Bill Maher likes being less political on stage. But he really isn’t a fan of aging.
It might seem rare for a chance to tell Bill Maher something he doesn’t already know about politics, since his job as host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” seems to revolve around him being up to speed on the topic.
But on this day — Tuesday, the day the Iowa Democratic Party botched the Iowa Caucuses — he has just walked out of a “Real Time” meeting and onto a call with the Observer to promote his Feb. 15 stand-up show at Charlotte’s Belk Theater. He hasn’t yet seen the news about the initial results that were announced barely five minutes before he picked up the phone.
“Do we have a winner?” Maher asks.
And when told it’s former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the lead, he says, “Wow,” sounding genuinely surprised. “I like him. ... He came off with a terrific sense of humor (when he appeared on “Real Time” on Jan. 30), I thought. Which I hadn’t really seen before. Hadn’t seen him laugh too much.”
Other than that, though, he isn’t liking the news coming out of Iowa this week. At all.
“I saw Trump was tweeting today that, ‘Oh, it’s like the Obamacare rollout.’ ... I hadn’t even thought of that, but that’s true. The Obamacare rollout was a disaster, and now the Democrats can’t even get their voting right,” Maher says.
“Why are we even worried about Russia (messing with) the voting? We’ll do it ourselves. And people make judgments on this kind of stuff. ... Do I think it’s really a compelling argument? ‘Oh, if they can’t even run their primary, how could they run the country?’ Not really. But do I think it’ll persuade people? Yeah, I do. It’s just a terrible way to start the whole thing off.”
All this said, you should know: There’s more to Maher these days than just politics.
He’s still doing two, three, sometimes four stand-up shows a month, when his schedule allows, and he’s injecting more non-political — i.e. personal — material into his act than he has in a long time. And he’s definitely thinking more about his own mortality, having just celebrated his 64th birthday on Jan. 20. (He dined out with friends, he says, then returned to his house where he, “as we used to say when I was a teenager, ‘played records,’” and partook in one of his favorite not-illegal-in-his-home-state-of-California-activities: vaporizing marijuana.)
Here’s more from my conversation with Maher.
Q. So you’ve been twice to Charlotte in the past 3-1/2 years. I assume you like Charlotte OK?
A: Love Charlotte. I mean, I always love the South — the South, the Midwest. I did my last stand-up special in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I love anyplace where you get a good liberal crowd, but they’re not “woke.” They’re not this “woke” nonsense. They’re not overly politically correct. They let a comedian comede. No offense to San Francisco, but I’d much rather play Charlotte. You know, San Francisco, they’ll be booing half the things I say for no reason. ...
It’s so funny, when I first started playing Southern cities, the people sounded like they were from Southern cities. And now — I mean, you don’t sound like that. I don’t know where you grew up, but —
Q. Connecticut.
A: Exactly. And very often I’m in Austin, Texas, or Charlotte, or someplace, and it’s like, the whole time I’m there, I don’t hear a Southern accent. I don’t think people who are outside of the South — especially in the coastal areas of America — I don’t think they understand how much similarity there is between a city like Charlotte and cities that they’re much more familiar with. Now, I’m sure an hour outside of Charlotte is very different. But that’s true of almost anywhere. That’s true of Pennsylvania. It’s true of Michigan and Wisconsin and lots of places.
This country is not really divided by state. It’s divided by city versus rural. That’s really where the divisions are. The people are all in the cities, and then we have a system of government where the land gets to vote. Wyoming has two senators, and each of them represents 290,000 people, and California has two senators and each one of them represents 20 million. That’s one of the reasons why we’re so (expletive).
Q. So is that encouraging to you, then, that you don’t hear Southern accents now when you come to a place like Charlotte?
A: It’s just different. I just feel like people don’t realize — as I do, because I’m always traveling in America — what it’s really like out there. The “flyover states,” as they call it. I just don’t feel like they get what Southern cities are like. I think their image of the South is still based on a rural reading of the region. And of course, you know, a city like Charlotte — I mean, that’s Bank of America, right? Isn’t that their headquarters?
Q. Yup.
A: OK, well, it can’t just be a bunch of people with (expletive) on their shoes.
Q. So I was listening this morning to the interview you gave on Howard Stern’s radio show last year, and there were a couple of things you started to talk about, but then you guys sort of got off onto something else and didn’t get back to it. And I think they’re kind of related. One, he asked if you long to do a little less politics, and then later, you started to say “The whole second half of my act is now —” and then you got interrupted, or something happened. Can you talk about those things — the desire to maybe explore other non-political topics, and finish that thought about the second half of your act?
A: Sure. Well, for years, I didn’t do anything really in my act that wasn’t fairly directly political. Or at least, let’s say, political-adjacent. Which, you know, if I talk about marijuana reform, OK, that’s not exactly the most political thing you could talk about. It’s not the earned income tax credit. But it certainly is a political topic and a political issue.
And that’s partly because when I hit 50, I said to my (“Real Time”) writers ... “You sometimes write jokes basically based on who I am, which is a single man ... but it just doesn’t work when you’re 50.” ... They don’t want to hear about a 50-year-old man who’s single. OK, so the only thing left was politics. Which is mostly what I do anyway.
But then a couple years ago ... I think when I did my special I was 62 — and that combined with the MeToo movement ... I saw this avenue, or it just happened, that I was gonna talk about my personal life more. Not specifically about dating and that kind of stuff, but lots of stuff that is more personal. ... Age was — you know, that’s very personal. It’s a new topic for me. And it was very liberating to be able to talk more freely and openly and honestly about my personal life. Especially in stand-up. There’s not really a place for it that much on (“Real Time”).
Q. Do you get feedback, though, from people who come to your stand-up shows and feel like, “Gee, I came to hear the political stuff and now he’s talking about this other stuff.”
A: I don’t think they feel cheated on the political stuff. I mean, I do a nice long show. Even if I didn’t do anything past the political point, they still would have gotten probably almost an hour of straight-up politics. But you can only do so much of it. I think you have to strike this balance. It’s a weird knife’s edge I think we’re all on, and I feel very much just like the audience in this regard — that we don’t want to look away from Donald Trump, because you can’t do that. It’s your country, and it’s going down the tubes. But you also can’t look at it all the time, because then it becomes normalized, and it also just drives you crazy.
I mean, people are literally stressed out in a way they never were by someone in office. I certainly am. I, of course, was a giant critic of George (W.) Bush, but I never worried for a second that George Bush would actually come after me, or would actually become a dictator.
But of course we have those worries now with this president, so we’re all sleeping a little less easy than we used to. And God knows it’s not going to get better. I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. So we want to cover that area, but then we need to go into a different area. We need to get away from it to a degree. ...
And so I just feel like my act is a better balance now. I really enjoy the second half of it now. I didn’t talk about personal stuff for so long, and it was a little like coming home — because it certainly was a part of my act for so many years when I was younger. But then again, when you’re younger, you’re talking about a whole bunch of different issues. I mean, when I was younger, I could not have done a joke about reading the obituaries and going, “Ninety-four? A young man!” You know, that’s not a joke you do when you’re 30.
Q. Do you hate getting old?
A: I do. I do. I’m not afraid to admit it. I resent it. It sucks.
I mean, (health-wise) I feel fine. Nothing really has changed. It’s actually the best time of my life on a day-to-day basis. I enjoy my life more than ever. I have much better peace of mind, because much of my life when I was younger — I mean, I didn’t get “Politically Incorrect” on the air till I was 37. So until then, I had a lot of anxiety about, “Am I gonna be a failure?”
And, well, I don’t have that anymore. I did it. I’ve been on TV for 26 years. That’s unheard of. So I feel like I’m playing with the house money. The only little downside is: I’ll be dead sooner. There’s no getting around that.
When I read about somebody who’s — like, Bernie (Sanders) — who’s 78. And I’m like, “Seventy-eight!” Because that’s what I always would say if I saw somebody was 78. But now, I’m like, “Oh, (expletive) I’ll be that in 14 years.” Fourteen years go by like that.
Some people are totally OK with that. But that’s always on my mind. It’s like, I’m enjoying this party, but I’m looking up at the clock and I see, “Oh my God, it’s 10 till 1.” And all I can think is, “Geez, I hope this party goes late.”
Q. How old did your parents live to be?
A: My mother was 88, and smoked until the end. I mean, if she hadn’t been (smoking cigarettes) I think she probably would have lived to a hundred. My father died at 71. And that’s not good, because that’s seven years from now. But, you know, I think we all live such different lives than our parents did. I mean, my parents were in World War II. It’s like, what?? You say that to kids nowadays ... you might as well be talking about the Civil War.
Q. Do you want to keep doing stand-up for as long as you can?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t know. ... It’s certainly one of the easier things to keep doing as you get older. So many of the idols, musically, of my youth are just embarrassing themselves. I don’t want to say names, because I love some of these artists. But at a certain point, you just can’t sing. OK? The vocal cords are like other parts of your body, apparently — they kind of give out. And yet they still (try to sing). But they can’t.
I don’t think that happens to a comedian. George Burns was booked when he was 100. And he almost made it. He died just before his hundredth birthday and he was gonna play the (London) Palladium.
Q. Can you imagine doing that? Continuing to perform till you’re 100?
A: It depends on where they go in the next 30 years, medically. I mean, they’re doing things now like injecting people with young blood. ... What they find is when you inject young blood into old rats, the rats act young, and when you inject old blood into young rats, they act old. Apparently, it’s a lot about the blood. They’re on the verge of doing a lot of things that — I don’t know if it’s gonna reverse the aging process, but it certainly slows it down. ...
So I don’t know. Maybe they’ll have something that will make us all incredibly spry in our 80s. But again, we’re not talking about the best years of your life, probably. We’re talking about years, but not ones where you’ll be dancing a jig.
Or I could drop dead tomorrow. I don’t know. I just know so far, life has gone fast.
Bill Maher
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15.
Where: Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St., Charlotte
Tickets: $49.50 and up.
Details: 704-372-1000; blumenthalarts.org.
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 3:29 PM.
