Article in Canadian TV Guide
July 5-11, 1997

Even when Bill Maher is making an appearance for an organization close to his heart, he still can't help but make trouble. There he was, at a benefit in San Diego, Calif., for an animal-rights group when, mid-monologue, political correctness jumped up and bit him on the ear:

"I had looked for material that was apropos to animals," Maher recalls in his dressing room after a taping of his ABC late-night talk show, Politically Incorrect. "I came across this joke from a story in the paper. The joke was, "they finally got pandas at the San Diego Zoo to mate. It turned out to be easy - the male panda got a Porsche." Pause. Maher looks partly sad, partly outraged." and the audience, "he says booed."

He still can't believe it. "I couldn't figure out what the booing was about," he says. "I couldn't make fun of pandas? Afterwards I asked a woman I saw booing what it was for. She said, "Well, you know, the idea that women would go after guys with Porsches, that's not very nice to women."

Maher (pronounced "Mar") has been fighting political correctness throughout his entire 18-year career as a comedian, mostly in stand-up - which he calls "the last bastion of a free voicing of opinions and ideas"- and the long struggle for success is finally paying off. Such august institutions as the New York Times have cited Politically Incorrect as "almost single-handedly reviving political satire on television. [It] has pulled off the rare trick of being irreverent without being irrelevant." A recent cover story in U.S News & World Report compared him favorably with icons of satire ranging from Mark Twain and Will Rogers to Mort Sahl. His views on all manner of public issues have been sought out as if he were a U.S. senator. Through it all, Maher has stuck to a simple credo: "I don't care what the correctness people say - most people are always ready to laugh at everything."

Long before anyone else sized up the magnitude of the political-correctness monster, Maher issued his first challenge to a mass audience in the mid-'80s on The Tonight Show, then the arbiter of what would and wouldn't wash on TV. The subject: AIDS. The punch line: "I just want to meet an old fashioned girl with gonorrhea." The joke got a huge laugh from the studio audience and from its host, Johnny Carson. Maher ran with it, building his career on prodding audiences as far as they could go.

The '80s were a fertile period for comedy, but all the while he was looking for a way out of stand-up - "that's not how you get your ticket punched in this business." Maher had long observed that, ever since the retirement of Johnny Carson, and Jack Paar before him, late-night audiences had been deprived of a real talk show; David Letterman and Jay Leno, said Maher, were really hosting variety shows without much talk that didn't involve stars plugging projects. He had been doing the odd gig at the U.S. cable network Comedy Central, including a successful stint as an election-campaign commentator. Banking on that success, he pitched them an idea for an arena-type show in which he and four guests would square off around topical issues for a half-hour "as if we were blowing off steam at a cocktail party. And if we offended some viewers, so be it." The idea was sold and, in 1993, Politically Incorrect was born.

The program became an underground hit with a loyal following. Each show was wild and unpredictable: suddenly people - whether famous, quirky or pretty much unknown - who would never have been on the same show, much less debating current events, found themselves tossed together. Drew Carey, meet Robert Kennedy Jr.; Carrot Top, say hi to Deepak Chopra; Luke Perry, have you met Norman Mailer? Whaddaya want to talk about - immigration, drug control, parenthood, taxing churches, O.J., gangsta rappers, plea bargains, sex scandals, smokers' rights? You name it.

Maher retained the standard opening monologue but, unlike standard fare, his cut deeper. "Who's superior, men or women? Women don't start wars or pollute oceans. But men don't throw crying fits and lock themselves in the bathroom when one of their friends get married." And: "They asked Louis Farrakhan what he thought of Schindler's List, and he said it was the feel-good hit of the season."

Politically Incorrect scored respectable ratings on Comedy Central. Then somebody at ABC got an idea - what if you followed Ted Koppel's superbly sober Nightline with Politically Incorrect's let-it-rip bar-stool banter? In January, with ABC behind him, Bill Maher went up against Leno and Letterman and became a certified star.

Maher, 41, admits it's been a strange journey from River Vale, N.J., the bedroom community where he grew up, to L.A. and stardom. His father, Bill Sr., who died in 1991, was a news editor at NBC radio who routinely discussed politics at the dinner table, tweaking his young son's interest in public affairs. But after getting an English-literature degree from Cornell University, Bill Jr. decided to follow in the footseps of his hero, Johnny Carson, and took his shot at stand-up in 1979.

"My whole act at first was about having Catholic father and a Jewish mother," he says. "Years later, after I started getting on The Tonight Show, Johnny would make me do one of his favorites about how I brought a lawyer into confession. "Bless me, Father for I have sinned - do you know Mr. Cohen?""

As he evolved during the '80s, Maher did considerably better on the comedy circuit than his peers, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser and Garry Shandling, but his career was foundering. He wrote a novel, True Story, based on his experiences as a stand-up, which was well reviewed but didn't bring the recognition he was seeking and didn't help much to pay the rent. He appeared in a short-lived sitcom called Sara, with Geena Davis, and some bad movies, but "I wasn't dedicated enough to be a real actor."

Then Seinfeld, Reiser and Shandling got their own series. "I went through my hardest years," he says. "I'd say '91 and '92 were the worst. I saw my friends getting the right vehicles for them and was glad for them, but I felt awful when I said to myself, "Is it ever going to happen for me at all?""

But Maher appears to have found his calling with Politically Incorrect, and he proudly defies classification. In general, he's in favor of the death penalty, women's choice and affirmative action but against welfare. And he fervently believes Ronald Reagan was right in calling the Soviet Union "the Evil Empire" during the Cold War, and that the Vietnam War was a necessary price to pay in the fight against totalitarianism.

The only shadow over the show's future is ratings. Despite the critical raves and consistent ratings, Politically Incorrect has yet to make serious inroads against the late-night heavyweights, attracting only a scant 10 per cent share of audiences compared to say, Letterman's 16 per cent.

No matter what, Maher will soldier on. "When the show began, I thought I'd run out of topics, that political correctness would ease up, but it's getting worse. When I do stand-up these days, it's frequently on college campuses, which should be the bell whether of ideas. But there's absolute fascism on many of these campuses. Liberal McCarthyism from young people who don't even want to hear the other side."

If that's the case, they'd better not tune in to Politically Incorrect. The same day that news broke of the mass suicide by Heaven's Gate cultists, Maher didn't wait to see which way the wind would blow on the subject. He leapt right in: 'Apparently they thought they were going to meet up with this UFO, whatever you don't refer to the flight attendant as stewardess'�

"The coins were apparently a symbol of the materialism they were leaving behind, and they $5 bill was in case the UFO rented headsets."