A Man for Our Time

One afternoon a few weekends ago, Bill Maher decided to take a stroll near Venice Beach, California. As the host of the HBO series Real Time With Bill Maher, the comedian has been one of the sharpest, most consistently intelligent critics of the Bush administration, making Venice to Maher what Talladega, Alabama, say, is to a president who believes the jury is still out on evolution -- namely, a natural constituency. Maher has infuriated enough right-wingers and religious zealots in his career to engender the occasional security risk -- death threats once resulted in guards moving into his guesthouse -- but here, among his people, he gets nothing but love. "Bill! What're you doing, slumming in Venice?" cheerfully shouts a hippie with a dog. "Keep up the good work," says a woman wearing a fanny pack who doesn't look a day over a hundred. "I love you," says a much, much (much) younger woman wearing a tight T-shirt, no bra and short-shorts, after Maher gives her a lecherous wink. "I love ya back," Maher says, delivering the line with ironic panache, as if he's auditioning for retroactive membership in the Rat Pack. "And when I say that, I literally mean I love the backside of you."

"How about my front?" the girl asks, thrusting her chest out for rhetorical emphasis.

"That's good, too," Maher says. Then he returns to the task at hand: choosing the proper smokeless marijuana vaporizer. We've stopped in a head shop. Maher, who turned fifty in January, has longish hair streaked gray and white, but otherwise he's dressed like a young man, in expensive jeans and a designer T-shirt, a gray cap his only concession to celebrity disguise. Beneath the cap, Maher has the sort of face a boardwalk caricaturist could dispatch with a few quick strokes, exaggerating nose and chin and deep-set eyes. His handshake is extremely firm.

"So . . . this is where you'd put the substance?" Maher asks, furrowing his brow, as he examines a wooden pipe.

"Right," says the friendly clerk, who almost definitely rode to work on a skateboard. "The flame heats up the bud and relaxes it but doesn't actually burn it. So you still get the oils you want. Understand?"

"No," Maher says. "But as Bob Dole said, when asked if smoking is addictive, 'How should I know -- I'm not a scientist!' "

The clerk laughs and shows Maher a glass vaporizer with a complicated plunger system.

"No," Maher says. "The one I'm thinking of, you light the pipe directly." The clerk frowns and says, "Well, you could technically hold the flame under the glass. But that might be kind of crack-ish."

"I don't want crack-ish," Maher says. He ends up buying the wooden pipe, along with a half-dozen metal one-hitters shaped to look like cigarettes and a larger pipe shaped to look like a cigar.

"What you really need is a Volcano," the clerk says, referring to a high-end tabletop machine that is, apparently, the Viking stove of smokeless marijuana vaporizers.

"Oh, I've got one," Maher says. "I once gave a Volcano to a high-powered studio executive who shall remain nameless. He was having respiratory problems."

Outside, it's a hazy afternoon. Maher stoops down to kiss a dog. "Hey, fool!" he says. "What are you doing, fool!" Maher has two elderly dogs at home. He famously hates children. "Abortion is kind of like reaching in there and killing something," he says. "I'm just not against it." He hates the concept of marriage, too. "I always compare marriage to communism," he says. "They're both institutions that don't conform to human nature, so you're going to end up with lying and hypocrisy."

Staking out such positions has not exactly helped Maher's reputation as one of Hollywood's least abashed players, which was tweaked in a recent headline in The Onion: BILL MAHER SPENDS ALL NIGHT ARGUING WITH REPUBLICAN HOOKER. Maher himself has joked that, contrary to popular perception, he does not actually live at the Playboy Mansion. When I mention all of this, Maher is unapologetic. "On the show," he says, "I do a very serious thing. And a lot of people have a hard time reconciling that with what I'm going to do after the show. They can't get it into their heads: 'How can he be talking to Madeleine Albright one minute and then somebody half his age. . . .' They're just jealous. But I never made any bones about it. I am a player. Always have been."

Maher's mouth curls into half a smile. He adds, "At least I was a good one."