BOOK REVIEW: Bill Maher’s book will shock you

Bill Maher gets his fix from smoking pot. I get mine from watching his weekly HBO show, Real Time.

It is very US-centred, which may explain the difficulty in accessing it from within SA, but if you trawl YouTube early on Saturday mornings, you might find the still-warm Friday show, before the HBO spoilsports block it. It works for me most weeks.

For me, Real Time is a must because Maher is opinionated, articulate and very witty. You may not agree with all he says. I don’t. Some will find his anti-religion, pro-pot and pro-abortion views hard to swallow. He has a toilet mouth. But he can be funny.

As was the time when US presidential hopeful Donald Trump sued Maher for suggesting that — given the politician’s hair colour — he needed to produce a birth certificate to prove his father hadn’t been an orange-haired orang-utan. (This was a tongue-in-cheek response to Trump’s demand for former US president Barack Obama’s birth certificate to prove he had not been born in Kenya.)

Maher always rounds off his shows with a 10-minute editorial, and it is these segments that have been brought together and updated to form the basis of his book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

It is the ideal holiday or toilet book. Short chapters, divided into easily digested sections, which can be devoured in a few minutes.

The focus is very American, but if you think the US is irrelevant to South Africans, just look at the recent panic when it seemed SA might lose its very valuable tariff-free access to the US market, which is so generously provided in the Agoa package.

There are plenty of laughs in Maher’s TV show, but there is also serious content. Fast food for thought. He tackles controversial issues and targets the ultra-woke.

It is good to hear different sides to any issue, and nobody is forced to agree with all that is said. I am relieved, though, that someone is saying it.

Maher is unrepentant about airing views and ideas that may not enjoy mainstream appeal, and he does this brilliantly in this book. One man’s certainty is another’s blasphemy. And irony abounds.

He explains that his weekly editorial “is a 10-minute thought piece, with laughs. Always with laughs. I’ve told my brilliant writers who work on it with me every week: ‘You can be bad. I can always edit that out — just don’t be earnest.’”

“People not only don’t want to hear a countering view, they often want to make those offering it disappear — either actively, by cancelling them, or passively, by ignoring them,” he suggests.

“I’m sure I’ve lost fans over the years for not toeing the line they wished I would toe; I do not miss them. This show is not for them. My show, and this book, is for those with an open mind and those who recognise that, especially now, there’s ample crazy on both sides.”

Having said what I think of Maher, his show and this new book, I shall stand aside and offer a few extracts, which I hope will illustrate the thoughtful, witty and provocative gems that this top-notch comedian and talk-show host has produced:

• “Seat belts? I refuse to live in a nanny state — I’m an individual, and I want to soar, free as an eagle, right through the windshield.”
• “A couple of years ago they made a movie called The Aeronauts about the scientists who broke the record for the highest altitude reached in a balloon. In fact, they were both men, but the movie made one of them a woman because, as the director explained, ‘representation is important’. So true. Women never get enough credit for the things they didn’t do. Meryl Streep should play Seabiscuit, so every girl will know she too can grow up to be a racehorse.”
• “When did American business get so insecure? I was even asked recently to rate my ‘experience’ in the airport bathroom. Which was poor. I didn’t meet a single Republican congressman.”
• “Jared Kushner. Who once said, ‘The problem is people who don’t work hard enough.’ Exactly, Jared! People who are too lazy to roll up their sleeves and inherit their own money.”
• “Trump isn’t a vessel for God’s will; he’s a vessel for fried chicken.”
• “I know, you’re tired — I am too — of making the same old obvious arguments, like how pot is less dangerous than other legal adult activities, but somehow you can legally drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and do that thing where you cut off your oxygen with a belt and masturbate. Which is not only dangerous, but, take it from me, it’ll get you kicked out of Macy’s men's wear in a heartbeat.”
• “In two generations, China has built five hundred entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class and mostly cornered the market in 5G and rare earth minerals. Oh, and they bought Africa.”
• “Many is the night I’ve wanted to say to someone, ‘Can you just put the phone down for a minute? After all, we haven’t seen each other in weeks and ... we are having sex.’”
• “The guy who, as a baby, was photographed for an iconic Nirvana album cover sued Nirvana for ‘lifelong damages’. I never thought I’d have to say this to a baby, but stop being such a fucking baby. You’re not a victim. There’s no reason you can’t have a normal, happy life just because people look at you and think, ‘baby penis’.”
• “Budweiser announced in 2021 that they were investigating how to brew quality beer on Mars, something they can’t even do here.”
• “No-one has to tell Joe Biden what’s in the constitution. Because he was in the room when it was written.”
• “And yes, if birth rates decline too much and people keep living longer, the result is a society of the aged and enfeebled — or as it’s known today, Congress.”
• “Steven Spielberg recently remade West Side Story and bent over backwards to respect ethnicities, and ended up pleasing nobody. And it’s too bad, because the original musical was created by Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein: three gay Jews. And if you can’t trust gay Jews to write about hot-blooded Puerto Rican teenagers, who can you trust? Next, you’re going to tell me street gangs don’t even dance.”
• “We need to get back to what Facebook used to be: a place to see who from high school is gay, fat, bald or dead.”

There is plenty more of this, and a lot of very welcome serious commentary too.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but the problem with reading Maher’s views is that you are not hearing them. A dimension is missing. Maybe go for the audio book, read by the author himself. And I struggled to catch all the references he made. He is embedded in the US and in US politics and culture, and I have so many gaps in my knowledge.

Despite this, I adore his wit and his humour. You may be put off by his crudeness, and this book is not for the overly sensitive. Adults only. Check the title.

What This Comedian Said Will Shock You encapsulates what I most like and admire about Maher, my favourite late-night TV host. Shock me? I wouldn’t have it any other way.