Of Course Bill Maher Helped Woody Harrelson Write His Controversial 'SNL' Monologue
Bill Maher just revealed that he was partially behind Woody Harrelson’s bizarre, contentious anti-vax conspiracy monologue from the actor’s most recent Saturday Night Live appearance. Because of course he is.
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When Harrelson hosted SNL back in February, his long-winded opening monologue about a fake screenplay that paid off with a not-so-subtle insinuation that Big Pharma fabricated the COVID pandemic in order to peddle vaccines drew controversy and questions over how Harrelson slipped the conspiracy theory past Lorne Michaels’ censors. Many speculated that Harrelson defied SNL higher-ups and went off-script with the punchline of his screenplay story – improvisation being a pretty significant “no-no” at 30 Rockefeller Plaza – but no one should be surprised at all to learn that the endlessly self-satisfied centrist Maher was a significant influence behind Harrelson’s rant.
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On yesterday’s episode of the podcast Club Random with Bill Maher, the Real Time host told David Spade that he had worked closely with Harrelson leading up to the SNL appearance in order to finely hone a cutting indictment of the COVID-19 vaccine. Maher claimed that he and Harrelson have discussed vaccinations for "too many hours" – most of which were presumably spent rolling joints.
Maher bragged to Spade about Harrelson’s monologue, “I worked on that with him," explaining how he and Harrelson have spent significant time discussing vaccines without a single doctor present. "What a ballsy move," Maher cracked, “It's the plot of certain movies: 'It's live. They can't stop me. I'm going to do this.' And this guy did it in real life.”
Spade speculated that Harrelson must have added the anti-vax punchline after running the monologue by Michaels, saying that spreading conspiracy theories at the top of the show is “not really what they do there.”
“I don't know how much they knew about what the ending of that story was, but it was also a brilliant way to make that point," Maher responded, saying that he shares “90 percent” of Harrelson’s opinions on vaccines, though “I certainly don't go as far as he does."
Maher detailed how his long-standing vaccine skepticism is based on a general distrust of Big Pharma due to the clearly intentional and comprehensively documented effort by groups such as the Sackler Family to get millions of Americans dependent on highly addictive opioids. Maher’s own anti-vax sentiments are much more extensively archived than Harrelson’s as the talk show host has historically extended his healthy distrust and dislike of painkiller pushers into an illogical support of roundly debunked myths concerning vaccines and autism.
With all this in mind, it should surprise no one that these two cooked this nonsense up together. It's as predictable and unoriginal as your average SNL sketch, so in that sense, right at home.
