’m always working on that notebook that I bring onstage. I’m always updating it and changing it, because I work out of the paper. I’m not one of those observational comedians who is sitting there trying to think of a joke about the salt shaker in the diner. That’s not what I work on. That’s not the clay that I work with. I work from politics and national events, sh*t that happens in the world. And that’s always changing. I just did a stand-up show for HBO in September, and there’s not one joke in that act that you will find in my act today. Comedians, comedy and jokes are the opposite of music. When you go see The Eagles you want them to play the song you know for 40 years, and if they don’t you’re very disappointed. With me it’s the opposite. Occasionally people will say, “Hey, I wanted you to that routine about the pirate,” or whatever. But generally comedy needs to be fresh. It needs to be new. It’s good when it’s new. It’s not good when it’s its familiar.
Didn’t comedians used to be concerned that topical humor would wind up dating them or associating them with a particular era?
I don’t know about that. I feel like my act is the most up to date of anybody’s because I’m always changing it, because the news is always changing. Other people are doing routines they’ve done 20 years ago. I mean, I have a few jokes at the end of my act that are like that. They’re like an old, comfortable shoe, but the vast 99 percent of my act is fresh out of the headlines, at least for the last six months to a year.
I think the worry about doing topical material, political material, always was that you alienate half the audience. To which I always said, “I don’t give a sh*t.” When I first went on with Politically Incorrect they said, “You can’t do a show like that. You’ll alienate half the crowd.” Which is why Johnny Carson never told you what his political affiliation was. Jay Leno never did. David Letterman never did. That old-school idea of keeping your politics to yourself, yeah that’s one way to do it. That’s not my way. I like to tell people exactly what I think, and I think that I proved, at least on TV, that people are OK with that. They don’t have to agree with you every time. I have a lot of conservatives who come up to me and say, “You know, I don’t agree with a lot of what you say, but I watch you. You’re funny.” You have conservatives on, and sometimes you do agree. I am not afraid to alienate my own liberal audience sometimes if we disagree on something. But in general my act makes a lot of fun of Republicans, and if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and you go to my show, it’s probably going to be a rough evening for you.
You’re not dogmatic. What’s really strange, and this feels like a recent development, is it feels like there’s been more dogmatism on the left that I’ve noticed lately and people prepared to be outraged, and a new political correctness.
Right, and I’m always railing against that. I mean, I am after all the guy that had a show called Politically Incorrect, and I’m always trying to herd the liberals away from that and tell them, “This is not who we are.” We should be the ones embracing the First Amendment the way conservatives embrace the Second Amendment. And you’re absolutely right. The censorship that I worry about is self-censorship, from these trolls on the social media who shout anybody down who say anything that deviates from the politically correct. And it’s just not the country that I want to live in. I don’t want to live in those shackles, and I won’t.
Are you conscious about challenging yourself—kind of like a surfer who will try crazier tricks in order to get better at maneuvers that are a little easier?
A little bit, but I would just put it this way: If you think of it as circles, larger and larger circles, the largest circle is to go on Jimmy Fallon or some mainstream show. If I go on a show like that I’m not going to talk about religion, because the audience is not my audience. It’s Jimmy Fallon’s audience. I can entertain them and do very well on a show like that, but I’m not going to go to all the places I would go in front of an audience that’s my audience. These people aren’t atheists. They’re gonna boo me, which is OK. I’ve been booed before.
So then you go to a smaller circle, which is my HBO audience. But even the studio audience that comes to my show here is not nearly as, shall we say, free as the stand-up audience. Although I can do most things I want to do in front of the HBO studio audience, there’s a lot more I can do in front of a stand-up audience. To me, stand-up is the last bastion of true freedom, and that audience is the best. I mean, that’s why I do it. I don’t need to do it anymore. I do it because I like it.
What are your news consumption habits? How do you feed the beast?
I wake up and turn on the computer machine. I’m a creature of habit. I usually start-out with the Huffington Post—my old girlfriend Arianna. From there, it’ll lead me to things. I think I’m like a lot of people if you spend an hour there. You’re like, “Wow, I thought I just sat down!” One thing leads to another, and then you read other people’s blogs. And then I read the old-school newspapers. I look at everything. I look at all the old magazines that come to the office.
Speaking of current events, some critics have leveled charges of generalizing Muslims against you. When you wake up one day and see there’s been beheadings of Egyptian Coptics by ISIL accompanied by the declaration, “We will conquer Rome,” how does that hit you? Does it reinforce your beliefs regarding complacency?”
I feel like I have made amazing progress in getting my liberal audience over to what I’ve been saying all along, which is that you have to stand up for liberal values and not throw them out the window just because they’re being violated by what you perceive as a minority. I can’t tell you, since that big kerfuffle we had on the show last fall with Ben Affleck, and [Real Time] got in the press more than it had before, how many Muslims have come up to me and said, “Thank you. You’re speaking for the kind of Muslim I am. I want to live in the 21st century.”
The Muslim world is having a civil war right now. We have to be on the side of the people who are modernists. We can’t be defending the entire religion because the entire religion has some awful things in it, and we have to stand up and say that. We have to be liberals and stand up for free speech, stand up for equality of women and homosexuals, stand up to for leave a religion if you want without fear of violence, stand up for the right to be an atheist if you want if in any part of the world. These are liberal values, and if people are not going to believe in them then they can’t really call themselves liberals.
Is there a political solution though, or are we heading toward a clash of civilization that’s just inevitable?
The clash of civilizations has been going on since the Crusades. There have been times when it was dormant, but I think we will look back and see with the rise of ISIS here that the invasion of Iraq was maybe the worst decision in American history, because I don’t think we’d be seeing ISIS now if we hadn’t invaded Iraq. We just took a situation that was bad and made it worse.
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