This is the first week in a long time that I saw his show on my DVR and deleted it without watching. He has been grating on me for years for so many reasons, which I’ll list below. But his backyard format was the final nail in the coffin. It revealed how unfunny he really is without any of the A/V wizardry.
My problems with him, more or less in chronological order:
—Flirty years-long promotion of Ann Coulter and Maureen Dowd
—His longtime outspokenness about environmental concerns stopped abruptly around the time Al Gore disappeared from public view. Should have been an issue in recent elections and he doesn’t give a shit.
—Not funny. And when his bad jokes bomb, he gets angry at the audience. Sad.
—He’s an old man who thinks he is an edgy, cool young thing because he smokes weed and used to go to the Playboy mansion. He seems unaware that Hugh Hefner is dead and marijuana has been decriminalized and it not a big deal anymore. And his pothead schtick is the last vestige of his liberalism.
—Decades ago, he was aggressively atheist—to the extent of coming across as a proselytizer for the non-existent church of atheism—and yet he now condemns solely Islam, with the supposition that Christianity and Judaism are superior and preferred religions. He may be an atheist, but he has a decidedly pro-Christianity dogma mindset.
—His sense of humor is lame, with the same adolescent sensibility Donald Trump has. Trump embarrasses us all by calling people childish names from the bully pulpit, and Maher’s answer is to say he looks like an orange primate instead of joking at the expense of his lack of intellect and competence.
—Meghan McCain adores him and credits Maher for introducing her to her husband, who publishes a hatemongering alt-right website and who was chased away from the Washington Post following multiple cases of plagiarism, all in his first week at the Post. Maher saw fit to have this guy on his show to comment. McCain, a GOP propagandist, has said many times on The View that she agrees with “everything” Bill Maher says. And that says everything about Bill Maher.
—Most unforgivably, he has promoted Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon in recent years and then defended their ideas and his decision to promote them. And then, like a coward, after hosting Yiannopoulos and afterward saying he thinks Yiannopoulos is “reasonable” and is welcome back on his show, Maher tried to claim credit for Yiannnopoulos’s downfall.
The bottom line is that as time has marched along, Maher went from being a struggling hippie actor to a comedian to a wealthy right-leaning talk show host with a drug problem, a xenophobia problem and a problem of falling for the lies of any skinny bleach blonde woman under age 50.
