TIFFANY CROSS ON BILL MAHER
Wow.
Just the other day, last Saturday in fact (June 26), Tiffany Cross took a poke at Bill Maher.
As I consider it, this was no more a poke — a swipe — than a bludgeoning might be considered a slap on the wrist.
She annihilated him.
She excoriated him.
She “laid him out in lavender.”
She humiliated him.
She was humiliated.
She was angry.
Livid, perhaps.
“This is why ‘allies’ get the side-eye sometimes,” she said of Maher.
Apparently, during a segment of the preceding evening’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the controversial host criticized Lin-Manuel Miranda for apologizing about concerns of colorism in his new film, In the Heights.
Maher mocked Miranda — and his apology — for not having enough “Afro-Latino” representation in the movie.
“Please stop apologizing,” Maher began.
“You’re the guy who made the Founding Fathers black and Hispanic!
I don’t think that you have to apologize to Twitter!
For f***’s sake. This is why people hate Democrats.”
He was just warming up.
“I mean, he’s a Latino making a Latino movie with a Latino cast — not good enough!
Nothing is ever good enough for these people!
They’re like children.
We don’t raise our children right, and it’s reflected in the media.
No one ever tells their children, ‘Shut the f*** up, sit down, listen to your elders, stop b****ing,’” he added.
This infuriated Cross, who thought it was “gracious” and “appropriate” for Miranda to apologize, tossing in her opinion that Maher “has been wack for a long time.”
“Maybe he said something highly offensive again [last night], I don’t know,” she lamented.
“I stopped suffering through that stale, clumsy monologue and painfully out-of-touch show a long time ago,” Cross said.
“But I did see a clip segment of him complaining [about] Lin-Manuel Miranda apologizing for the lack of Afro-Latino representation in his movie In the Heights.”
In a piece from Saturday’s episode of her MSNBC program, The Cross Connection, she expounded in a fiery monologue.
“Bill Maher, you do not get to tell people of color what they should or should not be offended by.
Stay in your lane, slim.
Maybe instead of trying to invoke sympathy for Sharon Osbourne or making sure Tomi Lahren has a space to spout her BS, you should have more diverse panels of people who can explain colorism to you and systemic racism and how these things still devastate people’s lives and livelihoods today.
Try that instead of standing on your alabaster perch every week to crap on other people’s lived experience while providing a safe haven for well-established white supremacists.
Because I’ve got to tell you — this old, angry white man act is so played.”
Got it.
But in case greater clarity was needed, Cross went on to blast Maher’s “mostly white” weekly panels, “where he sings sob songs to them about the perils of the shrinking demographic and chides anyone who falls even slightly outside of his myopic, privileged view.
The country, like it or not, is changing in real time.
And sadly, ‘Fake Time with Bill Maher,’ is not,” she acerbically concluded.
So?
What to make of all this?
Bill Maher is a renegade.
He lives to defame, besmirch, disparage or denigrate those for whom he has little use and that for which he has no use.
But it’s deeper than that.
His sometimes bemusing satirical dispensation of political news, and observational comedy composed of cringe, black and Rickles-like insult — read sarcasm and cynicism — pretty much defines Maher’s schtick.
It’s what he does.
It’s how he does it.
It’s who he is.
Say what you will — and he certainly does — Bill Maher is very smart.
He’s quick with a quip and eminently quotable.
To wit:
“We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It’s overrun with sheep and conformists.”
“We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.”
“If you think you have it tough, read history books.”
“Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.”
“Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.”
“Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.”
“What Democratic congressmen do to their women staffers, Republicans do to the country.”
Maher is a hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool, left-wing liberal comedic satirist.
A satirical comedian.
He is a broad-nosed and pompous shock jock of sorts.
His pomposity knows no bounds.
He lives to annoy.
He irritates you with his mere presence, his being.
His s***-eating grin.
But his words resonate.
He can be pithy yet thoughtful; he expounds, he embellishes, he offends and he can make you laugh.
Or maybe cry.
Tiffany Cross is an intelligent young woman and quite good at what she does.
She is eminently entitled to her opinions, as are we all.
She is free to express them.
But what you see with Bill Maher is what you get.
Period.
Simply put, it not only comes with the territory, it is the territory.
As Maher — no fan of one, Donald John Trump — sternly admonished his viewers in advance of the 2020 presidential election:
“Mark Tuesday November 6 down on your calendar like you’re Brett Kavanaugh planning to get shit-faced. Because Tuesday is win or go home for democracy.”
He takes no prisoners.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in July 2021.]
