We try, as a rule, not to spend too large a fraction of our daily lives thinking about Bill Maher. He’s a bit like the internet as a whole: Sure, you can go looking for bad opinions, annoying jokes, and endless condescension, and you’ll find them in abundance, on a regular basis. But who needs the uptick in blood pressure?
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Still, we do need to acknowledge when Maher does something like, say, give his first really good, genuinely funny interview in years—if only because he was the subject, not the interviewer, and spent most of it being roasted to death by classic Martin Short character Jiminy Glick. Which is what happened on this week’s edition of Real Time With Bill Maher, where Maher shilled his new book via the (admittedly very funny) decision to have Short-as-Glick shit endlessly on both it, and him.
There are aspects of the Glick character that have aged better than others over the years, but the core—of having Short be as rude as humanly possible to his latest victim—remains a great and powerful joy when pointed in the right direction. And few directions are righter than Maher, who mostly laughs during the interview, but also tries to assay a few jokes—met with stony silence and a look from Short, who then proceeds to roast him again. The pre-written lines are good—“Other than lacking one, what do you think your comedy legacy would be?”—but our favorite moments are when Maher stumbles for a moment and Glick/Short just tears his feet out from under him. “You’d tell me if you’d had a stroke, wouldn’t you?” It might not be quite as satisfying as watching Bill Burr (who gets a namecheck) genuinely tell Maher he’s completely talking out of his ass, but it’s still a pretty great interview if you like someone stopping Bill Maher from talking, which we do.