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. Hegave $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.
There was a time when Maher was jockeying to be the heir to George Carlin. Now, he is just another example of the men who, when the going gets tough, decide to cozy up to power. I thought back to another Real Time moment, this one from 2005. Maher was joined by the writer Christopher Hitchens, the one-time leftist who became an ardent supporter of the Iraq war, abandoning his cause to support the George W. Bush administration. (Hitchens oncedefended his support to Jon Stewart with the chilling answer: “Unfortunately, you go to war with the president you have.”)
With Maher, Hitchens tried to defend Bush by pointing to his marriage. He insisted one had to give him “credit he got Laura Bush to marry him.” Maher was quick to point out the fatuous remark: “That’s like [saying] Hitler’s dog loved him.” The rightjumped down Maher’s throat in response. Now, they cheer as he makes an even more pathetic, dangerous concession.
In other news, Rachel Kaly delivered a killer set on the April 9 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers.
“People say that because I’m so short I’m not threatening,” Kaly said. “But I’m actually closer to the size of a gun than any of you.”
Kaly went on to tackle topics ranging from the pandemic and her grandfather’s decision to “take up space” by getting buried bodily, to pronouns and dating on driving apps. She shared that she recently moved to Los Angeles from New York, leaving her old neighborhood, in part, because it was the same one where her ex lives.
“I was worried about seeing her with a new person,” Kaly shared. “Cuz if that person wore bigger shirts than me, then I would have to end it all.”
Esteemed late night veteran Eric Andre stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, his fly open, to talk about his podcast, cooking, stand-up and all kinds of fun stuff. He also shared with Kimmel that he had been offered and declined the role played by Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain, for which the actor won an Oscar.
Andre said he doubted whether it fit his brand, decided it did not, and then “made the biggest mistake of my entire career.” Who knows how it would have turned out, but I hope this means that Andre will slowly begin to wade into more “serious” acting roles going forward. It truly seems like a natural progression. Let’s make this man an EGOT! Plus, he already should have won for his work in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.
To close, let us return to John Mulaney. This column was a bit critical of his return to Netflix under the newly retooled show, Everybody’s Live. Mulaney has long proven he is an absolute master comedic storyteller, especially when recounting his own life. Last Wednesday’s show was no exception.
The show’s theme was getting fired. And to illustrate this point, he told a story of taking work writing a TV ad for Madden NFL videogames after his first pilot was canceled. The commercial featured Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis, who was ready to give Mulaney some advice on how to get back on his feet, on how to “win your crowd.”
After receiving some initial advice from Lewis on “when he went through what he went through,” the comic realized that he did not, in fact, know what “went through.” So Mulaney strolled over to Lewis’ agent and asked. As Mulaney tells it, the agent “stared at the only man in America who didn’t know what had happened to Ray Lewis.”
Don’t know either? Just watch.
Some Other Fun Stuff
John Oliver’s monologue over on Last Week Tonight centered on Donald Trump’s tariffs, in case you haven’t heard about them. Oliver poked fun at Trump’s insistence that “everything is going to work out well.” This, Oliver observed, is “a sentence that has never been true in human history.”
David Letterman’s Netflix show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction returned on April 8, featuring an interview with WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark, who plays for the Indiana Fever. The Indiana native Letterman was in his element.
The YouTube page of the Kennedy Center is getting us all excited for the official release of the ceremony awarding Conan O’Brien the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The ceremony will air on Netflix on Sunday, May 4. The Kennedy Center released a montage of O’Brien paying tribute to other honorees, including Lorne Michaels, Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler.
Finally, Taran Killam, Tone Bell, and Jess McKenna stopped by After Midnight on April 10 for a hilarious segment, “Teacher Feature.” The guests were asked to wade into the audience and bring someone on stage who they believed was a teacher. The reason, host Taylor Tomlinson said: “Summer is just around the corner, at which point all of our nation’s teachers will be released into the wild. You could be standing next to one on any given Tuesday and have no idea.”
Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He’s been writing Paste’s late night TV recaps since 2024. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.
