Bill Maher at the Overture Center
There’s preaching to the choir, and then there’s Bill Maher’s performance at a packed Overture Center on Sunday. Hoots, hollers, copious applause, catcalls, and a few “Go get ’em, Bill”s rang out after every mention of George W. Bush’s buffoonery, the oil spill being a clusterfuck, and organized religion being a sham.
As if he were performing a 90-minute extended opening monologue from Real Time—his post-Politically Incorrect show on HBO—a well-tanned Maher stood reading off a musical stand for joke cues. Not exactly the picture of the touring comic, he still wrung some fresh material from news items that get repurposed into jokes on a nightly basis thanks to Letterman, Stewart, Colbert, and others.
The strongest moments came early, when Maher talked about the BP oil spill, and how it’s the first news story he’s ever covered on his show that genuinely bummed him out. After bemoaning the fact that the people in the Gulf Coast want to keep drilling, he began wishing Barack Obama was a black president, the kind that might pull up his shirt to reveal a gun tucked into the front of his pants in front of BP execs. “In that moment, I wanted Mr. T as a black president,” Maher joked. His Tea Party attacks were well-placed, specifically when talking about the group’s name. “The tea-baggers took a gay sex act where one man drags his balls across the face of another, and they turned it into something tawdry and demeaning,” Maher said.
The set dragged during the last half-hour, when Maher mostly just repeated the anti-religion riffs from Religulous with an Avatar-related guffaw thrown in (“I don’t know what eternity is like. But I’ve seen Avatar, and know what eternity feels like”). Then he closed with an extended riff on Tiger Woods, which seemed like it was mailed in from December. But that hardly mattered, as Maher gave the crowd the one-sided political rant it came for and was rewarded with uproarious approval.
