FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Bill Maher is at home near Los Angeles. There are no fires. The sun is shining. The air-quality gauge says the air outside is good. This is not the kind of day that a man abandons his beloved California for Miami.
But the New York native acknowledges he came close to doing just that last year, weary from wildfire smoke, government regulation and COVID edicts.
“Just the fact that it’s on my mind, who has always loved California, will tell you that we have serious problems,” Maher says. “There’s an exodus from states that strike people — even liberal people — as overbearing. Tax-wise overbearing, regulation-wise, it’s insane what goes on here with regulations. I do understand this exodus.”
The 66-year-old comedian began the 20th season of his HBO talk show “Real Time” last month firmly entrenched in the political no-man’s land he’s staked out, a friend of neither the left nor the right. On March 4-5 Maher will air his grievances for a new HBO special to be filmed in front of live audiences at the Fillmore Miami Beach.
Speaking by phone, Maher laid some groundwork for these shows on subjects including COVID, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Whoopi Goldberg, climate change, democracy, insurrection and what he thinks of overtures to join the GOP.
Q: Why did you choose to shoot this special in South Florida?
A: Because it seemed like the place least likely to be affected by COVID bull—. But, also, I’ve always loved Miami. Always had great shows there. When it came time to pick a city, I was not going to pick New York or California because they’re just a lot more, let’s say, zealous about the pandemic.
Q: Even as hospitals filled up and ventilators were scarce, Florida never seemed to stop partying. What does that say about us?
A: Our first show of the season a few weeks ago I read the statistics of what states had the highest [COVID] death rates. I think Florida was 17, New Jersey and New York, I think, were 4 and 6. You know, highest being worse. … There’s a lot of different factors that have gone into why some places did better than others. In general, it’s a pandemic, things are gonna happen that are not good. My point of view has always been much more let’s keep living. … Let’s concentrate on protecting, if we can, the vulnerable parts of the population. We know what they are, it’s not a mystery anymore. And let the rest of us live.
Q: Comedians are now an essential part of the political discourse. Is that a role you feel obligated to fill?
A: I see my role as coming on Friday nights [on “Real TIme”] and informing people in an entertaining way. But I also feel our show is very unique, being an honest broker about calling out everybody. The rest of television is inside one bubble or the other. I don’t play the bubble game.
Q: Was Jan. 6 political discourse?
A: It was way beyond political discourse. C’mon, I mean, people died. They tried to stop an election from being properly counted. This is the thing about the Republicans these days, they’re like, “Oh, Bill, I see that you criticize the left a lot. Why don’t you become one of us?” Yes, I criticize the left a lot because the left has changed a lot. I haven’t changed. They’ve changed. But the idea that I would join a party that believes in neither climate change or democracy, is not even on the table. There’s a lot wrong with the Democrats, but I still think they’re savable. And until the Republicans believe in those two things, climate change or democracy, they are not.
Q: Speaking of climate, what are your feelings about the plight of the lovable, lumbering manatee? Their decimated food supply is big news here.
A: It’s hardly just the manatees. We’re decimating entire populations of species. … We’re gonna be down to cats and dogs, cows and pigs and chickens. Just the things we pet and eat. And definitely we’re killing everything in the ocean. When you order fish in a restaurant, whatever it says on the menu, you’re kidding if you think that’s what it really is. It’s whatever we found there today, and we’re gonna call it a Chilean sea bass. A name they just made up. It’s funny, they made up Chilean sea bass and then they drove it to extinction. It never existed, and then they killed it off. [Laughs]
Q: So, for the record, you will not be one of the many ex-New Yorkers and ex-Californians moving to Florida.
A: I looked kind of hard at moving to Miami last year, when we had horrible fires. That’s the other thing that makes me nervous about California — there was a week in 2020 when we couldn’t see the sun, [it] was blotted out from the sky. … We are living in a permanent state of drought. I turn on the tap every day and say, “Where are they getting this s—? Where is this coming from?” Because it never rains here. And people said, “Well, Miami is going to be under water.” But I’d rather be drowning than on fire. … This last year in California, for some reason, it wasn’t so bad. Somehow the climate is a disaster, but the weather was delightful. If it would just stay that way, I wouldn’t be tempted to get out of here.
Q: You have a degree from an Ivy League school [Cornell]. Our governor has degrees from two Ivies [Yale and Harvard Law School]. We’re very proud.
A: Having a degree from an Ivy League school means absolutely nothing as far as character or intelligence. I mean, there’s no bigger a—hole factory in the world than Harvard. [Sen.] Ted Cruz and [Sen.] Josh Hawley, two insurrectionists who don’t believe in our form of government, and who are in our government, have degrees from Ivy League schools.
But I did give your governor credit during the pandemic in one editorial we did, when I said — I read this, I don’t know this — that he was a voracious reader of the information and the literature that was coming out about COVID. And maybe that’s why he protected the elderly population better than the governor of New York, who at the time was being lauded as the smart guy about COVID. There’s a lot not to like about DeSantis, but I think his was a better way to handle it, by keeping things much more open.
Q: Is this a particularly tough time to be a comedian with a big stage and a big mouth? I’m thinking Whoopi Goldberg and Joe Rogan.
A: It’s been rough for anyone, comedians or otherwise, who speaks about anything and is at all interesting in any way. There are so many humorless buzzkills who just want to put a scalp on their wall. They’re not really caring about social justice or any other kind of justice. They just want to get people and cancel people. That’s a big hobby for people who don’t have a personality of their own.
Q: You think Whoopi was treated unfairly? [The host of “The View” on Monday completed a two-week suspension from the show after a Jan. 31 on-air statement that “[the] Holocaust isn’t about race … It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”]
A: I think we need to get over this mania we have in this country for making people go away and disappearing them if they say something you don’t like. She should be able to say whatever she wants. I didn’t agree with what she said. Two weeks earlier she attacked me. And she’s allowed to. That’s her right, it’s an opinion show. It’s called “The View.” If they say something you don’t like, turn the channel, turn the page, do something else.
[Maher acknowledged that he has disagreed with many statements made by Goldberg, who he calls a friend, going back to her 2007 defense of Michael Vick during his dogfighting controversy, which she called a product of the Southern culture he was raised in.]
In a country that has for most of its history been an apartheid state, you cannot expect the races to have matching points of view, whether its on electrocuting dogs or the Holocaust. As much as I think she’s way out in left field on both of those issues, I get it. We have two completely different histories that were imposed on Black folks by the white population. So it’s seriously un-woke to think we should all come out with the same point of view.
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Bill Maher performs 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, March 4-5, at the Fillmore Miami Beach, 700 Washington Ave. Tickets start at $62 at FillmoreMB.com.
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