Bill Maher - classic!

Not sure what the republican guest was trying to achieve by suggesting that Bill go and work in the fields with him. Not heard it said as a phrase before. Can see how the comment fit in response but think it wasn't well judged. Shouldn't be something that is being said off the cuff in front of a recording audience though. Some people probably think of that as being overly PC for a humorist but just seems to have been a stupid thing to have said.

i think he gets more curdled the older he gets. just keeps repeating himself all the time like an old man. i didn't mind him years ago. liked his rants. he just seems like a big baby now. comedians shouldn't get so comfortable. he's so comfy/smug in his bubble. i mean he was always smug but i seem to remember him listening more. and it seemed like he took more care to have a good mix of guests. now its just lunatic right wing people and kinda befuddled other people i've never heard of. and some random celebrity.

Nobody intelligent wants to waste time on his show

He's the worst kind of pot head too - he's bereft of original thought and checked out mentally. Not good qualities for running a show imo

I don't understand how he could possibly think it would be cool to say the n word.

Tarantino syndrome

he was playing his Eminem records?

i was gonna bring T****t**o into this but that will lead nowhere productive

Louis CK gets away with it too.

every generation gets the frank zappa they deserve

Haha ouch

Maher def in that lineage of unholy fools and (doyou)seers

i still love george carlin. not everything he did obviously. and he loved his 50's-era jive talk. but i still appreciate him as a writer. bill hicks i can live without. i see maher and hicks in that post-carlin light.

I was too young, or at least too unhip, to be into Hicks at the time, so when I finally caught up with him, I was a bit appalled by this supposedly "revolutionary" comedian just being another sexist, homophobic asshole.

Right

bill hicks is all the worst parts of the "dudes who think they're really smart" brand of comedy

haven't listened to any hicks stuff in years but i suspect his fondness for conspiracy theories and "they're all puppets of the system, man!" attitude toward politics would prob sound a lot grosser in the current climate than it did in the early '90s

yeah, we don't really need more antisocial, conspiratorial types of any political persuasion rn

i can see how this happened in bill maher's mind

1. senator makes a bizarre comment about inviting maher to work "in the fields"
2. maher thinks it's a putdown, calling maher a slave, a member of the bottom class
3. maher tries to think up a joke, maybe a slightly higher class?, what about a slave in the house, what are they called again?

and then he doesn't have the filter to know that the n-word is a bad idea in any context.

Conspiracy theories were just good times fun before 9/11 Truthers and Alex Jones.

Is the phrase 'work in the fields' odd or just regional or what.
I hadn't heard it used non literally before as far as I can remember.
But can see why the response might be what it was if done live.
Odd that I'm watching Dear White People at around the same time where several people are saying 'you can't use that word'. Should be understood though especially between 2 white people especially when they're being recorded. Would be nice if they weren't using it at all but can't control that. Don't want it normalising anyway though may be too late for that since it's used in rap etc. & Patti Smith. Did she get much shit for that? Or Yoko?

Louis CK gets a pass for this all the time

i can see how this happened in bill maher's mind

1. senator makes a bizarre comment about inviting maher to work "in the fields"
2. maher thinks it's a putdown, calling maher a slave, a member of the bottom class
3. maher tries to think up a joke, maybe a slightly higher class?, what about a slave in the house, what are they called again?

and then he doesn't have the filter to know that the n-word is a bad idea in any context.

This is literally not what this joke is

the sen said "IN THE FIELD," a common phrase for doing political legwork

Maher's brain went "WHERE"S THE JOKE" bcz that's what comedians do

Louis CK gets a pass for this all the time

― sexualing healing (crüt), Monday, June 5, 2017 5:27 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is like the 4th time someone has made this point in about 30 posts so i guess i'll finally take the bait: not really the same thing imo. tho obv his use of it makes me uncomfortable (which is probably the point)

the idea that certain artists can NEVER use a certain word: nope

That Senator's book is about how young people needing to take more responsibility yadda yadda, so he goes into how back in Nebraska he get's his sons to go out and work in the corn/wheat fields as having to do a hot nasty job is a good thing to build character. Then after that he said to Maher, you should come out and work in the fields (to build some character ha ha) then Maher dropped the line in response referring to himself.

ok so he actually said "fields," my bad. Some of the early news stories had this wrong or incomplete.

That Senator's book is about how young people needing to take more responsibility yadda yadda, so he goes into how back in Nebraska he get's his sons to go out and work in the corn/wheat fields as having to do a hot nasty job is a good thing to build character.

so i assume ben sasse is a firm supporter of immigrant labourers, who must have built up incredible reserves of character through years of toiling in the fields...?

this is like the 4th time someone has made this point in about 30 posts so i guess i'll finally take the bait: not really the same thing imo. tho obv his use of it makes me uncomfortable (which is probably the point)

Someone refresh my memory but has he actually used it recently?

Anyway the fact that it took this for liberals to be sick of Maher (the ones that aren't still defending him, that is) is really fucking stupid. The rampant Islamophobia, transphobia etc was all fine and dandy, I guess?

I got the impression that most of the ppl attacking Maher now are ppl who already disliked him for all the reasons you mentioned above (and more!), and this new incident has just given them some momentum + a clearly understood clearly indefensible Maher transgression to rally around? Were there really large numbers of liberals who were pro-Maher before this who've now turned on him?

(I guess there are ppl who haven't really paid much attention to him for years until just now?)

Wesley Morris:

Mr. Maher has views, but what he said on Friday night isn’t among them. For one thing, it’s not even a view, per se. It was an attempt to mock Mr. Sasse’s unfortunate choice of words. (I think I knew what he meant, too: Nebraska grows too much corn for grown people to fret over who to be for Halloween.) But intention is tricky in comedy. Mr. Sasse said something that was, on its face, unsavory. You don’t need much of an imagination to envision Chris Rock, Larry Wilmore or Wanda Sykes taking a whack at that line. ABC’s sitcom “black-ish” exists, partly, to satirize these sorts of conversational bloopers.

But Bill Maher isn’t Chris Rock. He’s not on “black-ish.” He’s a 61-year-old white man who would never get a pass for jesting about slavery or the N-word. (His track record inspires too much doubt to give any benefit.) That’s a license reserved, arguably, for Louis C.K., or Sarah Silverman in her performance-art prime — white comedians who have really grappled with what it means to flirt with racially inflammatory language and ideas, what it means for the flirtation to fail. Mr. Maher’s approach to television doesn’t necessitate that kind of rehearsed rumination. The appeal of “Real Time” is its on-the-spot discourse, its anti-rehearsal. That looseness can tip easily into blurting, flatulence and worse.

The insult to injury here involves the conflation of Mr. Maher’s transgression and the umbrage he feigned at being asked to work in the fields. As my sister might say: Oh, he fancy now. For a long time, black people have deployed slavery-derived hierarchies as a social and psycho-political sorting mechanism. A house assignment might have won a slave less arduous work but more suspicion and contempt from her counterparts in the fields. No one self-identifies as a house Negro — unless that person is making a joke. And even then that person probably shouldn’t be Bill Maher....

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/arts/television/what-was-bill-mahers-big-mistake.html

for better or worse, I don't think Louie would be able to get away with that n-word bit in 2017. iirc that was on Chewed Up, probably 7-8 years ago? there was a lot more nuance and self-awareness to it than what Maher did, a big part of it was Louie being pissed at newscasters for saying "the n-word" rather than the actual n-word because it put the latter into his head without the newscaster having to bear the weight of saying it. but still, if he did that bit for the first time today, there would be outrage and thinkpieces galore.

Mr. Sasse said something that was, on its face, unsavory.

I don't really get this. If Sasse had said this to a black host I could see it being tone deaf but he's talking to Bill fucking Maher.

Hadn't taken in that Sasse was literally advocating physically working in the fields as part of his program so thought it was an oddly worded metaphor which might lead to the response. Though that response was at best tactless.

yah he was saying "Ever think about working in the fields with us in Nebraska?" in reference to a real program he runs where people literally work in fields. Maher heard "work in the fields" and his mind went somewhere else.

Of all the things for Sasse to get blowback on in this situation, referencing his program is perplexing.

OTOH, the "I'll just go along with this and hope no one noticed" chuckle should get him primaried, even with his post-appearance apology

It won't because he's in Nebraska but it should

Ice Cube telling him "Sometimes you sound like a redneck trucker" otm. it's pretty clear he doesn't think he did anything wrong tho.

"Smug liberal who's casually racist" doesn't really ring as "redneck trucker" tbh, but I'll have to watch this. Or maybe I don't. Eh.

thanks for giving us your uninformed opinion at any rate

Responding to a quote you posted, so moderately informed. But no problem!

did you ever watch his show during the Obama years? he is very fond of making a racist joke with the frame of "this is what republicans say"

also the weekly stating that Islam is a danger to the world with dangerous ideas, pretty redneck trucker that stance

it was interesting to learn that when he grew up in the 50s/60s "racism wasn't really a thing"

he must have enough money to retire on, right?

He said Race wasn't a thing, as in we were all white and no one talked about race. He's a piece of shit but you dont have to make shit up to attack him with.

Maher isn't even a liberal, he's a libertarian who voted for Dole in '96.

Does Trump have to actually blow Putin? Is that what it wld take?Flagrant D, balls gargling the leader of the Russian Federation? Jus asking

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 19, 2017

comedy genius

ok he's definitely trying to get Trump to respond to him, good luck

This week, Bill called out Molly Ringwald's NYT piece and praised The Simpsons' "fuck you snowflakes" move.

Next week's guests include Jordan Peterson.