What This Comedian Said Will Shock You

by Kitty Kelley

This is a smart book with a dumb title.

Bill Maher dedicates What This Comedian Said Will Shock You to “the writers,” and well he should. For he and his writers hit their marks on every page of this book, Maher’s fifth, which, hats in the air, is laugh-out-loud funny. Money-back guarantee.

Half Irish (his father) and half Jewish (his mother), Maher has comedy genes, which he’s polished to a high gloss by traveling the country doing stand-up and performing every week on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” He holds the record for the most Emmy nominations without a win, having been nominated on 22 occasions. Always a bridesmaid. (And never a groom. This serial sybarite refuses to marry and procreate.)

Critics might feel compelled to add a warning label: “Caution: This book multiplies by seven George Carlin’s ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.’” For here, Maher takes Carlin’s seven profanities and, like the Bible’s five loaves and two fishes, transforms them into nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and gerunds.

Let’s not forget that the comedian graduated from Cornell University (Class of 1978) with a degree in English and history, while selling pot on every corner. Now, at age 68, Maher defines himself as a dope-smoking libertarian who derides fat people, such as the morbidly obese Donald Trump, whom he labels “Donnie Dorko.”

Maher says he understands the temptation to pick a celebrity for public office. “After all, Trump started with a big advantage, because he was a household name, like Preparation H … and no one has to tell Joe Biden what’s in the Constitution. Because he was in the room when it was written.”

There are no chapters in this book — just rat-a-tat segments with clever titles: “By the Time I Get to Phonics,” “Prude Awakening” (on the claims that Marjorie Taylor Greene was into polyamorous tantric sex), “Love Factually,” “Charlatan’s Web” and “Vladdy Issues,” which pillories Republicans for becoming the party of Putin. “You know how many Syrian refugees Russia has taken in? Two. Martin Sheen has more refugees in his pool house.”

Punching above his weight, Maher wallops Democrats (“they are to political courage what Velveeta is to cheese”) and rips Republicans, including the revered Ronald Reagan, who “sold weapons to Iran, the country right-wingers all want to bomb now, in brazen defiance of American law, and instead of being impeached, he was elevated to sainthood and now rides horses in heaven with Jesus.”

Maher eviscerates the Washington Post for plummeting from Watergate glory into blubber-tweeting. “If someone named Deep Throat called the paper today and wanted to meet in a parking garage, this crew of emotional hemophiliacs would have an anxiety attack and report to HR that they didn’t ‘feel safe.’”

Gleefully riding the third rail of politics, sex and religion, Maher pulverizes the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United for allowing campaign spending without limits, lambasting Justice Anthony Kennedy, “writing for the majority from his tower in Whoville.”

The comedian chides Democrats for threatening to “pack the court,” saying “it’s already packed — with Catholics: Chief Justice Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett are all Catholics, plus Neil Gorsuch, who’s really one too since he was raised Catholic and is now Episcopalian, which is just a Catholic who flunked Latin.”

Maher pillories Cardinal Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2013 “shocked the world by telling Vatican Radio — you know, Vatican Radio, playing the hits from the eighth century, the ninth century and today — that he was going to resign, because the Church needed a fresh, young face. Somewhere other than on a priest’s lap.” He writes that Benedict, “the spare parts pope, the only one ever to collect a pension,” wrote a letter to the faithful claiming that “because of the ‘Revolution of 68’ — whatever that was — ‘pedophilia was then … diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.’”

Here Maher, an atheist, advises: “[B]efore anyone at the Vatican starts calling anyone else a pedophile, you might want to check the color of your kettle, because we traced the call, and it’s coming from inside the belfry.”

In the “Heathen Sent” segment, the comic demands equal time for people like him — atheists and agnostics — including “an intellectual president like Obama, who admits to being a ‘secular humanist’ (wink, wink — atheist) [while having] to pretend to be religious.” Maher calls that “holy ghosting.”

Regarding bizarro beliefs, he applauds the star of “Top Gun: Maverick.” “It was fun and nostalgic, and Tom Cruise has been such an ageless, reliably entertaining movie star for so long it sometimes makes me think, ‘Maybe there is something to Scientology.’”

Having whomped the Supremes, vilified the Vatican and beatified Tom Cruise, Maher pounces on the police by asking: “When did punching someone in the head become a law enforcement technique? The cops need to make up their minds; they do a Riverdance on your skull and then when they’re putting you in the car they say: ‘Watch your head.’” The comedian maintains “the police attract bullies like the priesthood attracts pedophiles. Like carnivals attract meth addicts.”

It’s not just the snappy one-liners that make this book catnip. Maher gives a rationale for his opinions as he confronts tough issues such as racial injustice. In “Beige Against the Machine,” he writes: “I can’t tell who is more annoying: the type of conservative who doesn’t care about anyone who isn’t white, or the liberals who hate themselves because they are white. There’s got to be a sweet spot somewhere between the PC police and the Memphis police.”

Despite its inane title, this book hits that sweet spot.

Originally published in The Georgetowner