Bill Maher - You Can Mess with Mohammed but not One Direction

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By Norman Golightly

April 15, 2015 – God bless Bill Maher. Anyone who’s familiar with Maher knows offering him God’s blessing won’t mean much to him since he’s a devout atheist. Therefore Atheist God, bless Bill Maher. Neptune or Great God of the Crops, bless Bill Maher. Somebody fucking bless Bill Maher for doing what he did in a recent show.

Maher is no stranger to controversy and like many comedians, he uses his platform to not only make jokes but to convey opinions and ideas. His opinions and ideas. In doing so, especially with a huge pulpit like Real Time on HBO, the veil between the act and the individual is decidedly thin if not transparent. Maher has taken a lot of flack for a number of topics over time and depending on your personal views, maybe deservedly so. Although if you’re so against his general views, why are you watching him in the first place? That’s for another day.

So Maher knowingly pokes the bears and the bears growl back – the circle of comic life in a social media zoo. But for every camel’s back, there’s that one last straw – and in this case in couldn’t have been a sillier straw made Maher snap and I’m so glad it did. Several weeks ago, Maher did a quick bit on Zayn Malik leaving One Direction and part of the schtick included comparing the likeness of the boyband member to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 21-year-old found guilty in connection with the bombing attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013.

What should have been a passing gag resulted in more blowback than affirmed pot smoker Maher is accustomed to, and the negative reaction was so ludicrous, it actually gave rise to one of his best segments in recent memory: Explaining Jokes to Idiots