All the Completely Unrelatable Advice Bill Maher Just Gave to Children
Either because he’s run out of celebrity guests who are willing to spend more than an hour being repeatedly interrupted in a smoke-filled man cave, or his producers just straight up hate him, Bill Maher’s guest on this week’s episode of Club Random was… a whole bunch of children?
We’ve got to hand it to Maher, this may be the first episode of his YouTube show that actually lives up to its “random” branding.
Despite the fact that proud non-parent Maher has previously called all children “feral” and once told a Club Random guest, “I fucking hate kids,” this week’s episode is titled “BILL MAHER TALKS TO KIDS!” and it’s literally just 52 minutes of Maher chatting with minors — kind of like an episode of Kids Say the Darndest Things where Art Linkletter was perma-buzzed and mentally already in the backseat of a limo on his way to Seth MacFarlane’s hot tub.
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After the Hawk Tuah Girl episode proved that nakedly exposing just how old and out-of-touch Maher is as he condescendingly lectures America’s youth is a winning formula for clicks, this episode was billed as a “candid sit-down exploration of what kids’ lives are like today.”
Yeah, it wasn’t.
Much of the show was just young kids explaining modern technology to Maher. When he questioned what his first young guest could possibly do with a smartphone, she explained that she used it to play Roblox, the popular online gaming platform. “Like The Matrix?” Maher asked.
“No,” the confused child replied.
When another kid said that she watched YouTube more than traditional TV, Maher sincerely asked, “Can’t you watch YouTube on TV?”
The “being cornered by your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving” vibes continued as Maher suggested that 8-year-old Beverly should watch Game of Thrones, and bafflingly stated that a 10-year-old Korean girl shouldn’t watch Korean language TV because America was supposed to be a melting pot. “Like everyone would come, and we’d be in one big pot and we’d melt together,” he argued. “That’s sort of like a good idea. Don’t you think that we should melt?” Maher asked of the children who somehow resisted the urge to burst out laughing while fleeing the comedian’s basement.
His advice didn’t get much better as the show went on. He insisted that kids should take more of an interest in the life of Elvis Presley (“You know he was like a bad MF, right?”), claimed that boys shouldn’t be shy, told an aspiring actress to “get on a soap” and waxed poetically about his days as a teenage liquor store employee, then seemed genuinely surprised to learn from his 16-year-old guest that such an arrangement wouldn’t fly today.
And we regret to inform you that he made a kid outline the premise of the 2009 sitcom Modern Family, then responded, “Sofia Viagra, she’s hot, huh?”
When Maher did attempt to discuss pressing issues facing the youth of today, he was apparently too ill-informed to cobble together any kind of substantive conversation. For instance, he quizzed two 10-year-olds about the dangers of the internet. Seems like an important topic. His example? Googling climate change “leads to weather. Then you’re looking up stuff about the weather. Then it leads you to Stormy Daniels… Now you’re into porn. Now you’re into a porn site. What do you do?”
And I haven’t even mentioned how Maher awkwardly tried to shoehorn jabs at trans kids into multiple segments, telling one pair of child guests, “I assume you’ve both transitioned. I thought everybody these days was transitioned.”
The pink elephant in the room here is that Maher is famously never not imbibing during episodes of Club Random, so much so that he even refused to cut back on the alcohol and weed consumption at the request of prospective guest Steve-O, who has been sober for 16 years.
While Maher clearly attempted to downplay his trademark boozy vibe for the all-kid episode, tucking his liquor bottle out of sight during interviews, he still always had a drink on the go, and appeared to be slurring his words at some points, all while indiscriminately cycling through disconnected topics like some kind of verbal diarrhea jukebox.
To their credit, all of these kids were far more well-spoken and polite than the majority of Club Random guests (I’m looking at you, Richard Dreyfuss).
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