Bill Maher Explored the Comedian as Rock Star

You can learn a lot about an audience by watching its reactions. In 2023, the writer John Warner wrote a fascinating piece on how comedians’ audiences respond to their punchlines — sometimes with laughter, as you’d expect, and sometimes with applause. Warner argues convincingly that the latter reflects the audience “expressing approval for the point of view that they already knew they agreed with.”

You hear a lot of applause from the Real Time With Bill Maher studio audience. They aren’t alone in this; a recent Daily Show segment with Jon Stewart also found that audience alternating between proper laughter and applause, depending on the punchline. Though it was also notable that this week’s Real Time featured a few lines that got honest-to-goodness, full-throated laughs from the audience — as when Maher addressed the president’s comments about buying fewer dolls for children.

“Who runs on a pledge of, ‘Let’s make Christmas worse for children’?” Maher asked. After a relatively policy-heavy episode last week, this week’s was a little looser, and had a few more moments where the audience seemed genuinely responsive. See also: a point later in the episode where the studio audience laughed heartily at Maher doing what panelist Kara Swisher described as “an excellent rich person’s laugh.”

That was also in keeping with the lead interview segment, when Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong joined Maher to discuss the new documentary Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie. Maher noted that the duo got “a rock-star welcome,” which led to a broader conversation about the idea of comedians as rock stars. Sometimes this was a good thing; in other cases, it could be seen as more cautionary. “Russell Brand did it…maybe a little too much,” Maher observed.

Maher applauded the documentary for showing the tension between the duo. Chong and Marin had very different personas on stage; Chong was free-associating and occasionally making ribald jokes, while Marin seemed a little more reflective. They also shared memories of their heyday, with Marin calling their records “my favorite period” of the duo’s heyday.

Perhaps the most intriguing moment came when Chong talked about reaching out to Terence Malick about directing one of the duo’s films. He refreshed Maher’s memory about Malick’s filmography at the time — Badlands and Days of Heaven — about which Maher correctly observed, “These are not funny.” Then again, onetime Malick acolyte David Gordon Green went on to direct stoner comedies like Your Highness and Pineapple Express, so maybe Chong was on to something.

Al Gore Stopped by This Week’s “Real Time With Bill Maher”

Along with plenty of talk of partisanship and governmental reform

Later in the episode, Swisher and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy joined Maher for the night’s panel discussion. Swisher was wryly funny throughout, whether explaining the “Trump take egg” meme or discussing the Trump administration’s tariffs. “There’s an expression in tech called ‘chaos monkey,’” Swisher said. “This particular chaos monkey is throwing feces all over the planet.”

The episode came to an end with Maher discussing the Democratic Party’s strategy and comparing it to the end of the eighth season of Love Is Blind. It was a very convoluted metaphor warning against ideological purity tests. On the other hand, the fact that Maher had brought up Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker — a billionaire gaining momentum among voters skeptical of billionaires — suggests there’s more to this than the segment showed.

Still: there were some genuine laughs over the course of the episode, and we can always wonder what a Terence Malick-directed Cheech and Chong movie would have been like.

Other notable moments from the episode:

Maher on the president’s approval numbers: “It’s like America remarried their ex and remembered why they got divorced in the first place.”
Maher on the effects of tariffs: “There’s less on the shelf and it costs more. What’s your problem, people? Just imagine you live at the airport.”
Maher on Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to give people bot friends: “I don’t want to live in this world where my friend is R2-D2.”
Maher on Love Is Blind: “It’s absolutely the best dating show with ‘Love’ and ‘Blind’ in the title.”