The Thing Everybody Gets Wrong About Bill Maher: He’s Never Been A Groundbreaking Comedian
Part 1: Chris Rock and Bill Maher’s Intersection And Why Rock Was Always The Funnier — And More Revolutionary -Comic
Over the last three years I have exercised far too many words trying to argue that Bill Maher was a cynic, a relic, and a hack because of his act now and how much it has changed. I imagine quite a few of my readers may have gotten sick of me writing about how horrible he is. It did not occur to me until fairly recently that part of the reason I personally do not enjoy Maher’s comedy is not solely because of his act now or even over the last several years.
I’ve made the argument over the years that much of Maher’s success was due far more to being in the right place at the right time. But because that’s true of so many success stories that really has no meaning. What I have been omitting in so many of my columns is that the reason so many on the left and others are enraged at him is not the same reason that so many have against almost every other comedian now has.
Because here’s the thing about Dave Chapelle and John Cleese and Roseanne and so many of the other comics we mourn as ‘losing touch’. The reason we do is because they were revolutionaries who changed how we looked at society. When we consider the work on Chapelle’s Show and Monty Python and Roseanne, we truly see just how revolutionary what they were doing at the time and can justifiably wonder what has changed about them that they don’t understand today’s reality. Maher is an outlier among the comics who bare this criticism because his act has never fundamentally changed from when he started out in the late 1980s. There is very little difference from having a show called Politically Incorrect in the 1990s and spending much of your act today raging against the wokeness of today’s youth.
Maher has not evolved as a comedian over nearly four decades in the industry and while that was once enough to keep a comic’s career going for years or decades, by the time Maher became a celebrity, it was starting to become stale and passe. There are many demonstrations that by the nineties Maher’s method of comedy was that of a different era, but I think the best way to do it is, to paraphrase Truffaut, show how other successful comedians were doing it.
In this sense, I am qualified because long before I even considered criticism as a field, I spent a lot of time watching cable TV and was therefore exposed to a lot of standup comedians over the years. I have seen the specials of the legends such as George Carlin, Robin Williams and Eddie Izzard. I’ve marveled at the work of such undervalued gems in the field such as Rita Rudner, Robert Schimmel, Lewis Black and one of my personal favorites, the late Richard Jeni. Jeni, for the record, is a particularly good comparison to Maher because I always remember watching so many of his specials on HBO over the years and being hysterical watching his material, which in many ways was always more ingenious than Maher’s. One of my favorite comedy specials of all time was: “A Steaming Pile of Me’ in which I saw some of the best routines I’ve ever seen any comedian do. Personal highlights include his portrayal of a terrified man thinking of the threat the recently incarcerated Martha Stewart might prove (it begins with a paranoid man worried that she’s ‘out there loading her salad shooter’) how Americans took the flaky buttery croissant and turned into the disgusting crois-sandwich and a routine about how he was out to dinner with his wife that’s starts out as vaguely sexist and then turns into a complete riot about how men will ignored their brain and listen to their testicles. He was ranked as one of the hundred greatest comedians of all time and I’ve missed him since he died in 2007.
So while I may not know stand up the way so many others do, I’ve seen enough comedy specials to know what makes people laugh and what doesn’t. And to demonstrate why Maher was never as good as people thought he was, the best way to start is with another comedian whose career path briefly crossed with Maher: Chris Rock.
Rock, as some of you may now, originally became known to many as a quasi-regular on Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1993. The fact that Rock rarely made an impression speaks more to the track record SNL has with African-American comics to that point. (The last one before Rock joined was when Damon Wayans was a semi-regular in the 1986 season.) To say that Rock never fit in was an understatement: even then Rock had a gift for making the audience uncomfortable with his jokes and Michaels could never find a way to make him work within the context of the series. He ended up on In Living Color not long after his gig ended and as he only partially joked when he guested during an appearance of Adam Sandler: “two weeks later, they kicked it off TV.” That was only a slight exaggeration; it was canceled six months after he began appearing.
Rock did have an acting career, and even then he could manage to balance drama and comedy well. He had a searing role in New Jack City at 25, was brilliant in the undervalued satire CB4 and had a memorable stint as a clueless murderer on Homicide. But he was still being underutilized when he ended up making some guest appearance as a ‘commentator’ during the 1996 Republican Primaries on Politically Incorrect.
I have little doubt Maher, who was only a year away from bringing his show to ABC, merely considered this helping a fellow comic: he had done so frequently in the early years of Politically Incorrect, most notably in regard to fellow SNL alum Al Franken. What not even he could have known was Rock had already recorded an HBO stand-up special that served as Rock’s coming out party.
Bring the Pain is one of the funniest specials I’ve ever seen on TV, and I’m not the only one who thought that: the 1997 Emmys gave Rock that prize for Best Variety, Comedy or Music Special and Best Writing for a Variety or Music Program. (This was before late night and comedy specials would get there own categories in the Emmys.) I only saw the much edited version on Comedy Central (my family didn’t start getting an HBO until 1998) but even there you could tell how utterly brilliant he was. From his joke about Marion Barry showing up at the Million Man March (“Even at our finest hour, we got a crackhead on stage!”) to his routine about why Colin Powell would never become President (his statements about America’s inability to accept a black President were incredibly prescient) as well his discussion to the recent acquittal of O.J Simpson in terms that he kind of got why it might have happened. Maher had made similar jokes in another special that same year, but were entirely about the media circus of it: Rock may have been the only comedian at the time, who had dared raised even humorously why it was a big deal (“It’s not about race! It’s about fame. If he’d been Orenthal the bus driver, his ass would be in jail right now.”)
Rock to be clear never flinched from making the audience uncomfortable even when Hollywood recognized him. Presenting an Emmy just before he ended up winning at the 1997 awards, he mocked the circumstances of his presence, Bryant Gumbel’s hosting and Ellen DeGeneres’ victory. “So far tonight, you’ve seen two blacks and a lesbian. Welcome home, CBS!” (the networks current slogan) Rock kept doing that all throughout his career particularly when he was invited to awards show, and I’m not just talking about when he hosting. On the 1999 Academy Awards when everyone was terrified about what might happen when Elia Kazan got his lifetime achievement award, Rock made everybody remember: “I saw Robert DeNiro backstage. And we all know he feels about rats!” I was frankly stunned that the Oscars invited him to host in 2004, not just because I thought network standards and practices would cut off any chance Rock had at being funny but because his gift as a comedian was in making the audience uncomfortable, something that the Oscars always avoids. This was made clear in his very first routine where he berated Hollywood’s obsession with Jude Law (something that Sean Penn admonished him for later) said he had seen Boat Trip and sent Cuba Gooding Jr. a check for $50 and a routine that he filmed later in which he asked average film goers if they had seen some of the nominated movies (they hadn’t) and most acknowledged seeing White Chicks instead. The fact that Rock was invited back again and again for appearances and hosting duties says less about the Oscars confidence in Rock and more about their utter desperation for anyone to do the job; for twenty five years (until Slap-Gate) he would never make an appearance without taking Hollywood to task about the kind of institution they were.
Looking at Rock’s four major comedy specials (Bring the Pain, Bigger and Blacker in 2000, Never Scared in 2004, and Kill the Messenger in 2008) and the specials that Maher was making constantly throughout that same period, it’s not a difficult or close question who the more irreverent, revolutionary, or funnier comedian was: Rock. Maher has spent his entire career, even in his younger years, only looking at the surface issues of some of the greatest problems facing America. Rock looks at these same issues and will always go deeper and reach more openly. This perhaps was made the most clear on the only time I remember him decided to deal with the Monica Lewinsky Bill Clinton scandal.
To be clear, both Maher and Rock believed the entire affair was (pun intended) overblown. But Rock is the only comedian I remember seeing at the time who even seemed remotely sympathetic to Monica and who definitely called out the hypocrisy of everybody who was on the side of Hilary.
“This is Hilary’s fault. That’s right. I said, this is Hilary’s fault. Everyone’s saying Hilary’s a hero. She’s not a hero! Aquaman’s a hero! He can talk to the fishes; what did Hilary do? Hilary put the free world in danger!….She’s the First Lady! She’s the first one who’s supposed on her knees to suck her husband’s d — — ”
I laughed hysterically at that joke at the time and it’s still as close an assessment to the hypocrisy the world took when ‘the world’ took Hilary’s side. Do I think it was as simple as that? Of course not. But I don’t remember any other late night comedian going as directly at how the Clinton machine had made Hilary the hero and Monica the villain.
And it’s just one of so many examples of how much better and ambitious Rock was as a comedian at the time. I remember watching Never Scared, which compared to an HBO special Maher did at the same time (2003’s Victory Begins at Home) is infinitely superior when it comes to dealing with some of the issues Maher tries to raise. Perhaps the most obvious is their difference when it came to drugs:
Maher dealt with the problems with cocaine and comparing it to pharmaceuticals, which was a valid joke then and now. But because at the end of the day all Maher cared about was something that mattered to him, he then spent three minutes dealing with Aaron Sorkin being arrested for doing mushrooms on a plane. (Something, I should mention, that had happened more than a year and a half earlier.) Rock dealt with the same issue, but he spent eight minutes dealing with it in a mix of angry comedy and social commentary. He fundamentally agreed with Maher’s basic thesis, but he was more direct about it leading up to it: “The government doesn’t care about keeping you safe! They sell guns at Wal-Mart!” Then after two minutes laying into all the pharmaceutical commercials, he then spent five arguing about the two reasons why the government cares so much about drugs being illegal. His first point, which was a straight commentary, was simple and accurate: “The government makes t0o much money locking up people in prison”, something that was impossible to refute then, much less twenty years. The second point was slightly funnier, but just as on point:
“God forbid some black and brown people get wealthy. Cause we don’t go no wealthy people. We got some rich ones; we ain’t got no wealthy ones. What’s the difference? Here’s the difference: Shaq is rich! The white man who signs Shaq’s checks is wealthy.”
Considering everything we know about the distribution of wealth, how it is tied fundamentally to slavery and racism, it’s hard to argue with him. Rock went further:
“Only the white man can profit from pain! From every great fortune there is a great sin.”
He went on to use the example of the Kennedys, but that argument pertains pretty much to any billionaire family in this country. Considering what we now know about what the Sackler family was doing right then — and had done before — it’s even more accurate. Rock also argued about the hypocrisy every time American raises a certain crisis about any major sin. The most obvious one at the time was guns:
“White man makes guns, no one does anything. Black rapper says guns; congressional hearing!”
Sadly, we haven’t made much progress from that point.
Rock, I should add, is far more successful than Maher in a way. He had an HBO talk-variety special from 1997–2002, has had a fairly successful film career, and has participated in quite a few ways in Peak TV. He produced and narrated the well-done CW series Everybody Hates Chris!, considered a classic by many among critics and genre fans and most recently gave a superb dramatic performance as Loy Cannon on the fourth season of Fargo. He may occasionally make movies with his friends from SNL that may seem beneath his material and sometimes we may never get what he’s trying to say (I don’t think I’ll ever get what he was trying to do with Pootie Tang on his show or the movie he made.) But few could accuse Rock of not being unambitious, radical or a game changer. Rock was revolutionary in a way that Bill Maher just isn’t and never will be. I’m not sure the entertainment world would be much worse if Maher had spent his life as an average stand-up comedian all his life; I know it would be if Rock had remained so. Maher may have given Rock a leg up but I’m pretty sure he would have made it on his own. He was too great a comic not to be.
Now I imagine those of you who defend Maher might argue it’s unfair to compare Rock to Maher because Rock is African American and Maher is white. For those pedants among you, there’s actually a contemporary comedian of that era who is a white man but whose career — and perhaps, more importantly, his comedy — is different from Maher’s but illustrates what a comedian usually does to thrive. I will deal with him in the next story.