I finally find myself watching a Club Random again, because Tom Green is there.

It starts badly.  They're both wearing plaid button-up shirts.  Green goes, "We're wearing the same shirt."  Maher goes, "Mine's better."  Because Tom's is flannel.  It wasn't a joke, it was like Maher was almost offended at the suggestion that he could be wearing flannel.  And then Maher gets disgusted about Green drinking a beer.  "Why don't you like beer?"  "It's cheap."

I made a joke last year:

Jinnistan wrote:

And since I learn something new with every Bill Maher show, this week's news is that I learned that Bill Maher is under the impression that eggs come out of a chicken's ass.

Now that Tom Green has a farm, he gets to carefully explain to an astonished Bill Maher that the vast majority of eggs laid by chickens are unfertilized.  No, Bill.  When you're eating eggs, you aren't eating chicken embryos.  PETA lied to you.  It makes me wonder how many grown-ass adults are out there who haven't figured this out?
 

Jinnistan wrote:

I finally find myself watching a Club Random again, because Tom Green is there.

It starts badly.  They're both wearing plaid button-up shirts.  Green goes, "We're wearing the same shirt."  Maher goes, "Mine's better."  Because Tom's is flannel.  It wasn't a joke, it was like Maher was almost offended at the suggestion that he could be wearing flannel.  And then Maher gets disgusted about Green drinking a beer.  "Why don't you like beer?"  "It's cheap."

I made a joke last year:

Jinnistan wrote:

And since I learn something new with every Bill Maher show, this week's news is that I learned that Bill Maher is under the impression that eggs come out of a chicken's ass.

Now that Tom Green has a farm, he gets to carefully explain to an astonished Bill Maher that the vast majority of eggs laid by chickens are unfertilized.  No, Bill.  When you're eating eggs, you aren't eating chicken embryos.  PETA lied to you.  It makes me wonder how many grown-ass adults are out there who haven't figured this out?
 

The thing that always makes me feel better about Maher and his painful superficiality about....everything....is how miserable a person he clearly is. It's almost like not having any genuine feelings makes life an unbearable, lonely slog.

It's also pretty much the only thing that makes me feel better about people like Trump and Musk and their most pathetic syncophants. Everyone of them, unhappy and nothing will ever fix it. Not even becoming the most powerful men in the world.

Tom Green, on the other hand, always seems like a genuinely decent person.

crumbsroom wrote:

I like anyone who calls Bill Maher a 'four eyed fuck'

Especially when the person doing so is also wearing glasses.

And right on time, Redbar takes the time to skewer the Bill Maher/Tom Green sit down.



 

The rocker tshirt and big belt buckle, I'm dying.

I don't know what is worse, his almost criminal harrassment of a girl one third his age, or just how unbelievably bad he is at it. It's like he has two competing forces driving him, one to bed a twenty year old girl he just met and who is clearly uncomfortable with him, and his general Bill Maher need to scold the youth for being a bunch of woke pussies.

How he just doesn't die from the embarrassment of this is beyond me.
 

Bill Burr: Drop Dead Years

We've had to wait a while for this to drop, filmed nearly a year ago, and while anything Burr puts out is going to be funny, this has Bill in much more comfortable form.  He's in a good place in his life, which, as a fan, splits me between feeling great love for the man and feeling like I'm missing the old bite and bile.  But since I also regularly watch Burr's podcast, none of this is surprising, and I might even have grown accustomed to resenting the lack of spontaneity in his official ironed-out sets.  I also think that, since I know he's already been developing a new hour of material in the meantime, and considering that his bite and bile has been reinvigorated into a post-election class warfare mode, that I'm simply less satisfied until we finally get the inevitable next special.  That's not fair, of course.  But I say, good for him.  Let's let Billy Broad Balls do his thing.

7.5/10
 

crumbsroom wrote:

It's hardly surprising that all it took was Trump to laugh at a couple of Maher's jokes and call him smart to get him schilling for his inclusion into the human race.

What a predictably insecure and self absorbed cunt

Narcissists recognize game when they see it.

Speaking of "Bob" Rock, it was also very revealing when he was on the Cunt Dungeon podcast, and, in trying to compliment Maher, told him that he didn't realize that Maher isn't a Jew.  Because, he said, he used to watch Maher and say things like, "this fucking Jew".  "I didn't know at the time that you weren't Jewish."  Bill Maher, evergreen champion of Israel, just sat there and tolerated this overt antisemitism.  He didn't even bother mentioning that his mother was Jewish (which makes him kind of a Jew).  Maybe Bill thought twice about confronting the guy who was going to get him a seat at Trump's table? 

I mean this in the absolute least antisemitic way possible, but Bill Maher is a total rat bastard.

Little wonder that Bill Maher is sensitive about the Larry David piece, and eager to hide under the skirt of Godwin as well, claiming that David's piece was insulting to the six million dead Jews.  (But Kid Rock's exclusion of Maher as one of the "fucking Jews" in media is a compliment?)  And likewise Maher immediately proceeded to insult Catholics by commemorating Pope Francis' death with a string of pedophile jokes.  (Nevermind that Francis actually increased transparency on church sex abuse - I wonder if this isn't similar to pundits like Megyn Kelly or Ann Coulter who have used this issue to attack the Pope as a surrogate cause for their real offense at the Pope's stances on gay, trans, women's and immigration issues, which are issues which Maher has leaned more conservatively as of late.)  Maher also made an inexplicable claim which linked Francis' death with the "fentanyl crisis" - an 'opiate of the masses' dig, I suppose, but witless nonetheless.

One of Bill's most obnoxious sleight-of-tongue rhetorical tricks has been to chide "the left" for their "hate" for Trump and MAGA supporters, and Maher went into his pitiful spiel this week on his show, with his own performatively pious version of "can't we all just get along" peacemaker bullshit.  Well, I think "hate" is a pretty strong word, but I probably do truly hate Bill Maher.  But more accurately I don't respect Maher, or Trump and his supporters, precisely because they engage in these kinds of disrespectable games of sophism.  I can't help but notice that Maher is seemingly unmoved by Trump and his voters' utter hatred for immigrants, for example.  I don't see Maher quite as teary-eyed over that.  And yes, some on the left have sometimes gone a bit too far in pushing for their ill-conceived linguistic engineering of gender, and rendering the fact of biological sex as an incoherent trivia.  But seriously, does this really compare to the kinds of post-truth epistemological molestations spewed by Trump and his primary horde of propogandists on a steady regular basis?  I find it hard to believe that if Maher sincerely cared so deeply about such integrity for facts and language, he might not have a different set of priorities here.  For exampe, I've watched Maher's show (the Real one, not the Random one) fairly frequently,both prior and after the election, and I haven't seen him once address the issue of the Great Replacement Theory, openly and explicitly touted and pushed by such high-profile Trump supporters as Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, etc, and a theory which is believed by approximately 2/3rds of Trump voters.  Does Maher not find this perversion of politics and genetics worth correcting?  I could name several similar issues, common ground in the past years'-worth of right-wing media which has been mainstreamed, but I think that one specific issue is sufficient to expose Maher's duplicity and ethical neglect.

The biggest falsehood that Bill Maher peddles is the notion that he's an "old-school liberal", and that "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me".  Pigshit spittle.  If Bill Maher had half a wit, he could at least claim to be a "classical liberal", which would be closer to the truth, because, at least for most of the '90s and '00s Maher never claimed to be a liberal so much as a libertarian, which despite sharing a few letters have very little in common with each other.  Most political observers perceive "old school liberal" as falling within the FDR-LBJ New Deal-Great Society form of social liberalism, against which Maher is particularly, actively hostile.  A liberal is not determined by what one decides to call themselves, but by the substance of one's policy positions and priorities.  What are Maher's liberal positions exactly?  Since the election, he has taken a technocratic defense of Elon Musk's fraudulent efforts to cut government waste, because like a libertarian (and not a liberal) Maher instinctively despises public government investments and having to pay his millionaire-share of taxes to fund them.  Before the election he was regurgitating the Mitt Romney point about "makers vs. takers" and how half the country doesn't pay federal income taxes - a fact which is more of a symptom of wealth inequality, as the bottom half don't earn enough for their income taxes to make any difference.  Maher, on the contrary, feels, like a libertarian, that the rich pay too much in taxes.  Bill Maher has supported closing the Department of Education, claiming that he didn't even really know what they do, clearly unbothered by having to look it up or something.  As a libertarian, Maher has no empathy for those who need publicly-funded Pell Grants to pay for a college education, and has never bothered to address a position on free public state college education.  In fact, the ivy league-educated scion of a wealthy broadcaster's family has been telling young people that they don't even need to bother going to college.  (He needs more Uber drivers at his disposal.)  He clearly wouldn't understand - generous read, likely couldn't appreciate - the necessity of the DoEd's civil rights function to guarantee education access to minorities, because libertarians do not value civil rights, at least they don't respect the federal government's obligation to enforce them.  Bill Maher, a Boomer who was 12 years old when MLK was assassinated, once claimed that he "never heard about civil rights" when he was growing up, and Maher lacks the introspection to comprehend that this may have been directly related to his growing up in an affluent North New Jersey suburb which wouldn't allow black people to live.  (Even by 2000 - the earliest census data I can find, black people made up 0.5% of River Vale, NJ.)  Maher is clearly an "out of sight/mind" sort of stooge, so why should he have any curiosity about an issue which his father was clearly reporting on at the time?  Is it such a stretch then that Maher's more recent reaction to the homeless epidemic in LA County has been "I just don't see it".  Yeah, because you probably never make it past Rodeo, you pretty bitch.

Most tellingly, or alarming as I see it, is that Maher has also recently said that he was not willing to "die on that hill" of protecting 'birthright citizenship', which I'm interpreting as his saying that he is also not committed to protecting the larger 14th Amendment to which birthright citizenship belongs - the same Amendment which gave the federal government the authority to enforce equal rights and access to citizens, btw, and a common boogyman for libertarians.

All of Bill's libertarian hogwash was already obnoxious enough back 10-15 years ago when he was having people like Penn Jillette on to complain about the government forcing him to build public libraries with "a gun to my head".  But at least it was honest.  Nowadays, his trying to launder his libertarian bullshit through a blurry lens of "old-school liberal" needs to be combated directly to his face, but I don't think he's willing to book anyone on his show capable of doing so.
 

The only joy is in realizing how few people are still willing - or "available" - to hang out with Maher in his morbid bachelor basement.  The place must smell like a mausoleum where neon and pastel have gone to die.

Because, as we know, Bill Maher is just so irked by the Left's insistence on defying science with their transathletes and vaccines, who does he welcome today to his vault of wisdom?  Oh, hey!  Terrence Howard.  I don't think this guy has any completely zany takes on fundamental scientific concepts, right?
 

Jinnistan wrote:

David Spade - Dandelion

If you can gel with Spade's weaselly rhythms (and he's pretty self-effacing about them as well), it's impressive how many laughs he can squeeze out of some slight material.  But I do, and I did laugh several times.  It's also interesting how often my laughs did not synch with his crowd.  "It's getting hard to watch porn on an airplane" - big crowd laugh, I smirk - "...but not impossible" - I laugh, audience mumbles.

7.5/10
 

I think the distinction between the two laughs those jokes get says a lot. It's illustrative of why people have shit senses of humour. I think most people laugh at things they think are supposed to be funny. Maybe out of politeness, maybe out of peer pressure, but that's what they are here to do, laugh, and they look for their moments.
The first one has the funny word in it. Porn. And it's in a place it doesn't belong. Airplane. It's easy to understand why that is a joke. So....people laugh, even though nothing is actually going on there. Not really. But those last three words bring us into the joke. They allude to multiple efforts. They plant the thought of Spade on an airplane, frustrated, determined, wanting porn, surrounded by fellow travellers. This is when something happens, as long as the audience is engaged.  Basically, the second part requires a little bit of effort and imagination on the part. So of course it's mostly silence.

People don't deserve art. No one even tries anymore.