I’ll often watch YouTube videos in an incognito window, just to avoid this sort of targeting,
Well I for one adore Big Joel and I’m grateful you brought this no doubt entertaining and thoughtful video to my attention.
To date, my favorite video of his is the takedown he did of the Love Languages books. He’s done some excellent work on Dr. Phil, too.
If it helps, he appears to have a sociology background. I don’t know anything about breadtube but I’d put him in the same category as Lindsay Ellis. Art and culture critiques from a pretty thoughtful person.
LOL, me, too.
No, Billy Joel is not political at all. Sometimes he plays cowboy music, but that’s not political.
It’s about horses. And beer.
Oh, that was good.
What’s non-negotiable is that you’ll get a much more positive response when excerpting/summarizing key points of looooong videos, rather than just linking them with a not-so-subtle expectation that others will sit through them in their entirety.
Not saying this of the OP, but a major feature of posts by cranks on social media is linking to such videos and proclaiming that opponents can’t possibly be serious unless they sit through full-length crazy.
I agree with some but not all of what Bill Maher says. But you are absolutely correct that he is definitely a smug asshole. That being said, I think many if not most talk show hosts/tv commentators are smug assholes (Keith Olbermann, John Oliver, Fallon, Tucker Carlson, Bill O”Reilly, Stephen Colbert, etc.). It must be a job requirement.
I could agree that Oliver is smug. I don’t think he’s an asshole though.
Is it too early to take/place bets…? Who will live longer… Bill Maher or Rump?
It’s not wishing them ill. As MAGAs have said in their town halls, “we all die”.
It’s just Americans pulling ourselves up by our boot straps and making the best of a bad 𝖠̶𝖽̶𝗆̶𝗂̶𝗇̶𝗂̶ … I mean situation.
He is also very self-deprecating. He learned from from Jon Stewart.
And short. I can’t imagine anything that would come out of Bill Maher’s mouth that would take more than three minutes to completely denudate because he’s not any kind of deep thinker or has any novel insights into social issues or world affairs. He’s just a fucking blowhard who tries to get people to argue for entertainment. Bill Burr is about the right level of intellectual critique because he doesn’t pretend to be a philosopher of social mores or extensively informed about anything, and just flatly calls out bullshit when he smells it.
Stranger
this is a fair point. In my mind there is a huge overlap so “smug asshole” is almost redundant phrasing, but a person can absolutely be one without the other
So I’m a half hour into this video (loving it) and I’ll give it a shot.
Big Joel opens with a brief analysis of that time Bill Maher made fun of Stan Lee/comic book fans, with the object of demonstrating how Bill’s smug asshole schtick can kinda work for some people.
Big Joel moves on to Bill Maher’s rant about critics of Mr. Beast (a famous and ultra-wealthy YouTube personality notorious for dramatic displays of charity/’’curing’’ people’s disabilities, though most of his videos involve contests for money.) Bill Maher claims that Mr. Beast is being attacked by crazy woke people who are against white people doing charity or perceiving attempts to cure people’s disabilities as “ableist.” Joel uses this example specifically to point out how intellectually dishonest Maher is and how much he’s ripped the “crazy liberal reactions” out of context (honestly Maher’s bit is so dishonest, I’m surprised he isn’t more regularly sued for libel. The people he blatantly misquoted are not “crazy Twitter liberals” but more like people criticizing their own government in various parts of Africa, people who have extensive experience working to get kids out of orphanages and back with their families, and in every case they are misquoted.) More examples of Maher’s intellectual dishonesty follow.
Big Joel moves on to the subject of Kamala Harris, whose defeat Bill Maher blamed on the Oscars doing a “land ownership” acknowledgement to natives. This is the takeaway we’re supposed to get - it’s woke that lost the election. He conflates the very worst of the far-left nuttery with actual Democrats and the Democratic platform, which couldn’t be more different. He also lies about liberals trying to find long-term solutions for homeless people. Joel deftly raises the question of who exactly Maher thinks is being alienated from Kamala Harris by woke leftists, who would ostensibly otherwise be voting Democrat. (Bill Maher also takes the opportunity to point out that Native Americans did bad shit, too, you guys - so the Oscars should stop acknowledging their homeland, I guess.) Joel has, in the past, taken aim at PragerU, a nauseating ultra-right wing Christian homeschooling YouTube channel, who like to make the same point about Native Americans and slavery. Perhaps the hottest Big Joel take from this segment is: “Is the Oscars land acknowledgment really what lost the PragerU vote?”
That’s about where I left off. Oh, and he talks about those Lububu things and how many influencers on YouTube are mad about their overconsumption. There are some hilarious diversions that all point back to the theme of performative outrage.
I think Big Joel works because he never does seem particularly outraged. I think he finds this mostly funny as hell because it’s so transparently lame, and while I think he recognizes and acknowledges the damage it causes, his tone is always more of a deadpan “Can you believe this shit?”
I think he’s skilled at taking a bunch of things that seem, on their face, unrelated, and using it to build toward an overarching theme. And that’s why I enjoy his videos.
I also fucking HATE Bill Maher. I want to punch his smug fucking face. I think he’s the ultimate example of a disingenuous pseudointellectual.
Also, on the subject of Bill Maher’s dinner with Trump:
Larry David’s opinion piece, “My Dinner with Adolf” from the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.html
I’ll throw up a gift link tomorrow. It’s worth it.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room…
For those who may not be aware, there’s a long-running dedicated thread here in the Pit on Real Time with Bill Maher, in which both the show and the man himself are discussed. The Trump dinner was discussed in that thread at the time it was current, which was many months ago. I don’t see what additional value this one is contributing.
FWIW, I defend Maher when I feel he needs defending, and I criticize him when I feel he doesn’t. His bloviations about the Trump dinner was one of those times when I felt Maher was absolutely indefensible – he seized on the opportunity to court and exploit controversy, to declare “I’ve been there and I know better than youi” delivered with his trademark smugness.
But he also makes good points on his show and has a lot of interesting guests and informative conversations, even if sometimes coloured by his own biases. And to be fair, the “smug” thing is at least partially derived from the “New Rules” segment, where the smugness is part of the act – it’s right in the name “New Rules” – “these are what I declare the new rules must be!” It’s a comedy act, people, trying to deliver insights in comedic and intentionally hyperbolic form!
Haven’t watched the video, but Bill Maher sucks. He’s an idiot and a hack. He does that fake laugh at his punchline because his jokes aren’t funny and the audience wouldn’t to know when to laugh.
I just watched Joels 2 part biography.
He wore a yellow star in his concerts after that infamous march, Unite the Right debacle, in Charlottesville.
In vehement protest. He said.
If Bill Maher thinks that nutty assholes are what cost Kamala the election, I’m inclined to agree. I think Bill Maher and Liberals of his ilk merely serve to stoke the deluded belief that leftwing nutjobs are anything close to mainstream. We’ve got a VP who doesn’t think women should vote, for Christ’s sake. Anyone who is more worried about a Hollywood land acknowledgment than the real danger presented by the current administration is propping them up. The fact that he does it through outright lying is all the worse. I don’t care if it’s supposed to be funny. It’s destroying America.
Who’s Big Joel? I thought somebody just misspelled Billy.
Yeah. Lots of people did. I think it’s explained right up top.
My son, in his teenage years when kids typically try on assorted personas to see what fits best, went through a hilarious John Oliver phase. I’m not sure how conscious he (my son) was of the fact he was emulating Oliver so closely, but my son’s word choices, intonation, and world view were completely lifted from John Oliver episodes.
I thought it was pretty cute. He got over it eventually, of course, and relaxed into his own self, but I gotta say … as a parent, I feel I could have done worse than raise a kid who thought John Oliver was a decent role model, at least for a few months’ worth of YouTube videos intelligently documenting various atrocities going on in the world.