Why Can't Bill Maher Replace Andy Rooney?



(image via jacneed)

We rather like the anemic-looking Bill Maher, despite -- or perhgaps in spite of -- the frequent visits to the Playboy Mansion to consort with bunnies of ill-repute, the masturbation into a pillow before his shows (as he was rumored to do in his ABC "Politically Correct" days"), his well-known penchant for "dark meat," and the messy social life (Averted Gaze). Perhaps because of this, Bill Maher's sense of humor is merciless; we need a merciless comedian in America's Hour of Empire. He is our Court Fool, our Mark Twain, Jon Stewart without the looks or charm, but with a double doese of righteous anger (The Corsair sparks up a Macanudo).

The awesome actress Ann Magnuson on Papermag.com leads us to a juicy Maher Op-Ed:

"Even at the time I thought Grayden Carter's quote about 9/11 signalling 'the end of irony' was absurd. Bill Maher tackles the subject with his usual wit and alacrity in an op-ed piece that appeared in Sunday's LA Times ...

"...I always felt that in the months after 9/11, while "Politically Incorrect" was still on the air but struggling for sponsors and referred to, not inaccurately, as "Dead Show Walking," we did some of our best work. The country had decided it was going to try to be a little bit serious for a while, and that liberated us to book guests with more gravitas and less Pauly Shore. In addition, I found it liberating to go through the fire of being fired and then realize afterward that there was a whole half a country out there that did not think truth was like wine: It does not get better with age. "Don Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately," Tom Hagen says in 'The Godfather.' I agree.

"A couple of years ago, a congressman named Bachus from East Jesus, Ala., tried to get some traction nationally by demanding that HBO, the network I'm with now, fire me for saying of the U.S. military's recruitment problems that "we've picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit."

"But by 2004, that dog wasn't hunting even a little. Even my detractors knew that I was just keeping it real and not attacking our troops. And it helped that, a few weeks later, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, that Patton of the Gulf War and former drug czar, said basically the same thing: "We're reaching the bottom of the barrel."

"Which just goes to show you: Where do left and right meet? At the truth."

Bill Maher stunned me last week when he got the astonishingly ambitious Bibi Netanyahu, essentially Israel's Prime Minister elect, on his show. That's juice. He turned getting fired from ABC -- which would essentially be the end of most comedians careers -- into one of the most amazing and libertarian triumphs of the spirit in the history of showbiz. I truly wish Maher would replace Andy Rooney -- and not Jon Stewart -- on CBS's 60 Minutes when the time comes.