Last night Maher made some real hacky joke about how Cheney was so overexposed, he was going to be appearing onI'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. When the audience made only polite chuckles he said "What, now you're offended by jokes about celebrities?" Then later when they didn't laugh at a joke about Obama, he said "We gotta worship principles, not people. Cause if we worship people, it's a religion."
Bill, let me 'splain it to you. Your jokes are frigging horrible. They would seem outdated 30 years ago. The times have moved on but you're still stuck in some Jack Benny delivery. I could dig up Johnny Carson's rotten corpse and get a more modern performance out of it. It has nothing to do with celebrities or Obama. How do I know?
Well, there are these two shows on Comedy Central who basically do what you do but update it for the millenium and to be, you know, funny. Remember funny? The shows are called The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. And on these shows, jokes are routinely made about celebrities and even, yes, Obama and they routinely get laughs out of the audience. Sometimes Stewart gets a joke that bombs, but guess what? He doesn't assume the audience didn't get it. He doesn't assume the joke is offensive to those delicate, hypocritical pussiess in the stands. Instead he makes fun of himself for telling a bad joke, or he ignores it, and he moves on. You know why?
Because unlike you, Stewart doesn't have this deep need to believe he's smarter and hipper than everyone. (He probably IS, but that's beside the point.) But your ego is way bigger. You can't accept the lameness of your material and delivery, so a little cognitive dissonance occurs in your brain when a joke bombs. "I'm funny. The joke is great. So why aren't they laughing? That audience must be too politically correct and/or ignorant to laugh!"
But they're not the problem. You are. So I suggest dropping your dreary monologue and terrible, sub-SNL-par skits, and just keeping to the light political discussion. And when you're doing that, keep the anti-religion rants to a minimum. They make you look like a lunatic on jihad.
