He's considering quitting stand-up after his next HBO special. “It’s like playing the cello,” he told me. “You have to be constantly working on it.”
In “Club Random,” Maher is downright sentimental as he gets stoned, drinks tequila, and offers his guests pot or their drink of choice (Seinfeld had coffee, Couric had Paloma). It can be confessional. He told Martin Short about how he woke up in the middle of the night with morbid thoughts that meant death. He told Seinfeld, “Men have been ruined by phones and pornography. It's rape. It's tyranny. And this is what young people are looking at.'' “They were replaced by horrible things like strangulation and spanking,” he said sadly.
Along with John McEnroe, he has a stake in Woody Harrelson's Hollywood cannabis dispensary, The Woods, and recently hung out there with Paul McCartney. “I have to say he was great,” Maher said.
He sleeps until he wakes up naturally around 11am or noon. Then he fasts for most of the day, because eating slows him down, he said. “Three meals a day is just something that someone made,” he says. “God didn't put it on a tablet.” He shoots baskets, gets high and writes with his two rescue dogs, one-eyed 15-year-old Chico and 10-year-old Chula. Around 3 p.m., he drank a shake with protein powder, yogurt, pumpkin seed butter, chlorophyll, avocado and tomato, “because I had heard that Hispanic men have a very low incidence of prostate cancer.” Eat a light meal at night.
As we left Craig's house and Maher made his way to his gray all-electric Mercedes, I asked him if he ever felt like he was banging his head against a wall. he does it But he said dryly that he wanted to strap himself to the mast and “keep sailing.”
