Larry Charles (above, left) is someone I admired long before he directed the virtually unanimously acclaimed Borat:CLoAfMBGNoK. He was a writer on Seinfeld and directed more than 10 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It made sense that HBO veterans Sacha Baron Cohen and Charles would find themselves collaborating on a film, a film that would go on to become the most critically acclaimed American comedy of the new decade. I really liked Borat quite a bit, and when I stumbled onto this poster:
...sometime last November or thereabouts, I was a little saddened that Charles’s follow-up would be centered around the detestable Bill Maher, who I knew very little about other than the fact that he held hopelessly liberal beliefs, and wore a countenance that radiated smug.
Well, since then I’ve read about and watched a lot more of Maher. After 9/11, when every American who wasn’t crying tears of blood or flying into a fit of vengeful rage at anybody who looked even vaguely Middle-Eastern was formally declared unpatriotic or traitorous, it took massive guts, balls, backbone, whichever body part serves the idiom best, to say what Bill Maher said, on September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the attacks, on his ABC show Politically Incorrect, when speaking to guest Dinesh D’Souza:
D’Souza: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.
Maher: Not true.
D’Souza: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.
Maher: Exactly.
D’Souza: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.
Maher: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.
Warriors? Eh. Does it really take a brave warrior to overpower a female flight-attendant and then cut the unarmed woman's throat? I think D'Souza may have overstated it, but I understand what he's saying. If this highly-organized and carefully planned operation had been carried out by SEALs with less crude weaponry in a location far, far away from our country, then it would have been an act of heroic military cunning. If our country is attacked, it's terrorism. If we are the aggressors, it's counter-terrorism, understand? It's the same old ethnocentric megalomania and hypocrisy that passes as patriotism and love of country over here in the greatest country in the world (read: has the most money) and as we all learned from Mr. Show, “More Money = Better Than.”
Maher is impartial and looks at the 9/11 attacks objectively. The only ones who have any right to be upset with him and D'Souza for what they said are those who lost loved ones or their homes or were injured. In their cases, irrational bias is perfectly justified.
Maher's show was cancelled not long after this episode aired. He got a new show on HBO in 2003, Real Time with Bill Maher. Again, HBO veterans united, and now we have Religulous.
Maher is as polarizing a national figure as one will find. Jackass, or the biggest balls in the nation? He's said plenty of things that support the former and plenty of things that support the latter. The man essentially demands an opinion. Just one look at a picture of his smug face and snide expression elicits a strong reaction.
Mine used to be that he was a jackass, but now, after watching two of his HBO comedy specials and watching select episodes of Real Time and old episodes of Politically Incorrect, and seeing his unapologetic attitude of contempt for the American public, often saying things so wildly contrarian, that there must be an inkling of calculated offense in them, I’ve decided that the man has balls. Balls in the way Sacha Baron Cohen had balls, stepping into the lion’s den of hostile provincialism and slathering himself in barbecue sauce and offering baiting commentary like so much bloody pork, his whole being a walking bait just begging to brave situations of unthinkable social awkwardness, situations which had me cowering behind my fingers out of embarrassment and discomfort while Cohen boldly, self-destructively charged into the fray. I doubt Maher will come close to that, but from the trailers, it looks like he is very conscious of his director’s previous documentary/social commentary/comedy of manners/assault on propriety/stunt and must do his best to meet its challenge. If anybody’s up to the task, it’s Maher. We shall see on October 3.
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