Bill Maher Washington Post Article

A Real Live WireEnjoying a Long Run On HBO, Bill Maher Could Go On Zinging
By William BoothWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, March 9, 2007; C01
LOS ANGELES

It's time for the Friday-afternoon writers' meeting in Bungalow 27 at CBS Television City, which is just a fancy way of saying that 10 guys are sitting around a trailer trying to come up with two more Ann Coulter jokes.

Then in comes Bill Maher, to the head of the table. Maher is male-model trim, a bit of a waif, actually, with smooth pale skin, dressed in designer jeans accessorized with a biker belt buckle. In person, he looks almost delicate.

Maher seems to be subdued, tired, congested -- or maybe he is just not "on." Still, everyone in the room defers to him. Most of the writers on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" have been with him for years, some dating back to his run on his show "Politically Incorrect," which he hosted until shortly after 9/11. He was fired by ABC after famously saying that the suicide hijackers who hit the twin towers might have been many things but they weren't cowards, an opinion that earned Maher a warning from White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that all Americans "need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

In many ways, these are the happy times for "Real Time," which recently began its fifth season. The Democrats have taken control of Congress (so there are new ankles to bite), the Bush White House has its first convicted felon, and the 2008 (high-stakes, wide-open) presidential campaign has gotten off to a roaring start with a field filled with oversize personalities capable of generating lots of raw material for comedy. Clean and articulate, indeed.

The Friday meeting is the last gathering before the show airs that night, and Maher and his writers are always looking for the last good ping, for the latest news to fold into the show -- do they do anything about the eight U.S. attorneys being fired? Or the secretary of the Army being ousted over the Walter Reed hospital scandal? Or a riff on Coulter, who slurred presidential candidate John Edwards with a gay epithet while addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference?

Political satire on TV increasingly is becoming its own hot genre. And the perfect breaking news for Maher occurs late Friday -- too late for Leno or Letterman. Stewart and Colbert don't even air on Fridays. Maher, who broadcasts live, adds stuff until the very last second.

This is topical TV as competitive sport. There are the late shows, the late-lates, the Comedy Centrals, "Saturday Night Live," MadTV. Even Fox News entered the fray with its conservative-bent "1/2 Hour News Hour." Plus, HBO is planning to throw into the mix "The Gaggle," to cover the 2008 elections -- hosted by a rotating younger demo of political pundits, like former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, stand-up comic Marc Maron and Republican operative Mike Murphy.

With so many vying to be political and smart and funny, perhaps some kid out there is gunning for Maher's salary?

"On our old show," Maher says about "Politically Correct" and its celebrity guests, "you had to play to their issue. Pamela Anderson? You talk about animal rights issues. You're not going to Bosnia. This show is different because our guests are bright."

Among the panelists this season: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, playwright David Mamet, the Dutch parliamentarian and "Infidel" author Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

"So they can talk about anything," Maher says. "They're not going to freeze up if you say 'Walter Reed.' They not going to ask who's Walter Reed. But we have to cover more now. What happened this week? It is a weekly wrap-up show. It's not the Bill Maher agenda show. It's not the guest agenda show. The news is the agenda."

Like you have to cover everything so viewers will keep . . . informed? "It's better than nothing," Maher says, then snorts a laugh. "But barely."
* * *
They tape "Real Time" in the CBS studio that on weekdays is taken over by Bob Barker and "The Price Is Right." The greenroom where the guests mingle before the show is the size of Maher's walk-in closet in Beverly Hills. There's a platter of fruit and cheese. Nobody cracks open the bottle of Scotch. In come the night's guests: Massachusetts liberal congressman Barney Frank, MSNBC conservative host Joe Scarborough and John Ridley, author and NPR commentator. They appear to know each other.

"On other panel shows, they like to keep the guests in separate rooms, to keep them riled up. Like they poke them with sticks to get them mad at each other," says Scott Carter, executive producer of "Real Time," who's been with Maher since "Politically Incorrect" (1994-2002). "We want to be different. We want it to be like a dinner party, but with really, really opinionated guests."

Says Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida who often spars with Maher over religion (Maher refers to believers as delusional), "I love doing the show!" He continues: "The thing I love about the guy is he's intellectually honest. He's not predictable. He's fair."

Psst. A little secret. A number of Republicans, conservatives and rightward blogger-types dislike Maher, seeing him as a traditional Hollywood liberal and as something of a 51-year-old sybarite -- he drives a Lexus hybrid, has never married, dates fly girls, has no desire for babies (whom he calls "drooling snot wads") and goes to the Playboy Mansion -- a lot a lot.

But Maher is more of the libertarian. He's for the death penalty and animal rights; he'd legalize gambling, prostitution and drugs; he'd shut down the National Endowment for the Arts; he's anti-religion and pro-defense; and he voted for Dole, Nader and Kerry. You know who loves the guy? Maher is a Friend of Bill -- and not Bill Clinton (who has never done the show; neither has his wife, though the bookers have begged). No, he's a friend of Fox's Bill O'Reilly, who has Maher on all the time.

"I think conservatives are mistaken thinking they're better off not doing the show," Scarborough says. "They should. It's a great forum."
* * *
The show is about to start. Head writer Billy Martin is warming up the studio audience (literally -- the studio is kept as cold as a wine locker). Want to hear a joke? Martin asks. Clean or dirty? The audience hoot-votes for the latter. "Dirty, of course," Martin says. "A liberal audience." (Maher says he wishes he could get a more mixed crowd.)

At the edge of the stage, Carter takes a seat in front of a computer console upon which he can type messages to Maher, who does not wear an earpiece. The show is a high-wire act, and rare for TV these days, it is a full hour, live (11 p.m. ET), with no commercial breaks.

The show begins with what they call "the cold open," a three-minute taped bit, in this case a spoof about "Titanic" director James Cameron's contention that he and "his TV scientists" have cracked the DNA code of Jesus and his wife and kid -- but in the spoof they make Jesus into Santa Claus. The audience laughs, a little. But they don't seem to really get it.

Then Maher comes out for the opening monologue -- and now he is definitely switched to "on." "Have you heard about this, this week? The Taliban tried to blow up Dick Cheney. Don't worry, he's okay. [Audience goes awww, as if they're disappointed.] No, he was never in danger. At the time of the attack he was safely asleep in his coffin." Etc.

He does a joke about Barack Obama's ancestors owning slaves, and Strom Thurmond's ancestors owning Al Sharpton's. "Now, in other slave-owning news this week . . . " He does a bit about the John McCain gaffe on "Letterman" when McCain described U.S. soldiers' deaths in Iraq as "wasted" vs. "sacrificed." "But to put it in perspective, when McCain was a prisoner in Vietnam, George Bush was wasted. And. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I meant to say he was sacrificing brain cells." It is only later, when deconstructing the show, that a viewer might realize that the monologue was not only intended to be funny but, equally important, it also provides the information and context needed to follow the discussions to come.

Maher then does one of two satellite interviews: the first with New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, who manages to come across as more opinionated than Maher when he calls the Bush team "without question the most dangerous administration we've ever had in the history of the country."

The other satellite chat is with actress Mia Farrow, just back from Darfur. "It's not funny. It's not entertaining. And worst of all, it's not changing," says Maher in his Mia intro. Farrow tells a story about a refugee mom whose son was ripped from her arms and bayoneted to death before the mother's eyes. Then Maher manages to pivot and makes a few jokes about how many foreign babies Farrow and Angelina Jolie have each adopted (10 vs. 3).

On his keyboard, producer Carter types Maher a note: "Great mono & sat!"

To the panel discussion. Opening line from Maher to Barney Frank: "What's the Democratic plan to kill the people who need killing?" The guests are, as Maher promised, frisky and informed, though they do keep overlapping each other's lines. Over the next half-hour, the panel discusses: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether Jesus is the son of God, the legacy of slavery, the condition of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the treatment of wounded veterans, wasted lives compared with sacrificed lives, and Al Gore's weight. Maher's concluding editorial? On human papillomavirus. The show is remarkable in its heaviness of content.

Afterward, sitting in his dressing room, Maher says that his hope for the show is what he calls "smart for free" -- the idea that an audience can get new information and insights, sandwiched between some jokes and a few dirty words. "We try to have enough comedic steppingstones, so if it does get heavy, there's something coming in five minutes that they'll laugh at," Maher says.

"But if you took away the joke, and there's no idea there, I'm not interested in that, either."