Editor's note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for Presidential Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Partisan: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Reshaped American Politics in the 1990s” and co-host of the podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this op-ed are her own. Find more opinion on CNN.
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Bill Maher has spent the last three decades building a brand as a risk-taker and contrarian. At a time when comedians like Jerry Seinfeld offered observational comedy devoid of political content, Maher offered observational commentary that was fueled by controversy and political debate.
Courtesy of Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer
Since his first show, Politically Incorrect, on Comedy Central in 1993, he has presented himself as someone unbound by party or ideology, fearless in speaking the truth in the face of a censorship mob.
His reputation grew after the September 11 attacks, when Maher criticized the US government for relying on missiles rather than suicide bombings, calling them “cowardly” and comparing them to terrorists. Networks canceled his show, the White House press secretary condemned his comments, and ABC dropped “Politically Incorrect” a few months later.
Keep this in mind, because there was a time when Maher could say shocking things. You wouldn't know it from reading his new book, “What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.” In 24 topical chapters, Maher touches on everything from internet influencers to Republican radicalism to marijuana legalization to football brain damage to frat boys and, above all, kids these days. While his previous books were mostly highlight reels of his TV shows, “What This Comedian Said” has a broader goal: to lay out Maher's worldview in longhand.
But despite Maher's reputation as a provocateur, that worldview is based not on illegal activity (there's nothing here that will shock you), but rather on an obsessive nostalgia for the good old days, before Democrats got “woke” and Republicans went coup-crazy.
Maher lets readers know early on that while the country may have changed, he hasn't. Angered by what some critics saw as a conservative slant in his commentary, Maher scoured the past 20 years of commentary on his current show, “Real Time” (CNN and the network are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery), and ended the show satisfied that he'd remained consistent. “Let me be clear: it's not me that has changed,” Maher tells readers.
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Bill Maher, Chevy Chase, Ann Coulter, Naomi Judd and Michael Rapaport star in the fifth anniversary celebration of the ABC television series “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.”
Citing a 1994 Playboy article he wrote titled “The Reluctant Conservative,” he confesses that he has become more conservative than he ever intended, but that he believes “being liberal is what a nation should aspire to, just as it is what an individual should aspire to be. Liberal means being open-minded, willing to try new things, and eager to take the next step,” he writes in retrospect. “I feel fundamentally the same,” he writes. And if he feels the same way now as he did 30 years ago, something else must have changed dramatically.
If Maher wanted to understand what has and hasn't changed in the past 30 years, he should have spent a bit more time focusing on his history. That exploration would not only have revealed that things haven't changed as much as Maher claims, but also that he and his comedy have played a central role in shaping today's political culture.
Nostalgia for late 20th-century America is the constant pulse of Maher's book. Passages like “Today's colleges aren't the ones you remember,” “People used to get their news from newspapers,” “Cell phones have killed civility,” “No one knows what words mean anymore,” and “Cell phones have ruined dating, and porn has ruined sex” stand out. You're forgiven for wondering when Maher transformed into Andy Rooney, the dour editorial writer for 60 Minutes.
Yet for all this nostalgia for the past, Maher is curiously silent about his time with Politically Incorrect, though when he brings up the show, it becomes clear that not much has changed since the 1990s. Political correctness has changed its name to wokeness, but the basic idea remains the same: the left is trying to seize control of politics, institutions, and even language itself in the name of a more inclusive society.
Maher's book, unlike his show and previous comedy specials, dates the issue to emerging around 2016. He writes, “Things were easier for me during the Bush-Obama administration, and it was easier for people to understand me. Before the awakening, what began as a noble directive to be vigilant against injustice turned into an ugly authoritarian and often supportive of bad ideas.”
But this formulation requires a touch of strategic historical amnesia. Maher repeatedly refers to black-only dorms as a symbol of hyper-wokeness in his book, perhaps forgetting that in 1994 he lamented racially segregated dorms in Politically Incorrect. He notes that “there is a great controversy today about how to teach history to kids,” but he never reminds his readers that conflicts over how to teach history raged in the early 1990s and are still known to this day as the “History Wars.”
That context is important because we know what happened after the political correctness panic of the 1990s: Most people adopted more inclusive terminology, schools taught a broader range of U.S. history, conservative politicians and media activists made anti-political correctness commentary a mainstay of their rhetoric, and unfashionable political terms like “womyn” largely fell out of use.
This is also important because the repeated panics around “political correctness” and “wokeness” demonstrate that such panics have political utility, particularly in justifying the rollback of programs aimed at inclusion and equality.
Introducing “Politically Incorrect” into the story would have provided another important context: Maher's show first gained a cult following on Comedy Central and then grew so popular that ABC picked it up for a late-night series, ushering in a new intersection of politics and entertainment.
The line between these two worlds was already beginning to blur long before “Politically Incorrect.”
Former Vice President and presidential candidate Richard Nixon appeared on the variety show “Laugh-In” in 1968, and then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton played saxophone at “Arsenio Hall” in 1992.
Reed Saxon/AP
Bill Clinton performs “Heartbreak Hotel” on saxophone during a recording of The Arsenio Hall Show on June 3, 1992.
But by bringing together actors, comedians, and politicians in conversation, Politically Incorrect had a profound impact on both the production and consumption of political entertainment. The Hollywood stage strove for profundity, the politicians for laughs. And both sought Politically Incorrect's highest prize: a look of surprise from the audience, a sign that someone had crossed the boundaries of decency and acceptable speech into the realm of profound truth.
It's Maher's distinctive knack for viewing shock as a sign of truth; frequent “politically incorrect” guests like right-wing pundits Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have learned this lesson well, and made it a hallmark of their careers. Maher's show first cultivated the style that has come to dominate cable news since MSNBC and Fox News launched in 1996. “We don't report the news, we invent new ways to see the news,” Maher writes in a new book about the exact role of cable news commentators.
Politicians, too, have learned from Politically Incorrect that voters, like viewers, prefer politics mixed with humor and aggression — a lesson embodied by Donald Trump, whom Maher despises. “In an age dominated by the professionally aggressive,” Maher writes in his book, “we secretly envy the man who speaks his mind with total abandon, with no regard for the repercussions, and who never apologizes.” Maher would blame the professionally aggressive for making Trump more palatable, but he'll likely find it a bit jarring that many of his portrayals of Trump are so similar to his on-air persona.
The persona of the courageous comedian willing to endure criticism and censorship to tell the truth remains core to Maher's brand. But it's a brand that no longer works well, at least for a comedian who aims to “shock” people with his books. In a political climate where attack is king, especially on the right, Maher's persona is tame by comparison. His hit show, “Real Time,” is less about shock value and more about Maher and a string of high-profile guests calling out bullshit on what they see as the excesses of both the left and the right.
But more than that, his moody nostalgia is so familiar, so mundane, that it doesn't provoke many unexpected reactions. Complaints that kids are overindulged, that pronouns are confusing, and that popular music is “nothing more than the sounds people make during sex and anthems to 'booty'” are neither incisive cultural critiques nor courageous confessions of truth. This is your average Fox News segment.
Maher played a key role in shaping American political culture in the 1990s, and continues to do so today. The shock-mongering political comedian was long ago eclipsed by politicians and pundits who learned to make their attacks on political correctness and wokeness more than jokes; they used them to change policies and win elections. More than any part of his book, it is Maher's place in that story that will shock you.
