Bill Maher’s #Adulting and Comedians’ Obsession With Haters – TIME

Bill Maher fans, get ready to clap your heart out. The Real Time host, whose new HBO stand-up special #Adulting airs April 15, is a self-identified liberal who likes to complain about political correctness. And he has made a career out of what Seth Meyers dubbed clapter. As described by Tina Fey, way back in 2008, clapter happens when you do a political joke and people go, Woo-hoo. Donald Glover later explained that the clapping means so true, yes, so, so true. But what you did isnt funny; theyre just clapping and laughing to be on the right side of history.

Clapter comedy threatened to overtake stand-up during the Trump era, as audiences weary of unintentional black humor in the news turned to pop cultures clear-eyed court jesters just to feel sane. But recently, catalyzed by a fiery debate surrounding free speech, hate speech, and cancel culture, clapter has metastasized into something even more corrosivesomething that goes beyond the actual substance of comedys much-discussed woke wars. As in all other corners of our polarized society, comedians have defaulted to binary ideas about right vs. wrong, our side vs. their side, justice warrior vs. truth-teller. And that impacts voices on all sides of these issues.

From provocateurs like Dave Chappelle to progressives like Hannah Gadsby, comics on the worlds biggest stages are allowing the faceless haters who criticize them on social media to consume their work. As these conflicts escalate, the result is even more attention for these stars. That isnt just bad for public discourseits bad for a mainstream comedy landscape that too rarely spotlights the many voices doing subtler, gentler, weirder, or more experimental work.

Bill Maher in '#Adulting'

Greg Endries/HBO

In defending their ideas and their work, too many of the most famous stand-ups have become smug, narcissistic, self-righteous, petty. Maher epitomizes this exhausting phenomenon. As excruciating as some of his opinions are (on R. Kelly: The music didnt rape anybody), whats most unappealing is the manner in which he delivers themas though hes the only sane, smart person in the world. The more public pushback he gets, the more sanctimonious he becomes. We never stand up to the people who wake up offended and live on Twitter, Maher complains in the special, as though his Real Time monologues werent engineered specifically to inflame that crowd and rally his own social-media surrogates. This sort of sentiment is common among comedians of his cohort: rich, famous, middle-aged, liberal men with ride-or-die fandoms who rail against cancel culture as a threat to their free speech, despite the fact that said culture doesnt even have the power to prevent Louis C.K. from winning a Grammy a few years after he admitted to sexual misconduct.

Mahers whiteness shields him from a certain strain of unconsciously racist backlash that others might face. But the vagueness of his targets also separates him from someone like Dave Chappelle, the superstar who has become the most prominent face of the free-speech-at-all-costs contingent. Theres plenty to saymost of which has already been saidabout the transphobic streak in Chappelles comedy. In discussing his style more than his content, I dont mean to minimize discussions around his attacks on a vulnerable minority that right-wing lawmakers are currently attempting to legislate out of existence. But Mahers righteousness reminded me of Chappelle, different though he may be.

David Chappelle in 'The Closer'

Mathieu Bitton/Netflix

Chappelle isnt above pandering to audiences thirsty for provocation, but hes overall a more complicated thinker. His tone veers between openhearted empathy and viciousness, drawing attention to contradictions in viewers own opinions on fraught issues and leaving room for what is often productive ambiguity around what he actually believes. And when he speaks on topics about which hes not supposed to have a take, there is often reason to be glad he did. But in last years The Closer, which Chappelle frames as his response to the LGBTQ community, the tactic backfires. An emotional anecdote about his friendship with the late trans comedian Daphne Dorman is undermined by lazy stereotyping and faulty logic that often positions queer or trans identity and Black identity as mutually exclusive. Gay people are minorities, Chappelle says, until they need to be white again.

What has stuck in Chappelles craw, as he admits in the special, is the accusation that hes punching down at trans people. That hurts becausesince theyve labeled him transphobic and since he, too, represents an oppressed communityhe feels like the injured party. If he is going to show trans people kindness, then they need to show him kindness first. Empathy is not gay, he says. Empathy is not Black. Empathy is bisexual. It must go both ways. Its a surprisingly sweet joke, but one that fails to acknowledge his long history of painting the trans community, with the exception of one trans woman who met Chappelle on his own terms, as monolithic. As far as Dave Chappelle is concerned, it seems, the most important thing about trans people is that theyre angry at Dave Chappelle. From there, its a short leap to responding to critical questions from teens at his alma mater with a reminder that, at least for now, Im better than all of you.

Such sanctimony isnt limited to comedians bent on offending the politically correct. My personal beliefs, for what its worth, align more closely with those of Hannah Gadsby, the Australian comic who broke through in the U.S. with a 2018 Netflix special, Nanette, that connects her experiences in comedy with the trauma shes suffered as a woman and a lesbian. Gadsbys particular talent as a comedian is synthesis. She can pull together a seamless set, incorporating a wide range of topics and emotional beats, by weaving in callbacks, refrains, and meta-commentaryand she knows this so well that she flaunts it, outlining at the beginning of both Nanette and 2020s follow-up Douglas what shes going to do and how shes going to do it, like Babe Ruth calling his shot. Its a neat trick, but one that can slide into the territory of condescension when Gadsby starts explaining to her audience how she expects them to react to her material, as though shes a powerful enough manipulator to override any conceivable viewers capacity for free thought.

Hannah Gadsby in 'Douglas'

Ali Goldstein/ NETFLIX

Her critics latched on to this tone as well as the specials dark content, protesting that Nanette shouldnt be classified as comedy. Douglas takes up the latter accusation in earnest. Of course not everything in Nanette was supposed to be funny, Gadsby tells the crowd: I turned the laugh tap off myself. It was a decision. I stand by it. Its not like I got halfway through the show and though: F-ck, Im out of jokes, Ill tell a sad story. Elsewhere, she launches into a self-consciously shrill rant about menjust, she says, to bait her haters. The problem with this stuff isnt that its not funny (although it isnt) so much as that it isnt insightful or challenging in the way that her other material can be. Its self-absorbed. It protests too much.

I dont think comedy specials that address serious themes, in tones that are also sometimes serious, are the problem. Stand-up is a relatively young art form, and there are only so many ways to stand in front of a microphone and deliver punchlines. More fluidity between the worlds of stand-up, spoken word, storytelling, theater, and music should only be daunting to genre puristswho, frankly, need to lighten up. The rest of us get to spend time with work that defies expectations, from Nanette to Chappelles blistering response to the murder of George Floyd, 8:46, to Bo Burnhams Inside. Earlier this month, HBO unveiled Jerrod Carmichaels Rothaniel, a deeply personal special directed by Burnham that plays like a conversation and a confession, studded with very funny jokes, about the contradictions of being a gay, Black man coming out in his mid-30s.

Jerrod Carmichael in 'Rothaniel'

HBO

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I dont believe, either, that the woke wars are at the core of comedys current crisis. What I see is an elite tier of highly paid, internationally known comics who cant seem to accept the fact that the privilege of performing for an audience of millionsand being treated as not just an entertainer, but a thought leadercarries with it the burden of subjecting yourself to public scrutiny. Self-deprecation has gone out of style in stand-up. (For Gadsby, the choice, which she describes in Nanette, was a conscious one.) Now, theres precious little space left for introspection or humility or self-doubt. Meanwhile, the epidemic of controversy-courting smugness has been exacerbated by a content-hungry streaming industry that incentivizes comedians to insert themselves into the news cycle. When one of their names trends on Twitter, thats free advertising for the comic and the platform that releases their specials. No wonder Netflix doubled down on its support for Chappelle.

This is all a shame, because vulnerability goes a long way toward defusing the anger directed at people who tell jokes. Why has Larry Davida 74-year-old straight, white guy who never met a piety he didnt want to puncturethrived for long enough to charm millennials and Gen Z? Because his jokes about other people rarely overshadow his jokes at his own expense.

Theres a difference between using your platform to wring laughter out of the human folly in which we all participate every day and using it to fight petty battles against the haters. Comics who position themselves as infallible are always going to catch hell for ripping into others. Who are these perfect people that we have in America now? Maher demands in #Adulting, during a riff on the supposed cancellation of Aziz Ansari. So many perfect people who never make a mistake, never do anything wrong, yet get to judge your date. Comedian, heal thyself.

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Bill Maher's #Adulting and Comedians' Obsession With Haters - TIME