(hosting Annie Leibowitz and Doug Jones)
Not that I’m gonna stop watching him over this (but if he keeps it up?)…
His opening monologue was so unapologetically shitty and crappy, so devoid of anything remotely close to “funny” (always a subjective call - I know - but still - WHOA), so bogged down with grade-three-level peurility and predictibility and lameness, GAWD, I almost feeling like pitting this.
And, to rub salt in the wound - the mechanical-seeming applause with each crummy offering.
Normally, if I get in at least two or three out-loud laughs from the monlogue, I’m good. But in the last…I don’t know how long, now, that hasn’t really been the case.
Has the writing been slipping in that dept. or is it just me getting all lawnchairly?
My opinion of Maher lately is that he’s become a cranky old man who’s stuck in the '90s and can’t accept that the world of comedy has moved on, and he has a grudge against “millennials” (by which he means anyone under 40 or so) because he can’t use the N-word anymore and doesn’t get social media.
Doesn’t sound like the episode you watched was any different.
Yeah, I haven’t watched him in years, even though I liked him when he first started out.
He does have one crucial function in my life: he’s a reminder that old guys get crotchety, petty and annoyed (and annoyING). And I need to actively work against that in my life.
I consider him a cautionary tale about not getting arrogant as a progressive advocate. Progressivism is always moving forward, figuring out that something that we accepted in the past may have bad roots, or that we were ignoring things that turned out to be important. You’ve got to be willing to be able to move on and be introspective, and not assume you are always right and have it all figured out.
We watched it. It was fine. The monologue was not memorable enough for me to comment on, however. I was disappointed with his interview with Fran Lebowitz. Mostly he seemed impressed that she’s touring and making money. She didn’t get a chance to actually say much.
100% agree - I was like - let’s move on from the touring/money thing. After a while, I sensed FL’s slight bemusement from his questions.
To his credit, though, the previous week’s show is the first keeper in my dvd library in almost a year, with the Bob Odenkirk opening i-view, where Maher came across almost fanboyish, definitely with some spark and they covered quite a bit of ground. And…hey, it’s Bob!
Took a look at it and yes, this installment was pretty weak, even in comparison with others from this same season. Agree he wasted the Leibowitz interview. The opening monologue’s usually not the best part of the show, anyway.
And Gen-Z’ers, again as a collective, don’t forget them.
Eh, I can “own it” if one day I find I’ve become a Cranky Old Man – but that’s because I know that can happen, and I don’t expect to depend on public opinion approval to continue to have a life. Could do worse than going around “curbing your enthusiasm”. But I hope I never get to believing that sometime around my 45th birthday we had progressed to where we needed progressing and it was time to stop there and say Mission Accomplished.
Thing is, Maher still sometimes shows up on game, be it for the whole show or for specific spots. But other times not so. This was one of the latter times.
Does he even differentiate? In my experience, Cranky Old Men of his cohort tend to lump everybody from preschoolers to children of the Carter administration as “millennials”.
I’ve seen his show many times over the years and liked it. But the one time I tried watching one of his stand-up specials I had to turn it off after 10 minutes. Exactly as you said. Un-funny 3rd grade level low hanging fruit humor. Just awful. Nothing clever or witty about it.
Thanks for the link, I don’t generally watch his show.
Monologue seemed fine to me. I got a couple chuckles, first from the crowd work when he got them to applaud the LA riots, and then again towards the end; maybe the line about Musk buying coke to put cocaine back in the recipe. I didn’t get the Nick Cannon reference so I had to look it up. Apparently, Cannon is being mocked on social media after posting a maternity announcement posing with the baby mama of his eighth child. Yikes, man, wear a rubber!
Maher didn’t seem particularly mean or nasty bitter to me, like I associate with his stand-up specials. For him he seemed practically jovial.
You must have missed his take on the Gabby Petito / Bryan Laundrie case, which more or less boiled down to “Look at these stupid millennials who think living in a van is cool, why don’t they go get real jobs?”
(I took the liberty to delete the mentioning of stand-up specials in your quote because I’ve never seen one and thus not qualified to comment on)
Agreed (concerning the monologue). And true, he can definitely be peevish and vindictive and, heh, “whiny little bitch”-like, however, I still totally stand by my OP in that I don’t feel the strength of his material has sustained well, over time.
Funny (well, odd ‘funny’) that his New Rules segment is still reliably good, with only the rare irrelevant, inconsequential, time-wasting tangent, while the monologue’s downturn in yuks for this boob toober hopefully isn’t a red flag for the rest of the show to eventually sink downwards.
Oh dear lord, my heart a-pittter-patter! Never came across the force that is Kirsten Soltis Anderson until she was on his show recently.
Oh my.
Maher’s comedy has been pretty terrible for a while. Though for shows like his, it’s less him and more his writing staff that’s letting him down. Maybe all the competent writers left to work for John Oliver. His interviews are also pretty dismal these days. Occasionally he manages to get a special guest off their PR script and it’s interesting, but 90% of the time it’s just a confused mess. Bill talks too much and half the time nothing of value gets said. He also loves to suck old counter-culture icon dick every chance he gets.
BUT, I still watch the show semi-regularly because the panel is often some of the best political discussion on TV. He sometimes does a good job of calling out the worst parts of the left and pointing how how fucking counterproductive they tend to be. He used to do a good job of getting right-leaning people to come on the show and allowing them to hang themselves with their words, but since Trump happened there don’t seem to be any GOPers left willing to have a real conversation on TV.
I admit it, I don’t get the appeal of Twitter. A while back, I did see Mahr rant about YouTubers who drop out of regular jobs and become van lifers for arrogantly believing anyone would want to follow their lives. I couldn’t help but wonder how those people were all that different from a guy who opted out of a regular job for a career where he stands up in front of people arrogantly believing they’ll care about what he has to say. But I admit it, I don’t get the appeal of a lot of YouTube personalities.
Edit: Oh, and I see someone linked to the rant I mentioned.
This is something I have noticed – IMO it is what happens when he’s not hearing from the guest what he expects/wants. I mean, yes, sure, it is the Bill Maher show, and it’s the general host prerrogative to steer the conversation in a desired direction, but that only goes so far before it becomes just taking over and using the guest as foil for what you wanted to say anyway.
(In this one, during the Fran Leibowitz segment it looked like all he cared about was being able to use this platform to say to her, “please write another book”)
And I agree that New Rules remain consistently superior to the monologues, especially for the “final” New Rule of every week, and that is probably a reflection that it is assembled and written with greater care and focus.
“Cranky old men” are just angry young men with a few more years under their belt. We’re supposed to dislike people because they don’t mellow. Well, when they do we call them “sell outs”.
