HBO host Bill Maher trumpeted marijuana legalization for decades and now that it’s happened in California and in many other states, he is one happy stand-up comic.
“I don’t have to stress when I travel like I used to,” said Maher, who has several comedy tour dates over the next month. “I used to travel with the smallest amount of pot I could get away with. I’d hide it in a piece of Kleenex in my underwear. I was so afraid I’d get on an airplane and wind up in jail.”
Maher knows recreational pot usage is still illegal in many places, but the fear factor is no longer there.
In the meantime, his weekly HBO show, “Real Time,” has remained a regular Friday night presence for 18 years and with a recent contract renewal, is set to run at least another three years. He loves telling jokes in front of live audiences and was one of the first late-night hosts to get back in the studio in September of 2020.
Not that he didn’t take pride in the shows he did over five months from his home, much of it outside in his yard. He even did his opening monologue as if there was a live audience while the editors inserted archival clips of audiences laughing from decades past, no matter how absurd or out of context.
“We used my man cave pretty well,” he said. “I felt my monologue looked more like a real monologue. Our show is really about content. It didn’t suffer that much. But it’s still better in studio. I hate Zoom. The delays, the technical issues. I love the intimacy of face to face, the eye contact, the body language.”
One annoyance: He still can’t meet with his writers in person. “We still aren’t there yet,” he said. “California is very careful about these things. I haven’t seen my staff in person since February 2020!”
Maher also began doing stand-up shows again in June after a 15-month break.
“The audience is so hungry for it,” he said. “I think no matter who was up there, they’d be excited. They hadn’t been out of the house. The time off also gave me a chance to put together an entirely new show. The world has changed so much since February 2020. Trump was still president. Most of my act at the time was about him.”
Though he got plenty of comedy fodder over the past five years from Donald Trump, he’s happy to talk about other subject matter any given week on HBO and on stage.
But he knows Trump is hardly gone and used his closing “New Rules” monologue on “Real Time” earlier this month to remind people that Trump is working to find more people at the state level willing to do his bidding if he runs for president in 2024 and then finds himself short of the necessary electoral votes.
“He’s that shark that went out to sea and will come back,” he said. “He’s slowly purging the Republican party of people who aren’t full-on Trumpers. This shark is very busy. He’s going to run again 100%. The virus has mutated and become more virulent.”
Maher, who didn’t predict the insurrection but worried Trump would refuse to leave office Jan. 20 after losing, said if Trump runs for president again for 2024, he’d recommend Americans take a long vacation in January or February of 2025. “That’s when the [expletive] is going to hit the fan,” he said.
His onstage act, he said, won’t be all politics. He said he inserts more personal stories and observations that wouldn’t really work on his politically oriented talk show.
“I abandoned the personal stuff for awhile,” he said. “But now I’m 65. You can’t accumulate that many days and all that experience and not be a little wiser. So I talk about marriage and dating and romance.” Of course, Maher has never been married and has no kids, but he will still make parenting observations as an outsider.
Age has also led to failing eyesight, and he recently began wearing glasses on TV, which he hates. “It’s irrational,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been that upset but it’s one of the landmarks in life. It just shows you’re not young anymore.”
He said he had LASIK surgey so many times, he couldn’t do it anymore. “I did 28 years on TV without glasses,” he said. “I could see the teleprompter just fine. Then in the last couple of years, I couldn’t do it anymore. And I don’t like contacts. I had to break down and get the glasses. It represents something I didn’t want to face.”
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