(Photo : Youtube screenshot)
Bill Maher New Rules joke about a mass shooting at the CMAs was not funny.
Bill Maher is described as a stand-up comedian, television host, political commentator, satirist, author, and actor. In 2005, he was ranked at number 38 on Comedy Central's 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time and he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010. But after Friday night, some people aren't calling him very funny at all.
During the New Rules segment of his show, Real Time with Bill Maher, he managed to go after three different demographics in the first two minutes. His first "joke" offended Christians as he popped off, "New rule - Pope Francis has to admit that when he invited those children to release some doves as a symbol of peace, only to watch the doves get immediately devoured by a seagull and a crow, he was doing so to teach them a lesson ... that Genesis is bullsh*t and Darwin was right. God is dead kids so watch your back."
He immediately jumped to Duck Dynasty's Willie Robertson and his trademark Stars and Stripes bandana that he wore to a Presidential event, saying him wearing it was only acceptable "because his homophobic daddy invented a whistle that makes ducks horny."
A mild joke about one of the "Real Housewives" followed and then he took a shot at gun owners using the CMAs as the backdrop with, "Now that liberals have forwarded their agenda by inserting a mass gay wedding into the Grammys, conservatives must match them tit-for-tat by having a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards." The image chosen to accompany the joke was a badly photoshopped photo of Carrie Underwood on stage in a formal dress with an automatic weapon in one hand and a revolver in the other. Thus far, finding one gun owner or country music fan that found it funny has been impossible.
Maher ended his nearly 7 minute segment on a tear about Americans being too worried about what goes on in the bedrooms of consenting adults. He talked about a woman named Lis Smith getting fired from the New York Mayor's office for dating Eliot Spitzer, Maher said she should hire John Edwards to sue for sex discrimination, and then "Edwards, Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Bill Clinton should get together with the ghosts of of JFK, LBJ, FDR, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King and form a new party. The Perverts with Principles Party."
Humor is great and satire, when it's tastefully done, is funny too. The question is, how funny is a mass shooting? Bill Maher won't be getting any awards for that performance.
