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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."
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Of the many liberals who use humor to go after the Bush administration -- Michael Moore, Stewart and Colbert, Al Franken, Al Gore -- Bill Maher may be the least compromising. He's one of the only comics, for instance, to openly disdain religion. At his worst, he can come off as hectoring, a prickly know-it-all. But more often than not, watching Maher on Real Time taking apart conventional wisdom is a thrilling affair. Plus, he's very funny.
In his Emmy-nominated 2005 stand-up special, I'm Swiss, Maher mocked the War on Drugs ("Look, I don't want to hurt children. But is everything worth sacrificing to that? Drugs have done a lot of good . . . a lot of great songs. I think 'Penny Lane' is worth ten dead kids. I'll be honest. I think Dark Side of the Moon is worth a hundred dead kids. There. I said it") and Bush's seven minutes of immobility in a Florida classroom after being informed of the 9/11 attacks ("Did he think he was being Punk'd?"). When a reference to "my friend Ann Coulter" -- the leggy conservative has been a frequent guest on Maher's program -- elicited a round of boos from the audience, Maher shot back, "I know, I know. But she's different when she's coming."
Maher's candor famously got him into trouble after the September 11th attacks when, on Politically Incorrect, his long-running late-night show on ABC, he took issue with Bush's description of the terrorists as "cowardly," saying, "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." Conservatives called for his head, and ABC flinched, canceling the show eight months later. Maher, if anything, has since redoubled his attacks on Bush, with books (When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden), a Broadway stand-up show (Victory Begins at Home) and, of course, Real Time, which focuses the Politically Incorrect panel-discussion format more barbedly on politics. The show's fifth season will begin on August 25th.
Maher lives in a mansion in Beverly Hills. A footpath leads through lush foliage, past a well-stocked koi pond, to his front door, which opens into a cavernous two-story living room decorated entirely with South Asian art, including an ornate wooden swing. "I love these," Maher says, pausing before a pair of temple doors decorated with human figures. "If you look closely, you can see the fuck positions." Maher recently bought the property next door to his home, which is the size of a modest park and includes a full basketball court and a handful of smaller buildings, including a screening room and a rec center with a rooftop tiki bar.
Back at the main house, we step onto a patio, where he pulls together a pair of long pool chairs so the feet ends are touching, forming a "V." We each recline on a chair, side by side, "like a couple of old Jews," Maher says, and he begins to tell me about his life....
>> Get the full article in the current Rolling Stone, on newsstands until August 24th, 2006.
>> Plus: See our pre-Bush talk with Bill Maher for some of the sharpest political comedy around.
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