Stream It Or Skip It?

Turning 69 later this month, Bill Maher celebrates his 13th stand-up special with HBO by hoping to bring liberals and conservatives back together into the same room where they can laugh with and at one another. Is that even possible in 2025? Maher sure hopes so. His career still depends upon it.

The Gist: Filmed last month in Chicago, in the wake of the 2024 election, Maher took a time out from his 22nd season hosting HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher to deliver his thoughts on where Americans stand united and divided as we enter 2025.

In a statement promoting this special, he quipped: “I almost called this special You Won’t Feel Safe, because if you’re purely a team player in American politics, you won’t. This one is for the 80% of Americans who want to see crazy called out no matter where it comes from. And the last twenty minutes on my sex life, that’s for everybody.”

Sorry to say, or you’re welcome, but there’s not quite so much joking from Maher about his sexual exploits. There are, however, plenty of bits making fun of liberals for supposedly getting too caught up in “woke” policies to trumpet their actual progress, conservatives for being too full of themselves and their bad ideas, and kids for seemingly trying to convince him and his generation that their ideas are worth pursuing.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Maher wants to position himself as a smarter defender of “free speech” than other famous comedians hogging that lane right now such as Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, even if Maher gets in a cheap jab at Chappelle’s expense.

Memorable Jokes: Hard to find what counts as memorable here when so many of the premises and punchlines date back to the previous election cycle of 2020, or even 2016. I mean, he spends more than a minute rehashing Q-Anon and Pizzagate, for crying out loud.

He reminds us how Stormy Daniels has seen and described Donald Trump’s penis, but then does at least deliver his own argument why there shouldn’t be conspiracy theories denying the assassination attempt on Trump during a 2024 campaign rally. It was tougher to barely graze Trump’s ear than not, and besides, Maher jokes that a Trump fan dying in the shooting was right on brand for the once and future president. “He’s Jesus in reverse. Other people die for his sins.”

And in a routine telling us why we might actually want to be wary of scientists getting things right the first time, he cites trans fats as an example, then cracks that they “hate Dave Chappelle.”

Our Take: Maher believes he has found a comfortable lane by claiming to be a centrist liberal who’s only seemed to move right-wing because the liberals have gotten “too woke.” It’s not so much a place for comedians so much as it’s a place for those Americans who’ve already established comfortable lifestyles for themselves and don’t want to be disrupted by anything outside of their bubble.

“If you’re brooding about the election…you’re in the wrong building,” Maher says, adding of Trump: “He’s got the white house again, but he’s not going to get my mind.”

That’s easy for him to say. None of the consequences of Trump: The Sequel will negatively impact him; rather, Maher might make more money off of the resulting discord by hosting raucous debates on his show.

And he’s much more of a set-in-his-ways Boomer than anything else politically. He loudly asserts that he’s no Republican in disguise, yet loves using conservative talking points for his punchlines, making it sound as though all of the teens are going trans to be trendy and forming protest marches to support terrorists. “I’m old enough to remember when it was the conservatives who hated the Jews,” he cracks, conflating opposition to the expansionist politics of Israel and Netanyahu with religion. And he gives the game away blaming liberals alone for “victim culture” and “identity politics,” as if that’s not also the very underpinning for conservative grievances.

Little wonder that Maher hears a lone wolf howling approval when Maher mentions the idea of “virtue signaling,” prompting the comedian to say: “Thank you, one guy.”

Given the platform and chance to speak to HBO’s and Max’s audience, Maher chooses to re-litigate extremist ideas that the very “decomposing” audience of FOX News viewers Maher mocks are likely to want to bring up in conversation. But does he blame the propagandists for hijacking the cultural conversation? No. Instead, Maher blames American youth.

Maher claims parents “raise kids wrong” by treating them as young adults with valid opinions, when his mind, “they’re stupid, like dogs.”

Part of his personal politics may actually be revealed in an aside where Maher laments all of the permits he needed to cut down a tree on his property, but then he brings it back to his selflessless in being childless. “I think the best thing I ever did for the cause was I never spawned.” 

Real talk: Maher seems incapable or unwilling to listen or learn. Just like too many people radicalized by their social media feeds, Maher’s comedy is stuck in his own bubble, where his HBO joke writers only bring him the most extreme ideas for maximum shock value, to the point where he may truly believe that’s the world we live in and must joke about as a release. But he’s not living in a real world if he truly believes that Gen Z wants us to be like Communist Russia, or that Dr. Seuss was only problematic because he drew a Chinese figure with pigtails in the 1930s. But accepting the reality isn’t as funny to him as perpetuating the very unreal world that conservative Boomers are being misled into believing. This is comedy for people who still post on Facebook, still forward email chains, and still watch his show.

Then again, acknowledging reality might mean that Maher would have to acknowledge his own living proof that “cancel culture” doesn’t impact people like him. He may have lost his ABC late-night show in 2002 by being a bit too Politically Incorrect, but the end result has left him thriving for 22 seasons and counting on HBO, and now his 13th special with the more prestigious platform.

He may boast a New Rule on his HBO show, but there’s nothing new about the ideas he wants to share. And that’s a shame. Much like his Boomer counterparts in D.C., perhaps he should take his own advice, as someone who claims he was calling President Joe Biden “Ruth Bader Biden” two years ago, and step aside for a comedian with the chops to satirize the powers that be betwixting us right now.

Our Call: It’s revealing that Maher jokingly asks: “Where are my unexciting people?” There’s nothing exciting here, and nothing you’re not already seeing or hearing from him on most other weekends in Real Time, so SKIP IT.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.