Bill Maher Hates It When His Own Fans Are A-Holes

Bill Maher just can’t win. On his Club Random podcast, he told comic Bobby Lee that he can’t seem to deliver jokes properly these days. He recently did back-to-back gigs in two different cities. The first night, he told a joke that didn’t quite land because Maher hadn’t performed in two weeks. “It’s not quite in my head enough. I’m not hitting as great as I could if it was really fresh in my mind. So I got about 80 percent out of that joke.”

Then surely Maher nailed the joke the next night, right? Think again. “The second night, because I just did it the night before, I’m a little bored with it. I remember exactly how to do that so I feel like a hack.”

But Maher isn’t the main culprit to blame for his lackluster stand-up performances. The real obstacle to audience enjoyment is his audience. “I get lots of people who are just too enthusiastic,” he told Lee about fans who shout during his show. “And they think they’re helping or they just want to say something. They don’t get it. Comedy is timing and the fact that you just yelled out when you did, you deprived the entire audience, like a few thousand people, of that punchline. And there’s no going back.”

Enthusiastic audience members ruin it for everybody. “I mean, this is what they’re paying for, to have their gut exercised by laughter,” said Maher, pointing an imaginary finger at the guy who just yelled, “Woo!” “And you took that one away.”

The worst part, explained Maher, is then “you have to yell at them.” (Note to Maher: You do not have to yell at people who paid to hear you do stand-up.)

“I said it the other night: I just hate it when my own fans are assholes,” Maher scolded. “Because they did it again. They did it twice. I was like, ‘I just told you! You deprived these people, and you did it again! You’re my fan, and you’re an asshole.’” 

The fact that someone could be an asshole and a Bill Maher fan is mind-boggling to Bill Maher. “That’s so hard for me to compute,” he said about the seeming contradiction. “You know, it just bugs me.” 

Lee concluded that Maher is out-of-touch when it comes to most stand-ups’ experiences. After all, when was the last time Maher told jokes in an actual club — hundreds and hundreds of years ago, right? Maher couldn’t pinpoint the date. “It certainly wasn’t in this century,” Maher scoffed. “I was doing theaters by the end of the century.”

“Wow,” said Lee. “You forgot what it’s like Friday night, second show at a club. It’s a fucking nightmare.”

Maher shuddered as he remembered slumming it among the common comedy fans. “Man, I haven’t forgotten at all,” he said. “I could be a billion years old, and I couldn’t forget that.”