Bill Maher Prefers Performing in Texas Because They’re Not ‘Politically Correct’
The “both sides are equally bad” shtick that Bill Maher has been peddling for the past decade is one of the biggest headaches in contemporary comedy – and, as we all know, everything is bigger in Texas.
The Real Time host and HBO mainstay is currently touring the Lone Star state, and, in this late stage in his career, Maher finds himself perfectly at home in the land of the George Bushes. Though Maher’s popularity peaked in the 2000s when the smarmy centrist was the sardonic voice of anti-Republican anger, his ongoing hysteria at the rise of “wokeism” and emasculation at the hands of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie have pushed Maher’s brand further towards the fence-sitting middle where he is free to grab the low-hanging fruit from both sides.
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Speaking with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Maher claimed that he’d rather do stand-up shows in “red states” like Texas than deign to take his act to PC hellholes like San Francisco. Calling himself an “old-school liberal,” Maher said that the crazies from both sides should sit down and work together to settle their differences the way we used to bridge divides in the old days – this guy knows we had a civil war, right?
Maher claimed that his favorite tour destinations are “all the red states,” saying, “Whenever you play a city, of course, you’re in a blue area within a red state and it’s kind of the perfect combination. Because in a blue city in a blue state, you’re kind of risking having people be a little too politically correct.” Maher added, “We’re all so politicized these days, we’re all so partisan, in our own bubbles and in our silos.”
“There is a lot of nonsense that goes on on the left and we can both laugh at both things and sit there together and not break into fights and there’s no hate,” Maher explained, “We’re sort of feeding that hunger, I believe, that’s out there for some common sense centrism.”
That “common sense centrism,” in his evaluation, means equating every issue with either political side regardless of the scale or severity – for instance, when the topic of book bans came up, he claimed that Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans of erasing history and censoring sensitive subject-matter, because, while Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abott were emptying public school libraries and banning important pieces of literature like Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, earlier this year, HarperCollins made the controversial decision to alter language used in Agatha Christie novels to omit the slurs common of the time period.
“The left is canceling or rewriting Agatha Christie because she wrote something in the 1920s and yes, there are some words we don’t use anymore, some ethnic slurs. But OK, here’s how we know she wasn’t writing in the modern era, her name is Agatha. The left seems to cancel books slowly while the right will just burn them in a big pile,” Maher claimed.
The book ban comment is emblematic of the kinds of false equivalences that are so commonplace in Maher’s media appearances and podcast episodes – a private publishing company making a misguided business decision about a handful of swears isn’t remotely comparable to a state government attempting to directly control the development of kids’ moral compasses by banning entire shelves full of culturally and politically significant books. But telling the truth wouldn’t sell tickets in Texas, so Maher made his usual “everyone is equally wrong except me” blanket statement and called it a day.
