The Mark Twain Prize was created to honor humor that challenges power, champions reason, and elevates human dignity. Giving it to Bill Maher directly undermines that legacy.
Mark Twain used skepticism to dismantle ignorance, but Maher uses his platform to promote it. He has spent years publicly questioning standard immunology, casting doubt on germ theory, and elevating fringe alternative health concepts over peer-reviewed medical consensus.
Furthermore, while past winners like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Jon Stewart built their legacies by punching up at abusive institutions and protecting the vulnerable, Maher does the opposite. He routinely paints a global population of nearly two billion people with a broad brush, famously asserting on air that Islam is the only religion that acts like the Mafia.
Twain's humor exposed societal hypocrisy and humanized the marginalized. Maher's humor weaponizes prejudice and rejects scientific facts. Bestowing this award on him does not celebrate Mark Twain's legacy, it cheapens it.
And ironically, your argument selectively defines both Mark Twain and Bill Maher.
Let's actually go point by point, because I don't think either pillar holds up once you look at specifics instead of vibes.
Start with "comedy has always had a moral obligation to challenge power and never reinforce prejudice." That's just not true historically, not even close... Seinfeld is one of the most beloved and influential shows in American comedy, and it was famously built on being about nothing, no politics, no institutions, no power being challenged, just four people annoyed at each other. Nobody thinks that disqualifies it. Go back further and most of vaudeville and early stand up was slapstick and blue material, whatever got a laugh that night, there was no unwritten rule that comedy exists to speak truth to power. That idea really solidified as an expectation around the Daily Show era in the 2000s. It's a pretty recent lens people are now applying backward like it was always the law.
Now the prejudice claim specifically. In 2011, Maher publicly called out Obama, by name, on his own show, to support gay marriage. That's a year before Obama actually did it, at a point where gay marriage had just lost at the ballot box 35 times in a row nationwide. He wasn't riding a safe consensus on that one, he was ahead of the sitting Democratic president. He's also been on the board of PETA since 1997, which is about as literal a version of "advocating for something that can't advocate for itself" as you can get. And like I said before, this is a guy who's spent decades going after presidents from both parties, Congress, the Catholic Church, Fox News, MSNBC, and pharmaceutical companies. If reinforcing prejudice were actually his thing, he's picked a very strange way to do it for thirty years.
Last one, the "he goes against scientific consensus" pillar, since that's supposed to be the damning one. For decades the entire medical establishment insisted ulcers were caused by stress and stomach acid. When an Australian doctor named Barry Marshall proposed it was actually a bacterium, other doctors said the idea was about as credible as claiming the earth is flat. He couldn't get funded or taken seriously, so he drank a petri dish of the bacteria himself to prove it. It took the NIH ten years to officially reverse course, and in 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for being right. That's not some obscure footnote, that's literally the same field the commenter is using to make their point. Consensus is what a room currently agrees on. It's not automatically the truth, and history is full of rooms that were confidently wrong until somebody proved them otherwise.
None of that means Maher's right about everything, he's not, and the vaccine stuff is fair game to push on specifically. But "comedy has to punch up or it's illegitimate" and "going against consensus makes you dangerous" are both being treated here like eternal laws when they're really just this commenter's preferences dressed up as principles.
Yeah if you look at pictures in his 50s he looks older… and shockingly more bald… LOL… I didn't even see his Politically Incorrect days I actually started watching him around the 2012 election and I realized that he said things that most people were disagreeing with pretty loudly and he started being right… it took 3 years for me to see that pattern though it took 3 years for me to see that pattern though..
And I realized that really the thing he puts his finger on is just not repeating the partisan stuff.. because a spare to Spade and that's something that me and you try to do so I admire that about him..
people seem to confuse that with agreeing about every single thing he says…. I doubt that I agree with every single thing that anyone says … but that's okay and that's kind of the point of discussing politics I don't know where people got this notion that if someone agrees with 90% of your values but perhaps isn't sold on 10% of the more radical ones, why you think going no contact with that person is a logical step.
My 10% with Bill Maher is his defense of Israel’s approach to Gaza. I appreciate him basing both sides, the immorality of supporting a genocide, in my opinion, is hard to swallow. He also seems to ignore that Netanyahu let Hamas get funded and then it took them 6-12 hours to respond to the October 7 attacks. At some point it becomes like those that dislike that Trump is credibly accused of sexual assaulting 25 or more women, but like his policies so they support for him. Sometimes that 10% is a redline.
I have never heard him defend their approach to gaza... I have heard him take strong opposition to people marching the streets saying globalize the intifada
Bill Maher sucks. Sad to see him win an award bearing the name of an actual humorist on it.
You may read politics into this but it’s not. I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s line when his Gentile dentist converts to Judaism and immediately starts telling Jewish jokes. Seinfeld is in a confessional and tells the priest behind the partition of his conundrum of his problem with the situation and the priest asks “so, this offends you as a Jew?”.
Seinfeld’s response…”No. It offends me as a comedian”.
Bill Maher is simply not funny and his pathetic looks into the camera like Mr. Roper from Three’s Company fame when he feels he’s scored a hit betray him as a smarmy narcissistic man.
Again…fine…he goes after everyone. Good for him. But he’s not funny and is no Mark Twain. Few are but he’s way off the Mark.
Hey, Ozzie.. thanks for engaging, man. I think that Bill Maher has very funny… And as a writer that the I understand how hard it would be to be funny, live on television every single week.For thirty five straight years , they relevant… So whatever he is onto is something that truly does transcend comedy.
I think that's the point you're making with the anti-dentite Episode of seinfeld that he kind of became a comedian , just so he could talk politics… Maybe. That would be brilliant and also an unusually difficult route. I'm guessing that like most young men, he was just trying to find himself. And when he finally realized what he wanted to talk about, he pivoted and profited… And that's kind of the point of my piece , because regardless of what people think about him , he has been extremely important to millions of members of society. My feelings aside. that's The scoreboard not the opinion.
Anyway… the comedy is subjective… He's definitely not one of the funniest comedians , but he's in a class where he's respected by the funniest comedians…and admired. You're allowed to think he's not funny. That's not really what the piece is arguing though.
I never called him the funniest guy alive or tried to sell you on his delivery. The point was the mechanism: he got canceled once, refused to apologize his way back in, and built a platform sturdy enough that neither tribe could ever fully own him or shut him up. That's the achievement. The jokes are just the delivery system for it.
And honestly, this is the exact thing I wrote about in the piece itself, the ninety percent problem. Someone says a hundred things, ninety of them land, and the ten that don't become the whole verdict. You didn't like his delivery, so you're using that to dismiss the actual case: a guy who tells liberals they're being weak and insular and tells conservatives they're anti-democratic, in the same week, without flinching from either side. That's not a comedy bit. That's a nonpartisan trait both sides claim to want and almost nobody actually rewards when they see it.
You don't have to laugh at him. But "he's smarmy and unfunny" isn't a rebuttal to "he built the one platform in media neither party could cancel."
And I in turn appreciate you engaging and writing back and explaining what you meant in your post. Your points stand but so does mine…and is encapsulated quite elegantly in your “that’s not a comedy bit”.
My point…as you acknowledge… is that the impetus for your piece is Bill Maher winning the nation’s highest honor given for “humor” going to someone not doing comedy is kind of … find a word for us here.
Anywho…
Your Seinfeld confessional assigned penance is to read Twain’s “Roughing It” or maybe just the vignette on the Old Man’s Ram.
And… I am indeed a rabid anti-Dentite. They should have their own schools. And…stop the genocide. Maher of course doesn’t feel this way but that stands separate from the fact of his just not being funny. Rogan speaks to a mass audience but does that make him wise? No, it makes him savvy.
Anyways…good solid exchange and I appreciated the write up and can’t but agree with the points about Maher’s survivability and appeal. Both are undeniable.
You describe his critique of the left in ways that sound reasonable. Whereas In making the same points he sounds like an asshole. I stopped watching him not because I perceived his politics changed but because his humility did. Interrupting guests who were making points I really wanted to hear, so I could learn what Maher already knew so that I could come to my own informed conclusion rather than take his several fact and logic steps ahead of me as substitutes for my own thinking. He seems no longer interested in changing peoples’ minds and more interested in wallowing in a sense of superiority.
You have struck a cord with Meyer. The attack has continued with late night show hosts. All Parties have succumbed to the lure of big money for campaigns. The people that are really pissed off about this are the Independents. It is also the Independents that make up most of the Independent journalists that I have been exposed to. There is a fix to this, but no one wants to hear it. Unfortunately, the fix would require a lot of money to even attempt which would mean finding wealth Independents who believe in the voice of the people more than their own.
I haven't had so much backlash from the chat room threads in my entire time on sub stack than I did in the first hour of publishing this article. I have a dozen people just cursing him and all of them are on the left… they're proving that point I made in the article that canceling somebody so right to exist or give commentary because they only agree with 90% of what you think is almost the definition of insanity. No wonder the country is elected Trump twice. This is the voice that is coming through, even though not representative, the loudest from the left.
Lots of convoluted presumptuousness here, as if people like me, who find him 100% repulsive (you’re not female), are just being motivated by only 10% of what he says.
Thanks michael... I really appreciate that and I think I accidentally sent you a direct message instead of reply because I'm not wearing my glasses. Lol. But thanks twice and please consider subscribing because i talk about issues with this type of perspective almost exclusively.. my goal is to bring as much objectivity and uncomfortable devil's Advocate type stuff to the table hoping that people can come together and think through things instead of react and so far it turned me a place on the top 100 Rising best seller list in culture so i'm hoping that this catches on
Yeah, I spent the last five years wondering why--despite the language and the in-your-face arrogance--I found that Bill sounded like the most reasonable and articulate liberal in the room.
You're right. He didn't change all that much. The progressives went left and woke and trans. Bill stayed on the intelligent moderate left.
I always thought Bill was a little bigger, till I saw Rxan stand next to him.
Yeah I actually started to like him more once he started to criticize the left for the ridiculous parts.. There's actual progress to be made and they became the Church of Perpetual disappointment
The Mark Twain Prize was created to honor humor that challenges power, champions reason, and elevates human dignity. Giving it to Bill Maher directly undermines that legacy.
Mark Twain used skepticism to dismantle ignorance, but Maher uses his platform to promote it. He has spent years publicly questioning standard immunology, casting doubt on germ theory, and elevating fringe alternative health concepts over peer-reviewed medical consensus.
Furthermore, while past winners like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Jon Stewart built their legacies by punching up at abusive institutions and protecting the vulnerable, Maher does the opposite. He routinely paints a global population of nearly two billion people with a broad brush, famously asserting on air that Islam is the only religion that acts like the Mafia.
Twain's humor exposed societal hypocrisy and humanized the marginalized. Maher's humor weaponizes prejudice and rejects scientific facts. Bestowing this award on him does not celebrate Mark Twain's legacy, it cheapens it.
And ironically, your argument selectively defines both Mark Twain and Bill Maher.
Let's actually go point by point, because I don't think either pillar holds up once you look at specifics instead of vibes.
Start with "comedy has always had a moral obligation to challenge power and never reinforce prejudice." That's just not true historically, not even close... Seinfeld is one of the most beloved and influential shows in American comedy, and it was famously built on being about nothing, no politics, no institutions, no power being challenged, just four people annoyed at each other. Nobody thinks that disqualifies it. Go back further and most of vaudeville and early stand up was slapstick and blue material, whatever got a laugh that night, there was no unwritten rule that comedy exists to speak truth to power. That idea really solidified as an expectation around the Daily Show era in the 2000s. It's a pretty recent lens people are now applying backward like it was always the law.
Now the prejudice claim specifically. In 2011, Maher publicly called out Obama, by name, on his own show, to support gay marriage. That's a year before Obama actually did it, at a point where gay marriage had just lost at the ballot box 35 times in a row nationwide. He wasn't riding a safe consensus on that one, he was ahead of the sitting Democratic president. He's also been on the board of PETA since 1997, which is about as literal a version of "advocating for something that can't advocate for itself" as you can get. And like I said before, this is a guy who's spent decades going after presidents from both parties, Congress, the Catholic Church, Fox News, MSNBC, and pharmaceutical companies. If reinforcing prejudice were actually his thing, he's picked a very strange way to do it for thirty years.
Last one, the "he goes against scientific consensus" pillar, since that's supposed to be the damning one. For decades the entire medical establishment insisted ulcers were caused by stress and stomach acid. When an Australian doctor named Barry Marshall proposed it was actually a bacterium, other doctors said the idea was about as credible as claiming the earth is flat. He couldn't get funded or taken seriously, so he drank a petri dish of the bacteria himself to prove it. It took the NIH ten years to officially reverse course, and in 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for being right. That's not some obscure footnote, that's literally the same field the commenter is using to make their point. Consensus is what a room currently agrees on. It's not automatically the truth, and history is full of rooms that were confidently wrong until somebody proved them otherwise.
None of that means Maher's right about everything, he's not, and the vaccine stuff is fair game to push on specifically. But "comedy has to punch up or it's illegitimate" and "going against consensus makes you dangerous" are both being treated here like eternal laws when they're really just this commenter's preferences dressed up as principles.
Rooting for you to become the next Bill Maher. I hope you have just as many people that love and hate you because that seems to be the sweet spot.
I used to hate Bill now I like him. I was shocked to find out he’s 70.
Yeah if you look at pictures in his 50s he looks older… and shockingly more bald… LOL… I didn't even see his Politically Incorrect days I actually started watching him around the 2012 election and I realized that he said things that most people were disagreeing with pretty loudly and he started being right… it took 3 years for me to see that pattern though it took 3 years for me to see that pattern though..
And I realized that really the thing he puts his finger on is just not repeating the partisan stuff.. because a spare to Spade and that's something that me and you try to do so I admire that about him..
people seem to confuse that with agreeing about every single thing he says…. I doubt that I agree with every single thing that anyone says … but that's okay and that's kind of the point of discussing politics I don't know where people got this notion that if someone agrees with 90% of your values but perhaps isn't sold on 10% of the more radical ones, why you think going no contact with that person is a logical step.
My 10% with Bill Maher is his defense of Israel’s approach to Gaza. I appreciate him basing both sides, the immorality of supporting a genocide, in my opinion, is hard to swallow. He also seems to ignore that Netanyahu let Hamas get funded and then it took them 6-12 hours to respond to the October 7 attacks. At some point it becomes like those that dislike that Trump is credibly accused of sexual assaulting 25 or more women, but like his policies so they support for him. Sometimes that 10% is a redline.
Listen carefully to what he says David and then tell me what you think
https://youtu.be/KP-CRXROorw?is=rM7IodPxkfFM-rgm
I have never heard him defend their approach to gaza... I have heard him take strong opposition to people marching the streets saying globalize the intifada
Please.
Bill Maher no more deserves that award than my dog.
He's been sucking up to Trump since the first term.
Can you give me an example?
Bill Maher sucks. Sad to see him win an award bearing the name of an actual humorist on it.
You may read politics into this but it’s not. I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s line when his Gentile dentist converts to Judaism and immediately starts telling Jewish jokes. Seinfeld is in a confessional and tells the priest behind the partition of his conundrum of his problem with the situation and the priest asks “so, this offends you as a Jew?”.
Seinfeld’s response…”No. It offends me as a comedian”.
Bill Maher is simply not funny and his pathetic looks into the camera like Mr. Roper from Three’s Company fame when he feels he’s scored a hit betray him as a smarmy narcissistic man.
Again…fine…he goes after everyone. Good for him. But he’s not funny and is no Mark Twain. Few are but he’s way off the Mark.
Hey, Ozzie.. thanks for engaging, man. I think that Bill Maher has very funny… And as a writer that the I understand how hard it would be to be funny, live on television every single week.For thirty five straight years , they relevant… So whatever he is onto is something that truly does transcend comedy.
I think that's the point you're making with the anti-dentite Episode of seinfeld that he kind of became a comedian , just so he could talk politics… Maybe. That would be brilliant and also an unusually difficult route. I'm guessing that like most young men, he was just trying to find himself. And when he finally realized what he wanted to talk about, he pivoted and profited… And that's kind of the point of my piece , because regardless of what people think about him , he has been extremely important to millions of members of society. My feelings aside. that's The scoreboard not the opinion.
Anyway… the comedy is subjective… He's definitely not one of the funniest comedians , but he's in a class where he's respected by the funniest comedians…and admired. You're allowed to think he's not funny. That's not really what the piece is arguing though.
I never called him the funniest guy alive or tried to sell you on his delivery. The point was the mechanism: he got canceled once, refused to apologize his way back in, and built a platform sturdy enough that neither tribe could ever fully own him or shut him up. That's the achievement. The jokes are just the delivery system for it.
And honestly, this is the exact thing I wrote about in the piece itself, the ninety percent problem. Someone says a hundred things, ninety of them land, and the ten that don't become the whole verdict. You didn't like his delivery, so you're using that to dismiss the actual case: a guy who tells liberals they're being weak and insular and tells conservatives they're anti-democratic, in the same week, without flinching from either side. That's not a comedy bit. That's a nonpartisan trait both sides claim to want and almost nobody actually rewards when they see it.
You don't have to laugh at him. But "he's smarmy and unfunny" isn't a rebuttal to "he built the one platform in media neither party could cancel."
And I in turn appreciate you engaging and writing back and explaining what you meant in your post. Your points stand but so does mine…and is encapsulated quite elegantly in your “that’s not a comedy bit”.
My point…as you acknowledge… is that the impetus for your piece is Bill Maher winning the nation’s highest honor given for “humor” going to someone not doing comedy is kind of … find a word for us here.
Anywho…
Your Seinfeld confessional assigned penance is to read Twain’s “Roughing It” or maybe just the vignette on the Old Man’s Ram.
And… I am indeed a rabid anti-Dentite. They should have their own schools. And…stop the genocide. Maher of course doesn’t feel this way but that stands separate from the fact of his just not being funny. Rogan speaks to a mass audience but does that make him wise? No, it makes him savvy.
Anyways…good solid exchange and I appreciated the write up and can’t but agree with the points about Maher’s survivability and appeal. Both are undeniable.
You describe his critique of the left in ways that sound reasonable. Whereas In making the same points he sounds like an asshole. I stopped watching him not because I perceived his politics changed but because his humility did. Interrupting guests who were making points I really wanted to hear, so I could learn what Maher already knew so that I could come to my own informed conclusion rather than take his several fact and logic steps ahead of me as substitutes for my own thinking. He seems no longer interested in changing peoples’ minds and more interested in wallowing in a sense of superiority.
You have struck a cord with Meyer. The attack has continued with late night show hosts. All Parties have succumbed to the lure of big money for campaigns. The people that are really pissed off about this are the Independents. It is also the Independents that make up most of the Independent journalists that I have been exposed to. There is a fix to this, but no one wants to hear it. Unfortunately, the fix would require a lot of money to even attempt which would mean finding wealth Independents who believe in the voice of the people more than their own.
Revolution is the solution.
I haven't had so much backlash from the chat room threads in my entire time on sub stack than I did in the first hour of publishing this article. I have a dozen people just cursing him and all of them are on the left… they're proving that point I made in the article that canceling somebody so right to exist or give commentary because they only agree with 90% of what you think is almost the definition of insanity. No wonder the country is elected Trump twice. This is the voice that is coming through, even though not representative, the loudest from the left.
Lots of convoluted presumptuousness here, as if people like me, who find him 100% repulsive (you’re not female), are just being motivated by only 10% of what he says.
Let's keep up the good fight.
nice summary
Thanks michael... I really appreciate that and I think I accidentally sent you a direct message instead of reply because I'm not wearing my glasses. Lol. But thanks twice and please consider subscribing because i talk about issues with this type of perspective almost exclusively.. my goal is to bring as much objectivity and uncomfortable devil's Advocate type stuff to the table hoping that people can come together and think through things instead of react and so far it turned me a place on the top 100 Rising best seller list in culture so i'm hoping that this catches on
Yeah, I spent the last five years wondering why--despite the language and the in-your-face arrogance--I found that Bill sounded like the most reasonable and articulate liberal in the room.
You're right. He didn't change all that much. The progressives went left and woke and trans. Bill stayed on the intelligent moderate left.
I always thought Bill was a little bigger, till I saw Rxan stand next to him.
Yeah I actually started to like him more once he started to criticize the left for the ridiculous parts.. There's actual progress to be made and they became the Church of Perpetual disappointment
I love reading truth
🙏