Marc Maron didn’t hold back when asked about Bill Maher during a recent appearance on “Pod Save America.”
The “WTF” podcast host criticized the 69-year-old comedian for what he sees as a relentless effort to stay culturally relevant, calling the approach “desperate.”
“I always had a problem with his tone,” Maron, 61, said. “I feel with Bill that there is this — and it happens with some of the other boomers — desperate chasing of relevance that changes someone’s mind, in terms of how they approach what they do, and also makes the whole undertaking feel desperate.”
He added that Maher’s frequent commentary on “wokeness” is “not for me,” saying, “I can’t see past the desperation, and what he’s willing to do to stay in the conversation.”
Maher has long railed against what he views as excesses of progressive politics. On his HBO program “Real Time” and his podcast “Club Random,” he has frequently argued that “wokeness” undermines open dialogue.
“I would categorize ‘liberal’ as different than ‘woke,'” he told CNN last year. “Woke, which started out as a good thing — alert to injustice. Who could be against that? But it became sort of an eyeroll because they love diversity, except of ideas, and that’s not really where we should be.”
Maron’s criticism wasn’t his first. In a March episode of “WTF,” he said the country had been living under “fascism” during Donald Trump’s presidency and singled out Maher as one of the figures who, in his view, enabled the former president by agreeing with certain policies.
Maher himself has been at the center of controversy over his interactions with Trump. Earlier this year, he drew fire after describing a White House dinner with Trump in surprisingly flattering terms. On “Real Time,” Maher told viewers that “everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.” He went on to say, “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.”
That monologue prompted backlash from fellow comedians. Without naming Maher directly, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David slammed his comments in a New York Times parody written from the perspective of someone who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and found him oddly personable. Maher later hit back on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” calling David’s satire “kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
