NERRRRRRRRD! vol. 73

Bill Maher out here talking shit about Stan Lee fans, which, actually, yeah, that tracks

"comic books are for fat stupid dummies who are idiots. now excuse me while i continue to give Ann Coulter a bi-annual bullhorn and rehash some weed jokes (get it??? reHASH???? LAUGH YOU PC PLEBEIANS I'M YOUR BETTER)"


now i like bitchy hot takes as much as the next misanthropic sour ass with delusions of providing transgressive counterpoints to the status quo , but it helps immensely if you actually have a modicum of contemporary knowledge with regards toward the vast medium you've chosen to paint with the most outmoded broad brush imaginable.

i've been an avid viewer of his shows dating back to the gaudy Politically Incorrect days, but much like with Real Time today, it has less to do with Maher's presence on the program than it does with his reliably interesting and disparate roster of guests and panelists. they're the ones that supply the meat of the appeal. without them, Maher isn't really offering much more than a blandly cynical pastiche of post-60s cliches. he presents himself as a splicing of Johnny Carson, George Carlin, and Hugh Hefner, but he lacks the charisma, imagination, charm, and insight that made those gentlemen the trailblazers that they were. Maher (and this is especially true of the last five or so years with this rise of the PC Left and the Alt-Right) is little more than Andy Rooney with f-bombs, reverting to callous dismissals and splenetic hyperbole whenever someone dares to care about something that he himself does not care about.

remind you of anyone? 

Maher is nearing some Seduction of the Innocent shit with this latest ill-timed thinly spread smear, going from cruelly mocking adults for thinking the smiling guy who co-created a universe of stories and characters that endures over 50 years since its inception was a pretty neat dude to blaming comic books (whose readership is at an all time low and has no real power or influence to speak of, despite the Nerd Culture Branding Proclamations of "Owning the World", but that's a gripe for another time) for the rise of Trump, when reality television, celebrity worship, talk radio, comment threads, and the cottage industry of conservative literature probably have a bit more to answer for with regards to Trumpdom.

i know Maher doesn't give a fuck about what any comic book reader thinks or feels (or indeed anyone who reads something other than Christopher Hitchens or PJ O'Rourke [another dippy winner in the elder troll division]), but i take a great deal of solace in knowing precisely how wrong he is on any given cultural topic of conversation, particularly this one, when my book shelves and long boxes are packed with more scabrous satire and perspective-warping revelation than any number of Maher's stand-up specials, where "TRUMP IS A BITCH" and "ANAL SEX IS GROSS" are about as cutting as the subversion gets.

11/19 continuation:

Bill Maher Blames Stan Lee (and Comics) for Trump’s Election. What an Idiot.

The host of HBO’s ‘Real Time’ penned a blog post this weekend that was met with near-unanimous condemnation. And for good reason.

In fairness, Maher does drift against a useful observation: there is a problem in popular culture of adults invading or colonizing children’s media spaces, and children’s media being endlessly readapted for adults. The raw material of much of our current popular culture is mined from the toyetic substrate of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Yet this didn’t happen, as Maher claims, because “some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer.” It happened in part because the Reagan administration stopped the Federal Trade Commission from regulating marketing aimed at children in 1981, which had the effect of creating shows designed purely to sell toys and other merchandise, and gave rise to the all-consuming merchandising blitzes we’re all familiar with today. The result has been the creation of a permanent, weaponized nostalgia, which companies like Disney continue to exploit to this day, endlessly repackaging our childhoods back to us. If the average American exists in a state of arrested development, capitalism and its standard-bearers in the culture industries share a lot of the blame.

But Maher doesn’t have an actual analysis to make here, for the simple reason that he clearly hasn’t given this a great deal of thought. This should not be a surprise: Bill Maher is a punishing provocateur, one whose stock-in-trade is a bone-deep smugness, mixed with a superior delight in the offense he causes. There was the time he mentioned the need to “civilize” Arab men. There was his 2008 characterization of Hillary Clinton (and by extension, all women) as “crying” to get their way, and the time he defended Paula Deen’s use of racial slurs before joking about Chris Brown “beating the shit out of her,” and of course the time he had fun with the topic of domestic abuse: “Stop acting surprised someone choked Tila Tequila! The surprise is that someone hadn’t choked the bitch sooner.” And who could forget the time in 2001 when he got in hot water for equating dogs with “retarded children,” or his own casual use of a racial slur in 2017?

Maher glories in the sort of dime-store Islamophobia, racism and misogyny common among online libertarians. If Maher is considered a liberal, it’s only because he occasionally makes fun of conservative Christians and Republican presidents he considers stupider than him. He springs instead from the sort of offhandedly libertarian, New Atheist ferment that values free speech over everything, but can never figure out anything interesting to say with it. His embrace of people like Jordan Peterson and Bret Stephens alone is a sign that we’re not dealing with an intellectual heavyweight here; his bro-down with Milo Yiannopoulos, alt-right flash-in-the-pan and fascist grifter, gives the game away as well.

There is thus a degree to which the outrage from the comics industry, while understandable and deeply felt, is also a bit silly. What else could they possibly expect? Bill Maher has always been this: a 13-year-old boy’s idea of world-weary debate, a man whose comedic sense got trapped in a bathroom stall in the 1980s, a knee-jerk “politically incorrect” reactionary who views everything but himself with a slathering of unthinking contempt. H.L Mencken he ain’t. Hell, as contrarians go, he’s barely even a J. Jonah Jameson. As a friend of mine remarked, the man’s a pizza cutter: all edge, no point.

11/21 addition:

 smugly doubling down on an ill-informed opinion just to make an asinine political burn? no that's not like Trump at all. 

it would be funny if this dude's career was finally sunk not by giving a bullhorn to the likes of Milo and Coulter but because he used the death of the guy who created Stripperella as an opportunity to make fun of nerds for being geeks.