Bill Maher and Dave Barry Reflected on Aging Gracefully

This week, Real Time With Bill Maher reached a milestone: the show’s 700th episode aired on Friday night. “I started as a child star,” Maher said in his opening monologue. Current events gave Maher plenty to discuss there, though recent headlines — ICE in Los Angeles, the government deporting children — aren’t exactly topics that lend themselves to levity.

The highlight of the episode by a substantial margin came when Maher welcomed writer Dave Barry to the stage. Barry was there to discuss his memoir Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, which let Maher return to a theme he’s returned to a few times this season: what memoirs say about mortality. (This also came up during his interview with Barry Diller a few weeks ago.)

For his part, Barry seemed comfortable with his age. “77 is the new 74,” he told Maher. “It is old.” Maher’s response? “I’m always about tomorrow.” Also up for discussion was the difference between being a “class clown” and “class wit.” Barry remembered being told “you can’t joke your way through life” when he was in school. “This proved to be inaccurate,” he told Maher.

The two men exchanged a fair amount of banter, including needling one another about their approaches to styling their hair. (Maher to Barry: “77 years old and you still have the Dennis the Menace haircut.” Barry to Maher: “Have you thought about bangs?”) Barry also alluded to his time playing in the literary supergroup the Rock Bottom Remainders: “We raise money for charity, but no charity ever asks us to come back.”

If the general vibe was that of two famous men of a certain age trading quips, at least the quips were funny. Right here is where I should probably mention that I have a soft spot for Barry’s writing; I read Dave Barry Slept Here a lot during my formative years, and laughed a lot while doing so. And there’s something to be said for a conversation where both parties seem relaxed in one another’s company; they probably could have sustained an entertaining interview for the duration of the episode.

For the panel discussion, Democratic strategist Paul Begala and Republican Congressman Wesley Hunt joined Maher. Two ideological opponents with a penchant for rapid-fire commentary could have made for a memorable policy debate or two, but there were few surprises to be had in the segment. The three men talked about isolationism and interventionism and the recent rise of political violence, but there was little said that illuminated any of these issues.

The segment ended with a brief discussion of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti. Maher restated his usual position regarding trans kids, while Rep. Hunt went on a long tear about trans women playing sports, which, it should be noted, is not at all what the case in question was about. Begala was on the opposite side of the issue, but the segment ran out of time before he could bring together what sounded like a number of fairly disparate rhetorical threads.

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The relatively familiar arguments continued in the episode’s final segment, which began with Maher critiquing depictions of fathers as idiots in pop culture. From there, he pivoted to a broader argument over knee-jerk anti-male sentiment. Again, I’m not sure that the binary argument that Maher proposed here is entirely accurate. I’m glad to see Maher criticizing the likes of Andrew Tate, but when Maher argues that “the choice of role models that an American teenage boy has” are “either performative pussyhood or the manosphere,” I think there’s plenty of nuance between those two points. We’ll see if he returns to that when the show’s summer break ends.

Other notable moments from this week’s episode:

Maher on the president and racism: “Trump once called himself the least racist person in the world. I must say, the runner-up guy must be a doozy.”
Maher on the OneTaste verdict: “In the Venn diagram of orgasms and meditation, there’s no overlap. And if there is, you’re doing it wrong.”
Maher on fatherhood: “I don’t have any kids. I made a different decision in life and decided to have money.”
Real Time’s summer break begins now; the show will return on August 1.