Ben Shapiro Says Bill Burr Was A ‘F*cking A**hole’ on Bill Maher’s Podcast
Ben Shapiro, ever the polite podcast guest, made sure to ask Bill Maher’s permission before kicking his friends in the crotch. “Am I allowed to shit on the other guests you’ve had on the show or not?” he asked demurely.
Impressed by the good show of manners, Maher told Shapiro of course, please fire away, good sir. Shapiro got right to the point: “Bill Burr was a fucking asshole on this show.”
“That was so long ago!” said Maher of Burr’s appearance less than six months ago.
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“It pissed me off. Really, it was quite terrible,” pouted Shapiro. “That one’s been in my craw for a while.”
It didn’t make much of a dent in Maher’s psyche, who claims he doesn’t remember anything particularly objectionable. “Bill and I have a great relationship. It’s not what I call a loving relationship, but we have a grudging respect for the other one,” Maher said. “And when he is funniest is when I purposely goad him because he's Mr. Regular Guy. I’m not really a pompous professor, but I can play one because I know a lot of words he doesn’t and things he doesn’t, which he finds to be elitist.”
Yeah yeah, Shapiro gets all that. But “the thing that ticked me off was where he started essentially getting high-handed about — ‘Well, you don’t know anything about the Middle East and you can’t speak about this, but I love the protesters. And the protesters are great.’”
Maybe the problem was Shapiro just didn’t understand comedy. To find out, Maher abruptly changed the subject. “Were you funny in school?” he asked Shapiro. Before his guest could answer, Maher ran down his own scholastic comedy background. “I was not the class clown. That was too beneath me. I was a snob even as a kid, but I was kind of the class wit, you know, I would try to make the teacher laugh. Were you anything like that in school?
“A little bit,” responded Shapiro. “I was pretty biting. I mean, I was two years younger than everybody. I skipped third grade and ninth grade.”
What Shapiro revealed next is the key to unlocking his entire public persona. “When you skip a couple of grades and you don’t hit your growth spurt until senior year, that’s likely to result in you basically being the class punching bag.” Shapiro claimed he suffered physical abuse way worse than locker-stuffing, describing kids hitting him with belts.
“Kids are the real Nazis,” says Maher, remembering his own torture at the hands of bigger, stronger classmates. “You have to civilize them, and before you do, their instinct is to be awful.”
“Kids are innocent but not good,” Shapiro agreed. “Especially in high school, they have an innate ability to spot the chink in your armor and just go right for it.”
So based on his school days, it’s no wonder Shapiro reacted so strongly to the Bill Burr appearance. It wasn’t about the Middle East at all. Shapiro believed Big Bully Burr was picking on intelligent but weak Maher. That kind of treatment still rankles him — “You carry a chip on your shoulder.”
