Bill Maher is the perfect liberal, at least on paper — yet despite his talk shows being nominated for Emmy awards more than 40 times, it’s only in Donald Trump’s Washington that Maher finally gets the recognition he craves.
He’s now the 27th recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, an award first won by the late, legendary Richard Pryor in 1998 and last year given to Conan O’Brien.
Not every recipient has been politically left-wing, but Maher stands out as a rare left-leaning comic who dares criticize his own tribe, and he’s paid a price for it.
Liberals like Maher might not like Donald Trump or the stamp he’s placed on the Kennedy Center, which awards the Twain Prize.
But in Trump’s Washington, a rebel like Maher can be given his due — which can’t be said in precincts of cultural liberal control.
Maher certainly checks the boxes of a good left-liberal:
He’s a street-corner atheist; a male feminist who’s a 70-year-old bachelor with an endless succession of younger girlfriends; he’s a pothead — and pot dealer, the part-owner of a West Hollywood dispensary — who makes Snoop Dogg look like Nancy Reagan; and he’s an accurately self-described “libertine.”
He ought to be the ideal celebrity Democrat.
But the hypocrisy and ideological nuttiness of the party are too much for him.
So is the more-than-puritanical humorlessness of the left — and its holier-than-thou intolerance.
Maher is nobody’s idea of a conservative, yet he’s the closest thing many in the television industry today can imagine to a right-winger.
He kicks back against cancel culture, and if his shows aren’t altogether balanced, they’re nonetheless places where conservatives and contrarians get to have a say.
Amid the smarmy partisanship that smothered late-night TV in the era of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, “Real Time With Bill Maher” has often been an oasis.
He’s undeniably entertaining, hence his dozens of Emmy nominations.
But he’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons — hence the shutout from industry awards.
He’s won a single Emmy, but only for his role as executive producer on an HBO “Vice” documentary, not for any of his own shows.
The left just isn’t a very funny, fun or free place to be, a point Maher drove home in the title of the show that first made his name in TV, “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher.”
In the 30 years since that show debuted, political correctness has transitioned into “woke” and is worse than ever — except for the cultural space cleared by President Trump’s defiance.
A comedian like Maher needs Trump for more than just material to riff on.
There was plenty of that at Sunday’s Kennedy Center ceremony, including a very funny Trump impression by the 28-year-old comedian Matt Friend, who pretended to be the president crashing the stage to snatch the award from the “loser” Maher.
But it’s the very thing liberals hate about Trump, his willingness to mock and transgress their dearest pieties, that gives comedy room to breathe in what would otherwise be a suffocating woke environment.
If liberals can’t be expected to give Trump much credit for that, they should at least recognize that Maher is doing them a valuable service — and never more so than when he pricks their sanctimony.
Maher was an early warning to Democrats that if they didn’t realize how extreme they’d come to seem even to a liberal like him, they’d eventually have to contend with an opponent like Donald Trump, someone with a knack for making Americans laugh at political correctness.
Humor has always been Trump’s not-so-secret weapon.
But what normal people find humorous, the scolds of the modern left find blasphemous.
That ought to make an atheist like Maher rethink his horror of religion — narrow-mindedness isn’t a product of whether one believes in God or not, and dogmatic secularists are the biggest threat to free thought and speech today.
Europe showcases where political correctness leads — toward tolerance for intolerant Islamist minorities and suppression of politically incorrect speech from citizens who object to what mass migration is doing to their countries.
The American left has the same outlook as Europe’s, and in the clash between the left and the Trump-style right, a liberal like Bill Maher is going to find himself on the right, whether he likes it or not.
This is why the Trump coalition is going to win in the long run, and it’s why Trump remains such a commanding figure, even on a night honoring a comedian who’s so often been his critic.
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