Maher laughs first, last and in Las Vegas

By J. Patrick Coolican

Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007 | 7:31 a.m.

Yes, Bill Maher offers incisive commentary on politics and national affairs and religion, but ask him about his daily reading and here's the response:

"Penthouse, Hustler, Shaved Asian don't print that," he said with a laugh during a recent interview.

After that one-liner, he launched into an attack on the noise that surrounded the recent visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All the denunciations only served to put a Holocaust-denying civil engineer on a pedestal, he said.

"All I wanted to say to them was 'Stop making this (expletive) look good.' We're all on the same page. Nobody likes him. He's not popular in his own country. Even France is threatening to invade Iran. France doesn't fight when France gets invaded," said Maher, who performs his stand-up act Saturday at the Hard Rock .

"Ahmadinejad didn't attack us on 9/11. We all know that was Saddam."

This exchange sums up the Maher identity question: Is he a comedian, a provocateur, a performance artist, a left-libertarian intellectual?

It's quite possible the Cornell-educated Maher, who says drugs are good and religion is bad, is something new altogether. In his HBO show, "Real Time With Bill Maher," he goes for laughs in his monologue ("Rudy Giuliani, on his third marriage, I don't know if I'd criticize a group called MoveOn ") , but the show's guest segments are as serious - and , though insightful and interesting, not always funny - as anything on television. A recent conversation featured well-known evangelical and former White House domestic policy aide David Kuo, and Islam expert Reza Aslan, author of "No God but God."

As is always the case, Maher got in his shot: "God doesn't talk to you. You talk to him. Whether anyone is listening is an open question."

It's a line that might have been uttered by Christopher Hitchens or even Jean-Paul Sartre, but instead it's a guy who first played Vegas in the '80s, opening for Diana Ross. And , so like Lenny Bruce before him, Maher is no longer just a comedian.

Whatever Maher is, he matters, and increasingly so.

Here's why:

Comedians are often doing what the press once did more of - asking impertinent questions, calling out lies, ridiculing absurdities.

And whether it's Maher's show or his Emmy-winning stand-up act, or Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, people are lapping it up.

Maher served as one of the questioners in a recent Internet "mash-up" Democratic presidential debate, which allowed Web viewers to watch only the questions, answers and exchanges they chose. More than two-in-five viewers watched the Maher exchanges, making him more popular than all the candidates.

Of the 1.1 million viewers, nearly half were aged 18-34. Maher, Stewart and Colbert all have large audiences in that coveted demographic.

Just as talk radio successfully ran down the Democratic Party in the '90s, now it seem s Maher and his ilk are having a similar effect - especially among young voters - as they pound away on Republicans.

Exit polling showed voters 18-29 supported Democrats in the 2006 election by 60 percent to 38 percent. Other polling shows a precipitous collapse of the Republican brand among young people, who are well to the left of party orthodoxy on a variety of issues, including the war in Iraq and gay marriage.

Meanwhile, the young demographic is quickly becoming the largest voting bloc . In 2008 people 18-31 will number 50 million, more than the number of living Baby Boomers. By 2015 they'll make up one-third of the electorate.

Of course, Maher's no partisan. Weak-kneed Democrats are a favorite target.

His only allegiance, he said, is to "solidifying the half of the country that does like to look at things through a rational lens and not some crazy, fake patriotism."

At the end of the interview, Maher repeated a concern expressed earlier: "You're going to tell them I'm going to be funny, right? Cuz I'm gonna be funny."