In his new comedy special, “Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” which premiered Friday night on Max, comedian Bill Maher trundled though the issues that obsess him: Donald Trump, wokeness and liberals, trans people and drag queens, freedom of speech and “cancel culture,” religion, those with larger body sizes and kids these days.
Like many popular comedians in the digital age (Matt Rife and Dave Chappelle, for example), Maher uses his performances to serve up steaming platters of his well-established beefs. As a matter of course, Maher also addresses how his jokes about these cultural flashpoints are generally received.
The dividend of all this is a rather listless set. That’s partly because Maher’s positions on these issues are so well known that his punchlines failed to surprise. He also seems unwilling to put in the craftwork needed to make his stand-up material edgy or thought-provoking.
‘Free speech,’ he avers, ‘used to be a liberal thing, but then they got it in their heads that getting their feelings hurt is more important than the First Amendment.’
Maher’s superpower, I’ve always thought, is not stand-up but comedic dialogue with others. His stand-up monologues to the camera are fine, but where he excels is in conversation (in front of an audience). His genius is to frame questions about fraught political issues in a pithy, provocative way and then joust, often dexterously, with his typically controversial interviewees. Few other comedians possess this rare skill, and he has honed it to perfection on shows like “Politically Incorrect,” “Real Time” and his podcast “Club Random.”But “Is Anybody Else Seeing This?” is a stand-up special, and Maher isn’t about to use his monologue to question himself the way another stand-up might. He’s not going to ask whether there’s anything ironic about how much speech he devotes to the subject of limitations on speech. Louis C.K. could famously use a “Saturday Night Live” bit to confess he was mildly racist. Shane Gillis could fret that, politically speaking, he was becoming his Fox News dad. But Maher doesn’t use this opportunity to address an equally obvious critique of his recent work: Namely, that he seems to have transmogrified into an old, conservative white guy shaking his fist at Gen Z, new gender categories, EpiPens and anything else that didn’t exist in 1964.
These problems become apparent in his (many) asides about free speech. “I’m very supportive of the trans community,” he affirms, before he goes on to say, “I’m also … super supportive of free speech, and I love anybody who won’t let the mob tell them what to say about anything.”
“Free speech,” he avers, “used to be a liberal thing, but then they got it in their heads that getting their feelings hurt is more important than the First Amendment.”Such riffs encapsulate a political tension in Maher’s art. He claims to be an ally to the left, but he loathes the left’s posture on free speech. His approach to the 45th and 47th president manifests this tension in reverse: Maher is aggressively anti-Trump, having famously likened him to an orangutan. Yet his comedy is awash in a theme that must be music to Trump and the MAGA movement’s ears (specifically Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”). This theme maintains that freedom of speech is being curtailed in America by humorless “woke” “liberals” who censor any idea they don’t like. (For years, I’ve argued that Maher confuses liberals for the radical left, a confusion that Ben Shapiro recently noted as well.)
Maher espouses a strain of free speech absolutism that’s more often associated with libertarian thought. At the same time, he excoriates political figures, like Trump and Ron DeSantis, who make similarly maximalist First Amendment claims. Is Maher on the right? Is he on the left? (Maher strenuously denies in the special any suggestion that he’s gone Republican.) One might argue that Maher is advocating a kind of anti-Trump libertarianism (readers might remember Trump was met with boos when he addressed the libertarian convention last year).
Then again, Maher might just be showing us how he’s managed to remain relevant and commercially viable in this media environment: equal helpings of scorn for liberals and conservatives alike.
Maher might just be showing us how he’s managed to remain relevant and commercially viable in this media environment: equal helpings of scorn for liberals and conservatives alike. The strategy is working. His “Real Time” segments now have a weekly place at CNN. Would Warner Bros. (which owns CNN) offer a plum platform like that to, for example, Tig Notaro or Rosanne Barr — comedians who are not exactly known for espousing a bipartisan comedic worldview?This “balanced” version of Maher may be commercially viable, but does it make him politically interesting or comedically pioneering? On the basis of Friday’s special, I think the answer to both is no. His bits seemed predictable and ranting. The jokes have a formulaic quality. The punchlines land on the same beat over and again. This gag about social justice warriors sort of sums up the night: “[Liberals] have this idea in their heads that, you know, people who lived 500 years ago really should have known better.” Take slavery for example: “Everyone did it back then. The Greek did it. The Romans. The Egyptians. The Arabs. The British. All the way up to P.Diddy.” Then there are all of his self-aggrandizing proclamations (as opposed to the signals) of virtue: “I’m a noticer, that’s what I do”; “I don’t hold my tongue for anybody,” etc. Maher insists he doesn’t get the woke youth of today “not because I’m old, but because your ideas are stupid.” If Maher wants to convince his audience that free speech is under assault, he’d win over more listeners — and probably arrive at considerably more nuance — by continuing to dialogue with people who disagree with him. When he’s up there on his own in “Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” however, he merely celebrates his own positions, confusing smug certainty for a punchline and rendering his monologue monotonous.
Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. 
