The MoJo Interview: Bill Maher
Bill Maher has made a career out of touching third-rail topics and pissing off large swaths of the population. In his new film, the caustic comedian outdoes himself by going full-bore after organized religion. Religulous, directed by Larry Charles (Borat), follows Maher, an atheist, as he hits the Vatican, the Wailing Wall, and The Holy Land Experience theme park, trying to fathom why his fellow mortals believe in a higher power. "I don't want to give away the end, but I'm a Jew for Jesus now!" he reports. "No, kidding." The blasphemy continues on the film's parody website, disbeliefnet.com.
In 2002, Maher lost his gig hosting Politically Incorrect, his prime-time show on abc, after declaring that flying hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 was "not cowardly." For the past five years, he's held forth on Real Time With Bill Maher on hbo, securing his reputation as a repeat offender. (In April, he had to apologize after comparing the Catholic Church to Mormon polygamists and saying Pope Benedict "used to be a Nazi.") Mother Jones spoke with the pro-drug, pro-death penalty, pro-choice libertarian and former Ralph Nader supporter about his ideological idiosyncrasies and his unrepentant heathenism.
Mother Jones: In Religulous, you go around the world looking for answers to some big questions, asking people what they believe in. Any surprises?
Bill Maher: Yeah, there certainly were surprises. I don't know if we were asking so much what people believe so much as why they believe. The central question of the film is, "How can otherwise rational people believe in a talking snake?" as there is in the Garden of Eden. That really is the central conceit of the movie because it's one thing to be living in the Bronze Age when people didn't know that the earth revolved around the sun and thought that disease is caused by a toad in your stomach, that guilt could be assessed by whether you float or not. That sort of makes sense, but in the 21st century it doesn't make sense to me that people lead these otherwise quite rational lives, and then one day a week go to someplace and think they're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god. That to me was a dissonance I was trying to work out.
In 2002, Maher lost his gig hosting Politically Incorrect, his prime-time show on abc, after declaring that flying hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 was "not cowardly." For the past five years, he's held forth on Real Time With Bill Maher on hbo, securing his reputation as a repeat offender. (In April, he had to apologize after comparing the Catholic Church to Mormon polygamists and saying Pope Benedict "used to be a Nazi.") Mother Jones spoke with the pro-drug, pro-death penalty, pro-choice libertarian and former Ralph Nader supporter about his ideological idiosyncrasies and his unrepentant heathenism.
Mother Jones: In Religulous, you go around the world looking for answers to some big questions, asking people what they believe in. Any surprises?
Bill Maher: Yeah, there certainly were surprises. I don't know if we were asking so much what people believe so much as why they believe. The central question of the film is, "How can otherwise rational people believe in a talking snake?" as there is in the Garden of Eden. That really is the central conceit of the movie because it's one thing to be living in the Bronze Age when people didn't know that the earth revolved around the sun and thought that disease is caused by a toad in your stomach, that guilt could be assessed by whether you float or not. That sort of makes sense, but in the 21st century it doesn't make sense to me that people lead these otherwise quite rational lives, and then one day a week go to someplace and think they're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god. That to me was a dissonance I was trying to work out.
posted by temporal at 9/18/2008
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