Bill Maher has some of the strongest political opinions on late-night television—but he’s sick of hearing everyone else’s.
On the latest episode of his podcast Club Random, Maher told his guest, The Sopranos star Drea de Matteo, that Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel “very predictably” parrot “whatever MSNBC was saying” on their shows, as he praised the good ol’ days when “Letterman, Leno, you know, Carson…they never told you their politics.”
Maher argued that “part of our problem is that everybody makes their decisions based on the politics of the art and not the art itself.”
BILL MAHER, JIMMY KIMMEL Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images
“I’m not knocking them,” he insisted, but “The audience, and of course half the country, was like, ‘Well this is just insulting to me,” he surmised.
Leno was roasted by the current slate of late-night hosts for making similar comments in July.
“I love political humor, don’t get me wrong,” he said, “But it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other. Why shoot for just half an audience all the time?”
Stewart called Leno’s take “f—ing ridiculous,” and Oliver declared he’d take a “hard pass” on “any comedic advice from Jay Leno.” Maher sided with the veteran host Monday, insisting that “the most important thing” in this new “era” is “to signal to the audience what your politics are.”
“Leno never did that. Leno just played it right down the middle,” Maher aadded. “He was just like, ‘I will make fun of everybody.’ And that’s, in a different sort of way, what I’m doing also. I just don’t stop criticizing just because you’re on the left part. If you do something stupid, I’m going to call it out no matter where you are.”
In Maher’s relentless pursuit not to be pigeonholed to either end of the political spectrum, he caught a lot of heat for visiting Donald Trump at the White House this year and emerging with glowing reviews of the “gracious and measured” president.
“A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” Maher said afterward. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f—ed up. It’s just not as f—ed up as I thought it was.”
Larry David roasted Maher in a satirical essay for The New York Times that compared Maher’s White House visit to “Dinner with Adolf” Hitler. “No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’ But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere,” David wrote, mocking Maher. “I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side—even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”
Amid the outcry, Maher complained that he was skewered for the visit instead of praised. “I should be a hero for going there,” Maher said on TMZ’s 2 Angry Men podcast, “I’m not the villain here.”
Maher’s tone shifted again on Monday, when he declared that one side is indeed “more dangerous” than the other. “Yes, I still think the Republicans are more dangerous because I mean, they don’t really believe in democracy anymore and they’re doing a lot of harmful things,” he said. “But, you know, I’m also not going to deny that Trump won because a lot of things did get way out of whack that he said, ‘I’m going to correct.’”
He agrees with Trump that “the border shouldn’t be open. DEI is out of control. Universities are out of control,” he explained. “He’s not wrong about all those things. I just don’t agree with his method of addressing them.”
But most importantly, he concluded, “We should always be able to f—ing talk about it.” Unless, of course, you’re a late-night TV host not named Bill Maher.
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