January Issue, 1996
pp 60-65

ON the red-brick wall behind the stage at the Improv, Bill Maher�s shadow has begun to fade, the darkness draining out of it until there is little left but what looks like the chalk outline of a dead body. For 10 minutes, Maher has been gently taking the temperature of the Saturday-night crowd, but now it is his dark side that has become visible.

�Most stereotypes are true,� he asserts. �That�s how they become stereotypes. And people are so sensitive that they become insults: �Black people are great athletes.� Oooohh, what an insult!� A thundering silence fills the room. Maher turns to a black man seated at a table near his feet. �SEE?� he roars, vindicated by the man�s obvious discomfort. �Why are you so tense about that? You�re good at something!�

If the audience is even slightly amused, they are keeping it to themselves. Maher is finally standing where he has always wanted to be, in the Belly of the Least--the comedy central nervous system of Los Angeles, the city playwright Jonathan Reynolds described as �the nation�s clearinghouse for political correctness.�

And he�s dying. He�s standing on the faultline between what is funny and what is merely in bad taste, peering downward, waiting to see if the ground will open up and swallow him. But he likes it out here on the edge. �If I don�t go over the line every once in a awhile,� he says later, �how am I supposed to know where it is?�

�Bill pushes the audience,� says Jim Vallely, a former stand-up and Maher�s longtime friend, who is now a TV producer. �He loves getting people upset. He doesn�t come down to them--he makes them come up to him. Even at the beginning of his career--when you�re really just trying to get the audience to like you--Bill would always take some unpopular stance, always go one joke beyond what anybody else would do. He seemed to enjoy the verbal rejection from the audience. I think he still enjoys it.�

He doesn�t appear to be enjoying it on this night in early December. Standing outside the Improv following his set, Maher lights a cigarette and contemplates his decision--announced the previous week--to move Politically Incorrect, cable�s nightly hip-check, from New York to L.A. in late January. �This place is just a black hole,� he says glumly. �Last night, I had to apply mouth-to-mouth for a full five minutes to these people. I just wanted to raise them one energy notch. I mean, this is L.A., and they are just, like, sluggish. But it�s not their fault. The town is depressed, the stand-up industry is depressed. It�s just a bunch of shit out here.�

Does show business make you an asshole or do assholes go into show business?

Bill Maher has finally arrived. This is true both literally (he has just turned up for lunch, slightly late, following a workout with his personal trainer) and metaphorically (his late-night talk show on HBO�s Comedy Central is a hit, and Maher is �the hottest property ever to emerge from a show whose audience is measured in decimal points,� according to the New York Times.

Politically Incorrect (or PI , to some) is the 50-fingered milking of sacred cows for laughs, featuring Maher and four celebrities, guerrillas in the midst of deconstructing such topics as �Men are pigs, and we�re tired of apologizing for it� and �Why is life precious?� The fearless odd coupling of guests has produced some striking television moments, winning the show a pair of CableACE Awards over the past two seasons. Some particularly memorable two-shots: gay playwright Harvey Fierstein and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, ABC anchor Hugh Downs and prop comic Carrot Top, fastidiously turned out Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and Guns N� Roses guitarist Slash, top-hatted and tattooed.

One show last year featured inside-the-Beltway heavyweights Senator Arlen Specter, along with Same Donaldson and Cokie Roberts of ABC News. But it was actress-comedian Janeane Garofalo--unable to get a word in edgewise--who made the evening notable by leaping onto the coffee table to she at least could say hello to her parents. Following one of Donaldson�s tart political broadsides, Maher leered at him, then said, �And you wonder why they hate your guts.�

The closest the show has ever come to teetering off its high wire was the night Sandra Bernhard was seated next to right-wing fundamentalist writer John Lofton. Maher tried to ask a question about social class, but Lofton dismissed as irrelevant. �Well then,� Maher snarled, �get off the fucking show.� He later apologized, but his loss of grip had bent the rules enough that Bernhard ended the segment by turning on Lofton and spitting. A subsequent appearance on the show had the Christian author seated nest to New York writer Lynn Snowden, whom Lofton almost immediately began to accuse of plotting to unload on him. �He was very agitated,� Snowden recalls. �I finally turned to him and said, �Don�t worry. I wouldn�t spit on you if you were on fire.�

By moving PI to L.A. just as it is hitting its stride, Maher has raised the stakes of his already jittery existence. Last month, ABC announced that, when Maher�s contract with HBO expires on Election Day, Politically Incorrect will move to the slot following Nightline. With Ted Koppel as his lead-in instead of 20-year-old reruns of Saturday Night Live, there will be pressure to play it safe.

His friends aren�t concerned that he�ll go soft. �I think Bill�s anger is why people gravitate toward him, why they get him,� Vallely says. �Bill will not do any bullshit little tap dance to get you to like him. He�s the guy with that anger you get waiting in line at Starbuck�s to spend $3 on coffee and then getting attitude. He gives the attitude right back. Bill Maher is the snooty-waiter-dressed-in-black�s worst nightmare.�

Maher�s darker side is a lurking presence that seems always with him--the shadow of his smile. His generalizations about women often go well beyond calling guests �Kitten,� as he did with Arianna Huffington, or �Doll� for Georgette Mosbacher. �You�d hear stuff come out of Bill like, �Find me a beautiful woman, and I�ll show you a guy who�s tired of fucking her,�� recalls a member of the PI staff. �He says that a lot.�

Maher himself admits that he is not exactly warm and fuzzy. It may take him a while to win over the town, or even the room he�s been playing at the Improv for 15 years. �It�s a hard job to be Bill Maher 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because he�s got such high standards,� says Vallely. �He�s got high standards for his friends, and he�s got high standards for his show. He may make a lousy first through ninth impression, but 10 through 80 is fantastic. Then it goes down from, like, 80 to 84.�

Why is life precious?

Before he came up with the idea for Politically Incorrect in 1992, Maher (rhymes with Paar) had spent a decade trying to make it as a Hollywood actor. In the end, he had little more to show for it than a house and a few guest shots on Murder, She Wrote, Newhart and the like. �I was in my mid 30s, and I had done everything right,� he says. �I had taken all these progressing steps, but the big one had eluded me.�

In 1985, Maher costarred with Geena Davis and Bronson Pinchot in the heavily promoted NBC series Sara. The show was canceled after 13 episodes. �Everyone told me it was going to be the Mary Tyler Moore show of the �80s, that it couldn�t miss,� Maher recalls. �Well, it missed.� After making a film called Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Maher was sent packing back to the comedy clubs.

During one of his regular Saturdays at the Improv, Maher was about to go on when another comic, whose career closely resemble his, stopped as he was leaving the stage. �He said, �Bill, is this it for us? Is this as far as things go?�� Maher recounts. �It was meant to be a joke, but I remember going home and just thinking about that. I had done everything--movies, sitcoms--but it all added up to nothing. You�ve got to find the one thing that�s perfect for you, that is you vehicle. And no vehicle worked for me until I made my own.�

After Johnny Carson�s retirement from The Tonight Show in 1992, Maher spotted a vacuum in the crowded late-night talk show market and developed the idea for Politically Incorrect. �I watched Johnny every night,� he says. �He had an authority that his successors lack. There just isn�t that feeling now of it being an event when you do The Tonight Show.�

When it went on the air in July 1993, PI looked as if it was shot in somebody�s basement. What made it work was Maher�s retro idea of letting guests talk to one another; for 30 years, guests were permitted to talk only to the host. �You know, Letterman and Leno and those kind of shows are not like mine, where people come on and talk freely,� he says. �They won�t even let you talk unless you have some act worked up that you can �pretell� them. You can�t just go on and wing it with Dave or Jay.�

On his show, Maher livened things up by firing small-caliber apercus at his guests� feet and making them dance. Soon, while Letterman and Leno were fighting a war of attrition over a dwindling network audience--serving up such dim-witted ethnic Slurpees as Mujibur, Sirajul and the Dancing Itos--Maher was mixing a nightly cocktail of celebrity citizens engaged in lively conversation wit, a thing rarely found on television at any hour.

Unlike the scripted blather that fills the time between film clips on the other late-nighters or the partisan drone of the Sunday-morning talkfest that have come to sound like Senate subcommittee meetings, Maher�s show takes on edgy topics and torques them in a way that manages to both inflame and inform. Rather than simply asking whether prostitution should be legalized, as the McLaughlin Group might do, or booking Hugh Grant--as both Leno and Letterman did--Maher frames the issue inside his lopsided grin: �If a woman can rent herself out for nine months as a surrogate mother, why can�t she rent herself out for 10 minutes as a prostitute?�

Maher�s biggest problem has been convincing celebrities that they have something to gain by doing the show. �We�re not going to get Madonna, because she�s got a big get-over-yourself problem,� he says. Instead, the nightly quartets are often filled out with demi-celebrities rather than celebrities named Demi. �Last season, I was always trying to get people to come on,� says Chuck LaBella, who books the PI guests. �Now I�m turning a lot of people away.�

The unspoken deal Politically Incorrect offers celebrities is that if they don�t make fools of themselves, Maher won�t do it for them. �I don�t want to see people hang themselves,� he says, �unless they�re repugnant. That�s the Letterman school--that it�s funny when a guest hangs himself, and you just throw him the rope and let go.�

If Maher was on his way to becoming the darling of New York�s cable-ready intellectuals, he had little use for them or any of the city�s less obscure charms. �I didn�t even like New York as a kid,� says Maher, who grew up in suburban River Vale, New Jersey. �My parents would want to take me there, and I�d say, �I don�t want to go to that dirty city.��

He spent most of the past three years holed up in his Manhattan apartment thinking about his home in L.A. or on a plane heading there. As Snowden, a frequent guest, tells it, �After one show, somebody said, �We�re all going down to Bowery Bar,� which is this trendy place you can�t help but hear about. And Bill was like, �Where?� That�s when I realized he really doesn�t go out. It struck me that he was saving himself for the weekends, when he would go back to L.A. And then he would really live.�

If stupid people will vote for anybody, shouldn�t intelligent people get an extra vote?

The success of PI�s run gave Maher the clout necessary to persuade HBO to let him move the show to California. Before that, he had acknowledged publicly that it was �more of an East Coast show,� conceding that HBO was right not to let him make the move. �But as soon as I could, I did,� Maher says. �So what a phony I am.� He expects his innate phoniness to make him feel right at home here. �At least in L.A., they�re honest about being phonies, which is more than can be said about New York.�

Maher doesn�t accept L.A.�s rep as an intellectual backwater, though he has had a few anxious moments anticipating the night when he is confronted by a panel of, say, Gabrielle Carteris, Dweezil Zappa, Bob Dornan and Lambchop. �It�s not a stupid city,� he says. �Certainly not now. Maybe it was at some point--it did have that reputation. But there are zillions of really smart people out here.�

What Los Angeles seems short on, however, are political figures of national stature sufficient to prevent the show from becoming apolitically incorrect. �If you look at the shows we did in L.A. for a week last November,� says a staff member, �there were very few substantive people. Stars make the show much more high-profile and the ratings go up, but it�s like selling your soul to the devil.�

Duplicating such programs as the one-on-one Maher did in January �95 with White House aide George Stephanopoulos will be far more difficult now, though executive producer Scott Carter has expressed a strong interest in such Sunbelt legends as former U.S. senator Barry Goldwater, now 87 and retired. �I don�t think a lot of people in the political world need to go to L.A.,� says Snowden. �The great thing about the show being in New York was you got this mix of fashion designers, actors and photographers, and I think Bill was very interested in not booking more than one actor at a time. Now he�s going to have three sitcom stars on every night. He feels the show is big enough that everybody wants to be on it, which is true. But when it comes to taking two days off from work to fly out to L.A., and you happen to be a senator, I don�t know how you justify it.�

Maher�s own justification for flight was all but genetically encoded 23 years ago, when Carson moved The Tonight Show from New York to Los Angeles and, in a single stroke, became the king of television. �At that certain age, when you�re choosing heroes, I chose Johnny Carson,� Maher says. �I couldn�t be the Beatles; I couldn�t be Muhammad Ali. But Johnny looked like something I could do.�

And he is still doing Johnny. Maher�s opening monologues on Politically Incorrect amount to an extended homage to Carson--incorporating the best of his mannerisms. �Anytime I watch the show, I can�t believe everyone isn�t just shouting, �Oh my God, he�s doing Carson!�� Maher says. �And yet it doesn�t matter, because Carson was doing Benny.�

By risking everything to come to L.A., Maher has finally arrived on Carson�s doorstep. �I get up every day, and I�m very thankful that this turned out the way it did,� Maher says. �Because if it hadn�t, I�d probably be getting up every day wanting to blow my brains out. If you haven�t made something of yourself by the time you�re 40�--he turned 40 on January 20-- �if you�re not one of the ones who get picked for the team, if you�re 40 and you�ve got to take that gig at Giggles in Columbus to pay the rent, it�s a cruel fucking business. If you don�t make it, it completely sucks.�