Maher's draw is obvious: His brand of comedy mixes a reasonable outlook on politics with biting scorn for stupidity and counterproductive thinking. Or so his fans think. Other people––the people who leave comments on my Facebook wall, for example––think he's an asshole.
That Maher can be combative and unfair isn't what worries me. What worries me is that so few of his fans see him for the pundit that he is. In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, anchor Stephen Colbert defines, with his usual grinning sarcasm, what that means. Pundits have to have an opinion on everything; they have to be be right, even when they're wrong; they have to be loud and quotable.
The problem is that the man fosters a combative consensus. Where Jon Stewart looks at through the news through a set of values we think of as common to the human race, frequently coming across as more compassionate and even-keel than his audience, and Stephen Colbert satirizes punditry by exaggerating the moves of men less aware of their ridiculousness than himself, Bill Maher casts himself as a smarter, funnier, liberal version of Bill O'Reilly.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if he were put into a room full of people who didn't necessarily agree with him. His show is full of canned, sycophantic laughter, and his guests are hand-picked to either agree with him and laugh at all his jokes, or be dumb enough to lose to him in an argument. He puts on a self-satisfied face after his one-liners, and pauses while his fans shower him with their agreement.
Just watch to see how insufferable he is.
Real Time with Bill Maher is political humor in a bubble, and I think Maher's smug sense of self-righteousness underscores the thickness and insularity of that bubble. What the man doesn't seem to realize is that good political humor isn't about being right, it's about following the conventional rules of humor, and that means giving the other side (those people he's so good at lampooning) a fairer shake than he does.
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