Why is Bill Maher the worst?
Serious question.
He insists on making outrageous, offensive statements because … well, we don’t know why, exactly. We just know that it never, ever seems to stop.
Just last month Bill made an incest joke about Donald and Ivanka Trump, saying “When he’s about to nuke Finland or something, she’s gonna walk into the bedroom and — ‘Daddy, Daddy. Don’t do it, Daddy."”
He then made a gesture indicating that she’d grab his penis to calm him down.
He also once compared Zayn Malik to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which, you know, isn’t great.
The point is that he’s known for pushing boundaries at each and every opportunity.
And apparently he thought last night’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher was a great chance to be a jackass.
His guest last night was Nebraska Senator Bill Sasse, and at one point, Sasse invited Bill to visit Nebraska.
“We’d love to have you work in the fields with us,” he told him, smiling.
Bill, in his strange little mind, felt the appropriate response was to say “Work in the fielnds? Senator, I’m a house n—–.”
His audience had some mixed responses, and understandably so, but Bill was quick to assure them that it was a joke.
But Twitter wasn’t convinced.
“I for one am shocked that giant racist Bill Maher is in fact a giant racist,” one person tweeted.
Another wrote “Bill Maher said the N-word? Wow this totally changes my previously high opinion of that smug Islamophobic misogynistic attention-whore.”
One person theorized that “Bill Maher seems way too comfortable using the n-word. I mean, that came naturally to him. That… says a lot. And none of it is good.”
And, for the obligatory “hold my beer” joke, someone tweeted “‘Nobody can screw up a career better than me’ Tiger Woods ‘Hold my beer’ Kathy Griffin ‘No, both of you hold my latte’ Bill Maher.”
Meanwhile, Ben Sasse himself took to Twitter to discuss the controversy.
“I’m a 1st Amendment absolutist,” he began. “Comedians get latitude to cross hard lines.”
“But free speech comes with a responsibility to speak up when folks use that word. Me just cringing last night wasn’t good enough.”
He wrote that he wished he’d been able to gather his thoughts enough in the moment to say “Hold up, why would you think it’s OK to use that word?”
“The history of the n-word is an attack on universal human dignity. It’s therefore an attack on the American Creed. Don’t use it.”
Too little, too late, or an appropriate response?
It’s hard to know when everything is such a great big awful mess.
