Bill Maher’s New HBO Special Proves He’s Nothing More Than Rob Schneider With A Thesaurus

In Bill Maher’s new HBO special Is Anyone Seeing This?, the veteran comic makes the same lazy arguments Rob Schneider does anytime a podcast host offers him a mic and a chair:  The Left is trying to take away his free speech, and everyone but the comic is crazy. 

Granted, Maher does it with a much better vocabulary. He’s articulate and sly, plus he has the bonus of an audience that he’s indoctrinated over several years of HBO’s Real Time and his Club Random podcasts. If you’re a fan of Maher’s “common sense” rants — he’s just telling it like it is, folks — then his new special is more red meat for your comedy diet. 

But even with his thesaurus and professor-lecture cadence, Maher makes comic arguments that would get you kicked off a high school debate team. He cherry-picks the most ridiculous examples of, say, university inclusion policy (They want to ban the term “white paper”!) and then declares that all college campuses are CRAZY! It doesn’t take more than a moment’s thought to topple Maher’s Jenga tower — his conclusions are so extreme that any good point he might have made gets lost in the hyperbole. 

Give Maher credit for being even-handed — he truly looks down his nose at everybody. He’s an equal-opportunity condescender. His enemies’ list is long: social justice warriors, the woke crowd, the extreme Left, Republicans of most stripes, Donald Trump, white people, religious people, Muslims and kids these days. 

Boy, does Maher have it in for kids these days, the ones “who can’t make it to the mailbox without an Epipen and a GPS tracking device.” (Er, is Maher referring to a “phone”?) And another thing — kids talk back! Maher has heard the online chatter. When young people pay attention to Maher at all, they see a privileged blowhard who’s hopelessly out-of-touch. “I’m not out-of-touch,” he insists. “Your ideas are stupid.” Young people are hypersensitive and overentitled, he says. “Fuck you, you fucks!” 

Yep, in this comedy special, those are the punchlines.

Like Rob Schneider, Maher is mad that he can’t say things like the R-word anymore because this country is so R-word! He’s upset that Trump got re-elected, mainly because he used up all of his Trump jokes during the first term. The growing trans community is a “TikTok challenge that got out of hand.” He hates victims, and yet the irony escapes him as he wails about all who would squash his free speech. (Another irony: At last check, no one has attempted to silence Bill Maher.) 

In an earlier day, Maher would have identified as a liberal but “the Left changed, not me!” Maher is definitely on to something there. The world is changing, and Maher doesn’t like it one bit. All was swell in the universe when Maher could hang out with 20-something models at the Playboy Mansion, making them giggle with his R-word-splattered jokes. Now that his favorite punchlines are out of vogue and the romantic age gap continues to widen, what’s he supposed to do — evolve?

In what might be the special’s funniest bit, Maher tells the crowd that people are always telling him how good he looks. They wonder if he’s had plastic surgery on that boyish mug (he says with a straight face), even as he insists he hasn’t gone under the knife. Maher looks just fine for 68, but come on. Would you look at this guy and wonder how he’s stayed so devastatingly handsome? 

Back in May, Maher told Jerry Seinfeld that this HBO special might well be his last. With his TV show and podcasts doing well, maybe it’s time to move on. “After this year, I’m going to stop (doing stand-up),” he pledged. 

After watching Is Anyone Else Seeing This, I have one question: Bill, can we get that in writing?