A View From the Trenches on Bill Maher
Well, it’s official: ABC has canceled “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher” after five years on the network. Though I’m not questioning the decision (particularly during hiring season), I’m a little surprised that the announcement didn’t get more attention, at least compared with the amount given to David Letterman and Ted Koppel just a few months ago.
As a former writer for the show, I hate to see “Politically Incorrect” limp away like an aging guard dog spending its last few days lying on the porch waiting for the end to come. I was there for five years--from its first show on ABC until I left last summer for the CBS sitcom “The Ellen Show.”
In that time, I think I saw Bill and his show at their best--and worst. At its start, “Politically Incorrect” was the first new idea on late night since, well, Letterman. It offered viewers an alternative. You wouldn’t see celebrities pushing their latest projects on “Politically Incorrect.”
Of course, on many nights that was because the celebrities there didn’t have latest projects to push, outside of an appearance at a convention or at the opening of a muffler shop.
But that was OK. The show wasn’t built around landing Hollywood’s elite; if you wanted Jenny McCarthy’s take on acting, you’d have to tune in elsewhere. Instead, the show was--or is--about Bill assembling a monologue you’d be unlikely to hear elsewhere and delivering it the manner of his idol, Johnny Carson. Then he’d introduce his guests to discuss everything from legalizing gay marriage (“Why should they be denied the right to have to choose between losing half their stuff or staying in a loveless relationship?”) and a study linking beer and sexually transmitted diseases (“which, by the way, was the industry’s worst advertising campaign ever.”)
On a good night--and there were many of them--it was very funny, with no one laughing harder at a guest’s remark than Bill. On a bad night, Bill was just strident. Critics like to take shots at Bill, especially after his remarks following the World Trade Center bombing. But in many cases, there seemed to be an element of opportunism to the criticism.
I wasn’t there for his comments about the bombing, nor did I see the show where he made them--which, I guess, puts me in same position as many who attacked Bill. But I was there for perhaps its precursor, a relatively minor dustup when Michael Reagan accused Bill of making fun of his father’s illness.
It was not true. Bill did criticize the former president, saying something to the effect that Ronald Reagan was out of it in his last years in office. Bill was careful to say he wasn’t talking about Reagan’s current condition or making light of Alzheimer’s. He was making an observation that many people had--although not on late-night television.
Michael Reagan heard of this and was apparently outraged, saying he was going to ask guests of his radio show to boycott “Politically Incorrect.” A letter of explanation from Bill to a trade magazine followed; I’m not sure if Reagan was ever back, but somehow the show survived, leaving the question of who was exploiting the former president’s condition a mystery, I guess.
There was also “the room”--the much-inflated and intentionally mysterious place where writers on every show meet. Like any comedy room, it evolved as different writers came and went. Initially, it contained some of the smartest and funniest people I’ve ever met; at other times, it contained people whose greatest skill was a good memory for the material of others. Most telling was that a joke in the room at Bill’s expense always brought the biggest laugh from Bill himself--if it was funny.
Some complain that the show lost its sense of humor. I don’t know, although I was always sorry to see the monologue get cut, first from eight jokes to five, then to three, and now to a series of clips shown at commercial breaks. If Bill’s passion for an issue occasionally made him lose sight of the humor, I felt it was the writers’ job to make sure we supplied the comedy too. Maybe we failed at times--and maybe Bill didn’t care as much about the jokes.
Regardless, when “Politically Incorrect” goes off the air, it will rob me of one of my standard lines. People who worked on the show will tell you they are always asked the same question: “What’s Bill really like?” My answer was: “Watch the show for a week: He’ll be smart, funny, rude, obnoxious, gracious, petty and kind.”
I was just hoping I could say it for a few more years.
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Bill Kelley is an Emmy-nominated writer who lives in Arcadia.
