Bill Maher Isn't Happy 'SNL' Called His MAGA Friends Racist

I think you could get away with assuming folks aren’t explicitly racist because they voted for Trump in 2016. It’s wrong, but the whole thing felt so unprecedented that it was easier to assume folks just wanted a stronger economy or some such nonsense. At the end of the day, those who supported him supported a man who proudly said Mexicans are rapists and told Black people they had nothing to lose because more than half of their youth were unemployed. That’s what the man came out of the gate with! Now, years later, he’s softened his stance. Oh, wait, no the f*** he hasn’t!

Trump has gotten more racist, the way Kirby can absorb creatures and gain their powers. However, in this iteration, Kirby never gives up any of the powers he’s absorbed. He just gets bigger and wider and, in this case, more racist. This monstrously orange version of Kirby also has minions to whom he can spread his racism to carry out orders on his behalf, like removing people of color from their positions because they consider them “DEI hires” and scrubbing them from historical records for the same (racist) reasons. But please, don’t tell MAGA Puppet Bill Maher any of this!

The comedian(?) has his nose shoved fairly up the MAGA a**hole after being invited to dinner at the White House by Kid Rock (the highest of honors). Maher fancied himself a contrarian long before that, which is easy to do once money and power have made you completely removed from reality. However, Billy Boy doesn’t see it that way. In his eyes, which are often covered by douchey sunglasses often reserved for divorced dads scoping a Mohegan Sun for some strange, the liberal party left him because it… doesn’t like people who claim Mexicans are rapists and all Black people are DEI hires.

But like I said, Maher was a comedian at some point (I think?), so he knows funny! And boy, oh, boy, did he not find a sketch from the SNL 50th Anniversary Show very funny! Here’s the snag: I didn’t love the sketch either. It started great, as another iteration of Black Jeopardy, complete with Eddie Murphy playing Tracy Morgan while standing next to Tracy Morgan. It goes south when the show replaces Morgan with a MAGA-hat-clad Tom Hanks in a revival of an older version of the sketch. The callback felt forced and didn’t live up to the original. But in Maher’s eyes, it was simply a lie.

“I hated it, too, and I said it on my show. I know. I hated it,” he said on his podcast to Jillian Michaels, someone I had to look up who is a fitness guru turned RFK Jr./Trump supporter (that pipeline is strong). “Wearing the MAGA hat, not shaking hands with a Black person. And that’s when I thought, ‘You people don’t know MAGA people.’” Yes, why would anyone think that people who say “woke” and “DEI” the way past bigots said “uppity” and “militant” are racist? Maybe they should go to dinner with their leader and see how down-to-earth he is. That’ll change their minds (if they’re an abject coward).

The former host of Politically Correct didn’t stop his rant there. “I mean, they have their issues and I certainly have my issues with them,” he explained without saying what any of those issues are (something he’s shied away from more and more). “Of course, there’s some racists everywhere who are that bad, but generally, all the MAGA people I know have no problem shaking hands with a Black person. You’re just hysterical and you’re not helping.” Yes! You nailed it, Bill! Unless you literally know a man who looks like Tom Hanks, wears a MAGA hat, and doesn’t shake hands with Black people, the joke doesn’t work. Jot that down in your comedy notebooks, boyos!

“I get it, it’s part of a skit and it’s an exaggeration and that’s comedy. It’s a little too delicate a subject to go there,” Maher said, partially admitting that his point is bulls***. But, he wouldn’t be Bill Maher if he didn’t double down on his smug idiocy. “They probably think it’s great,” he continued. “As a liberal, I don’t like it. Again, because lying offends me. I’m a comedian, when the premise isn’t real, I can’t go with it.” Jeeesus Christ. He went on to claim that people just want to be able to compare Trump to Hitler, a warranted comparison he’s actively fighting against because Larry David publicly dogwalked him for his little White House Nazi dinner.

Conan O’Brien, who is an actual comedian and not whatever Maher is, often speaks about the emotional honesty of jokes. Jokes don’t have to be one-for-one recreations of events. Joking that a group of people who want to demolish Black people’s standing in America, and who voted for that mentality three different times, is emotionally honest. It’s funny because there is truth to it. Not something that was true before but isn’t any longer (as Maher claims). Racism is to MAGA what Dunkin is to America. Ya don’t like it? Stop cozying up with those folks, you spineless, smug, f***.