Bill Maher Had Plenty to Say About Jimmy Kimmel on “Real Time”

When Bill Maher walked onto the Real Time stage on Friday night, he opened things up with a recurring bit that cut deeper than it does most weeks. “I know why you’re happy tonight — I’m still on,” he said. It’s been — understatement alert — a challenging week for talk show hosts, what with the indefinite hiatus of Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this week.

Plenty of Kimmel and Maher’s peers had things to say about the incident, but Maher had more direct knowledge of what Kimmel was presumably going through — Politically Incorrect, the precursor to Real Time, was cancelled after Maher made comments that offended the current presidential administration. As Maher revealed this week, the parallels didn’t end there.

“It was 24 years to the day that I made comments on ABC that got me cancelled from that network,” Maher said. Also notable: when Politically Incorrect went off the air, its timeslot would end up being occupied by none other than Jimmy Kimmel. Ultimately, Maher chose to take a somewhat optimistic view of the situation, saying of Kimmel, “If this firing goes for you the way it went for me, you’ll get 23 years on a better network.”

This also led to a more gallows humor-infused bit throughout the rest of the episode, in which Maher wondered whether Real Time would still be on the air by next week. “Ask the president to leave me on for one more week,” Maher told his first guest. “I’ve got a funny bit next Friday.”

That first guest was border czar Tom Homan, who spoke of achieving “the most secure border in the history of the nation.” At first, Maher seemed simpatico with his guest, as the two men criticized sanctuary cities and took swings at the Biden administration’s border policy.

Where the two men differed soon became clear. Maher asked Homan about the possibility of granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants in the U.S. “Do you really want to scare your own people that much?” he asked Homan, and noted that immigrants weren’t the only people upset by raids conducted by ICE.

“Don’t you think you’ve picked up a bunch of people who you shouldn’t have picked up at all?” Maher asked, which received resounding applause from the studio audience. Homan defended the policy — a line of argument that didn’t go over nearly as well.

As for this episode’s panel, former Senator Joe Manchin, there with a new book, and journalist Alex Wagner joined Maher to discuss the week in politics. The murder of Charlie Kirk was among the subjects they discussed, with Manchin making a case for more regulation of the internet. That segued into Kimmel being taken off the air; here, Maher brought up the double standard of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who made a comment on the air speculating about killing homeless people. (Kilmeade has since apologized.)

Later in the discussion, Wagner spoke about the existence of a “punitive streak” in the Trump administration. Maher asked her if she could make similar comments about the political left, to which Wagner observed that Democratic presidents haven’t exhibited the same tendencies.

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In his opening monologue, Maher brought up a point that he addressed later in the show — the impossibility of reducing most shootings to partisan affairs. “It is a fool’s errand to try to say that these nuts who do these things are on any team,” he said.

At the end of the show, Maher returned to the same concept — or, as he succinctly described it, “Trying to prove that because this week’s chinless incel voted for Dr. Oz, it means something.” It made for one of the stronger closing segments he’s done in a while.

Other notable moments from this week’s episode:

Manchin and Maher both spend part of this week’s episode trying to convince Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear on a future Real Time episode.
There was a funny bit during New Rules about guessing online passwords in the form of a 1970s game show. It led to one of the better lines of the night: “If the Russians stole my identity so they could pay my parking tickets, I give up. Their long game is much better than mine.”

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…