I avoid watching anything to do with horrible old Bill Maher, but here’s a video of people talking about Bill Maher. It seems he has a segment called “Bill Maher talks to kids” which you might imagine is an attempt at being avuncular and wise, but no…he strolls out carrying a drink, sits down and makes some innuendo about Viagra, talks about porn, and suggests that these 8-16 year old kids are trans, because he has these assumptions that young people are all transitioning. It is the creepiest thing you’ll see today, I hope.
These aren’t secret clips and outtakes from the show — Bill Maher actually took the whole hour long segment of an icky old drunk guy talking about sex and porn, and laughing at gay and trans people, and intentionally put it on the internet for everyone to see. Will HBO do anything? Nah. Free speech! It’s not bad if it’s heterosexual grooming.
I am, for my own health and safety, NOT going to click play on that video clip.
I trust PZ that is it what he says it is, but I just do not want to watch it.
Maher’s decline is shocking to me. Long ago I enjoyed parts of his atheist shtick, but a lot of it was just stupid. Then he just kept getting worse until about 10+ years ago I just could not stand him anymore and tuned him out. This is sooo much worse than anything I imagined he had become.
A few notes: from the beginning, when his honking big glass of vodka was still full, he was slurring his words. So it was probably glass #2. And whenever he said anything gross, which was most of the time, the way he held his head reminded me of a praying mantis.
Some day America must learn to stop rewarding the creepy weirdoes. Because if there is anything we have learned by now, it’s that the more we reward them the more of them we get, and the worse they become.
Can we keep Maher away from adults too? I would be pleased if he would just fuck off into obscurity. He doesn’t have anything positive to contribute.
I have to wonder how those kids were forced to do that. Because even without his gross and creepy behavior, he isn’t exactly someone who I’d expect to have a lot of name recognition or interest among people that age.
Thanks for the offer, PZ, but I’ll pass. Haven’t seen more than 15 seconds of Maher in a long time. Less is more.
I’ll pass too. I watched about 20 minutes of Bill Maher a couple of decades ago, and am still satiated.
Icky old drunk guys talking about sex and porn to children, nothing more needs to be said.
As someone who often watches Real Time mostly for the guests and has caught an occasional Club Random (recently watching when Penn Gillette was on), I find this segment with kids appalling. WTF was he doing? On the Gillette episode I took note of the extent to which Maher was devoted to his booze. In front of Gillette is one thing, but in front of kids? And Emma Vigeland pointed out Maher’s refusal to not drink if Steve O from Jackass would appear on the podcast.
IMO anyone, especially Maher, who hasn’t seen Modern Family should not be taking pot shots at it. It took a kid to explain to Maher that there is a gay couple with an adopted kid on the show. The Sophia Viagra comment in itself was sickening, but he’s saying that to kids. Why is he asking these kids if Alaskan natives (the derogatory term) are on Modern Family? Where’d that come from? A very dark place no doubt.
He keeps viewing the world, as do many others, through a reactionary antiwoke lens. Note his asking the kids about transitioning. WTF.
No thanks, I just remembered I have a box of old light bulbs I have to eat.
Pity Bill Maher didn’t expire before those lightbulbs, Erlend…
I just watched the whole Club Random segment to see how out of context The Majority Report may have been. Whatever Maher was drinking (I’m assuming it was booze) he wasn’t drinking very frequently that I could tell and didn’t come across as inebriated. To his credit he wasn’t smoking anything. In other Club Random episodes he’s drinking far more and smoking cigars. So at least he wasn’t exposing these kids to second hand smoke. Low bar.
The clips The Majority Report highlighted were pretty bad on his part and there are other awkward moments they didn’t add like when he asked kids about being into Game of Thrones or a kid saying she has grass in her shoe and Maher making a weed reference. At some point he makes an allusion to how Bugs Bunny cartoons did some jokes for the adults to get. He did too much of that and it didn’t land well and did make him look creepy.
He also is approaching one of the kids with a Jonathan Haidt mindset, making too much of her having a smartphone, though she said she first got one at three!
I’d say this was an experimental segment that didn’t go so well. There are parts where he is talking to the kids in an OK manner, not kid talking them. He got into an interesting discussion about K-Pop with a Korean kid. But he also digressed a bit on how Native Americans came across the Bering region from Asia and how they look Asian as a result. Weird biogeography lesson that. WTF?
He did manage to build rapport with the various kids though had quite too many “OK Boomer!” moments.
A majority of this Maher podcast episode wasn’t cringey. He was asking kids about their future aspirations and relating his own experiences growing up. Although he was talking to kids in an adult manner he should have left out the creepy innuendo.
At around 1:30 he’s talking about kids with siblings placed further apart in age and quips something like ‘honey there was that thing we used to do…what was it…it was in bed’. Ummm…
Other parts weren’t creepy but disturbing in other ways:
At around 10:52 he’s talking to an 8 year old in an otherwise high level manner about herbivorous dinosaurs and sneaks in a weird joke about the name of his Jewish accountant.
Around 26:00ish the Korean girl is talking to Maher about watching an Asian streaming channel with Korean and Japanese content and he goes on a bizarre tangent about the “melting pot” asking her why she prefers watching Korean content. He asks her to start watching Grey’s Anatomy. That didn’t land well IMO.
When he brought up Stormy Daniels and porn, I knew he was just trying to be edgy. Too bad for him, no one gives a fuck and he just comes off as even more of a creep than he normally does.
This came after the other recent show of his where he drunkenly offered to “mentor” the hawk tuah woman.
crunch Mmmmm, lightbulbs drooool
I gave up watching Maher about 15 years ago after he started spreading his batshit insane ideas about alternative medicine, the causes of disease, and how the healthcare industry promotes treatments over cures, supposedly because it’s more profitable to keep people sick (as if curing cancer wouldn’t earn trillions and ensure a Nobel Prize and near deification for the discoverers).
He might land on the right idea occasionally, but his overarching smugness and creeping creepiness over recent years makes him impossible to watch.
This is a direct rip-off of a long-running segment that Stephen Colbert does with kids.
It’s sometimes a bit edgy, but he keeps it clean.
I hope that Colbert sues Maher for this!
magistramarla @17
I doubt Stephen Colbert has any grounds to sue since this has been done by other talkshow hosts prior to Colbert doing it. Jimmy Kimmel has done kid interview skits. Conan O’Brian and Jay Leno did them back when they were still on NBC.
Cutting against the grain I still watch Real Time and often disagree with or get pissed at Maher for shit he says. Yet this part of the most recent New Rules was priceless as he defends those of us who are childfree in a shot across the bow of couchfucker JD Vance! Bill Maher rises to the defense of childfree cat ladies! “I’m with purr”: