An average day in Los Angeles, and Bill Maher is dealing with yet another
death threat. A personally addressed hate package, containing sinister
powder, potentially anthrax, has been discovered at the Palm Springs
auditorium where the 53-year-old comedian, chat show host and scourge of
America's Right and Left was to perform his stand-up routine. The venue has,
naturally, been shut down, the gigs before and after have been cancelled
while the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating. And yet Maher
remains surprisingly phlegmatic. “Americans always panic,” he says with a
sigh. “Looking for anthrax and all that bullshit. But it's just someone
trying to get at me. You can't worry about that stuff. I assume there are
bigger fish to fry than a comedian.”
Maher has been here before. In 2001, when he was dismissed as host of the
current affairs TV show Politically Incorrect for insisting that the 9/11
suicide bombers were not cowards, he became a national hate figure and was
forced to bring bodyguards into his Beverly Hills home. This time the
flashpoint is no less incendiary: a satirical movie documentary called
Religulous, written and presented by Maher, that takes savagely funny
pot-shots at three of the major religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam),
and the apparently deluded 3.7 billion people who practise them. “We're
looking at the zillions of religious people in the world,” he says. “These
are nice people who happen to need their myths to live by. We ask: ‘How does
all this turn into suicide bombing, exorcisms and f***ing children?'”
The film, directed by Larry Charles, who made Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie,
takes Maher around the globe for a series of face-to-face encounters with
the faithful - often the eccentric and decidedly unhinged kind - in the name
of comedy and sceptical inquiry. “What I am preaching here, primarily, is
doubt,” says Maher, before adding, “But the subject itself is funny. People
who believe in a talking snake? That's funny.” The encounters range from an
absurd meeting with two tongue-tied gay Muslim activists in Amsterdam, to a
more traditional confrontation with an angry Christian trucker (“You start
disputing my God and you got a problem!”), to some wider theological debates
with scholars, scientists and Vatican priests.
It could have been a cheap-trick movie - Borat Does Religion. But, unlike
Baron Cohen's creation, Maher has no persona to hide behind and instead
thrives mostly on a combination of fearlessness and deadpan wit. “Gay Muslim
activists? That is a very rare job description,” he says to his two nervous
interviewees, adding, sotto voce, “You guys have balls.” He is adamant that
he did not deliberately ridicule any of his subjects, claiming, “It was
about asking important questions. But if people make fools of themselves
that's not my fault.” Mostly, though, what comes out of Religulous is the
sense of an impassioned sceptic, Maher, utterly in control of his material.
In one scene, for instance, he confronts increasingly discomfited American
Christians with a rapid-fire lecture that puts the story of Jesus into
context within those of Krishna, Dionysus, the Persian god Mithra and the
Ancient Egyptian god Horus.
“I always felt that I owned this whole topic,” he explains. “Especially here
in America, where people make jokes about religion, but nobody says that,
fundamentally, religion is silly and religion is dangerous. I've been doing
this for years, long before the books of Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens. In America I own this issue.”
Maher adds that his obsession with religion, like his love of comedy, goes
back a long way. He grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Jewish mother, Julie
Berman, and an Irish-American father, William Maher. When he was 13 his
father stopped bringing Maher and his sister Kathy to church because, it
later transpired, he disapproved of Pope Paul's stringent belief in the
sinfulness of birth control. In the same year Maher found out that his
mother, who had not spoken about her religious heritage and had quietly
avoided church her whole life, was actually Jewish. “It didn't bother me
that she was Jewish,” he says. “But it bothered me that, as a family, we
didn't talk about it.” Yet he is reluctant to see his childhood as the
source of everything he is today. Instead he says that his comedic persona,
and his penchant for exposing hypocrisy has been a “long process of
evolution”.
He does admit, however, that his father, a garrulous joker and an NBC radio
news broadcaster, was a huge influence, and formative in his appreciation of
comedy and current affairs. “As kids, it was thrilling,” he says. “There's
Dad, it's six o'clock, get around the radio, he's doing the news! At other
times, I'd see him being funny with his friends in the living room and I'd
say, I want to do that, and be that!”
He studied English at Cornell University, but upon graduation announced to
family and friends that he wanted to be a stand-up comedian. Fifteen years
of hard graft followed until finally, in 1993, he was hired to host
Politically Incorrect, a chat show on which celebrities and minor
politicians roguishly debated the issues of the day. It was a bittersweet
achievement, he says, because his father died of cancer just before the
programme aired. “He would have loved it. It combined the two things I
associate most strongly with him: humour and news.”
Today, he has mixed feelings about the nine years he spent on Politically
Incorrect. “It seems juvenile when I look back on it now,” he says. “And I
wish I had had the guts to walk away from it before they fired me.” The
firing was pivotal for Maher, and seemed to confirm that he wouldn't dampen
his risqué patter for anyone, or any event, no matter how tragic. In this
case, six days after the 9/11 attacks, he declared: “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.”
The public reaction, Maher says, was unequivocal. “It was somehow seen as an
act of treason,” he says, describing a furore that would ultimately lead to
questions in the White House press room, and multiple death threats. “It
felt like the whole country was going to get torches and march on my
driveway. It was like the only appropriate thing to do on television after
9/11 was to shut the f*** up and sing God Bless America!”
These days, Maher hosts a “more mature” political chat show, Real Time with
Bill Maher, on the cable channel HBO. He says that, apart from the
occasional death threat, America is used to his controversial style by now.
Ideologically, he is mercurial, and happy to offend all colours in the
political spectrum. He is pro-Israel, pro the death penalty, pro-abortion,
and anti-Iraq war. Politically, he says, “My heart leans towards the
Democrats, but I'm an independent. I like Barack Obama, but I don't like his
ideas on increasing the war in Afghanistan. In this country you have to be
for some war or else you're a pussy.”
His own view of religion is that it's not worth the bother. “I'm not an
atheist, though, because the belief that there is no God only mirrors the
certitude of religion,” he says. “No, I'm saying that doubt is the only
appropriate response for human beings.” He bemoans the mingling of religion
and politics in the US, citing Tony Blair's belated conversion to Roman
Catholicism as a classic illustration of the difference between the British
and American political systems. “In the UK, if you announce something like a
conversion to Catholicism while in office they say you're a nutter, but over
here it's the exact opposite.”
What of Religulous? Will its success in the US lead to further big-screen
adventures for Maher? “Absolutely not,” he says. “I have no interest in ever
doing a movie again. It was a one-time passion project. It was my Moby Dick.
And now I've done it, nothing will be on that level again. Ever.”
Religulous is released on Friday
