What was with Merle Haggard on Real Time With Bill Maher? Miffed at the satellite problem? Drunk? Just not comfortable with interviews? Or interviews where the interviewer is unseen? He just seemed ill at ease.
Didn’t see the show in question, but as a on-again off-again fan, I can testify that Haggard has always been a bit of a gruff sort, not entirely comfortable in such settings.
FWIW
Sir Rhosis
Satellite setups, with their weird second-and-a-half delays are always awkward, even when it’s professional newspeople. I thought Merle did okay, especially getting the hang of it toward the end, and the audience seemed delighted with him. Maher doesn’t really help things sometimes because a lot of humor is timing, and you can’t really use that on satellite feeds.
While I’m here, I’d like to say that I wish Richard Belzer would have shut the fuck up for two seconds so we could have heard more from Herbie Hancock.
I think he was annoyed by the satellite problems, but also just is not comfortable in interviews as a rule.
It seems like comedians are always the biggest motormouths on these shows and musicians are always the quietest. I also think there must be something to the idea that comics have the most pent up anger. I think the nature of standup comedy is such that comics more compulsively feel the need to keep talking – to keep the show going – when a microphone is on them. Comics perform their craft alone, with no band or cast mates to back them up. Silence is death, so it becomes extremely uncomfortable for them to shut up while they’re “on.”
I actually thought it might be age related. He had a couple of half answered questions and seemed a little slow on the draw even considering the satellite delay (This is of course having never seen Merle Haggard before.)
Well, I won’t disagree about Belzer going on too much, and I have nothing bad to say about Hancock as a musician, but the little he did say made me think he really didn’t have anything very important to say, anyway.
Neither did Belzer.
I meant to add, after this satellite incident (they lost the satellite connection just before they were about to go to Haggard at the beginning of the show, and had to wait about half an hour until they got it up again), and the heckling from the audience that happened a few weeks, ago, why in the heck are they continuing to do this show live? What does it buy them?
It’s not news, and it’s not like SNL, where the fact that it’s live gives a real excitement and edge to the whole show. But there’s not much of an up-side for Real Time. The only way anyone knows (or cares) that Real Time is live is when something goes wrong like this.
After the heckling incident, I had a feeling that they might start taping it to avoid providing a temptation to future hecklers.
Maybe after this, they will.