Late Night Last Week: Bill Maher’s Hypocrisy, John Mulaney’s Ray Lewis Story, and More
Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, Bill Maher reminds everybody that he’s a hypocrite, John Mulaney gets words of wisdom from Ray Lewis, and more.
On the Friday, April 11 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host pivoted from his monologue to a story time that lasted 13 minutes—almost half the episode. Perched on a stool before his live studio audience, Maher recounted his April 11 meeting with Donald Trump at the White House—you know, the one facilitated by Kid Rock.
“What I’m gonna do is report exactly what happened,” Maher said. “You decide what you think about it.”
Maher has always been an equal opportunity offender, but during the 2010s, he was most certainly a mainstream liberal. He gave $1 million to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and emerged as a vocal critic during Trump’s first term, patting himself on the back for predicting that something like January 6th might happen. But with the new decade, he began to drift towards the MAGA world, critiquing the response to COVID and, of course, voicing his endless concern over “wokeness.” In February 2020, he told Steve Bannon that history would not be kind to him. On Friday, he welcomed Bannon back as the show’s first guest.
The upshot of Maher’s monologue concerned Trump’s personality. The president was not a madman, Maher insisted to his audience. He has a good sense of humor, can laugh at himself, and seems to indicate that he knows he is (partially) playing a character.
“He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public,” Maher said, while relaying an anecdote in which Trump seemed to admit he lost the 2020 election. Maher, it seemed, was shocked to find that the former host of a fake business show who never met a camera he didn’t like had a penchant for performance. Did the WWE clips of Trump never make it to Maher’s desk?
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian; it matters who he is on the world stage,” Maher said. “I’m just taking it as a positive that this person exists, because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.”
Were the policies absent? And for that matter, did Maher not stop to consider whether the fact that Trump may be putting on an act in public might, in fact, be more disturbing?
At one point, Maher recounts later seeing Trump ranting and raving on 60 Minutes. “What happened to Glinda the Good Witch?” he asked. Well evidently, Maher has never finished the movie. Anyone who shelled out 15 bucks last year to see Wicked would not be as shocked as Maher was to find that, sometimes, the public and private personas of fascist leaders are not always one.
To make this point, let us turn to … 2018 Bill Maher. I remember watching Maher’s interview with Geraldo Rivera on Real Time not long after it was released. Maher confronted the broadcaster, criticizing the man he said he once admired for embracing Trump. Rivera said, “I can separate the man who has always been gracious to me, always been nice to my family…”
Maher quickly interjected: “Who gives a shit?! He’s running the world now, what does that matter that he was nice to you at Thanksgiving?” It’s a question that was ringing through my ears as I watched.
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