Bill Maher was leading a crowded meeting of writers and producers in a bungalow on the CBS lot in Los Angeles. In a few hours, the late-night show "Real Time" would go live, and a nervous energy filled the cramped room.

Bill Maher was leading a crowded meeting of writers and producers in a bungalow on the CBS lot in Los Angeles. In a few hours, the late-night show �Real Time� would go live, and a nervous energy filled the cramped room.

The host, always ready with a quip on television, was sitting at the head of the table in near silence, letting his news-junkie writers hash things out. The subjects ranged from Hillary Clinton�s Iraq-war record and potential tax reform to footage of college football on a screen overhead that would serve as a joke�s visual counterpoint.

For the past 13 years on the HBO show �Real Time� (after nine years on ABC�s �Politically Incorrect�), Maher has been presiding with similar authoritativeness � in this case, over what he sees as a feast of hypocrisy.

For 35 weeks a year, he calls out politicians, religious leaders, demagogues, pundits � some of them, notably, his guests � with a brand of humor that is at once engaged and world-weary and not infrequently infused with snark.

Labeling �Real Time� the best-kept secret in late night would be an overstatement; the show, as Maher and those who work on it are apt to note, consistently has drawn about 4 million viewers an episode if various on-demand and delayed-viewing metrics are factored in.

But perhaps because it arrives only weekly, or perhaps because Maher has been doing this so long he has become a taken-for-granted fixture of the media landscape, or because he is more polarizing than many others who occupy these chairs, he has often been overlooked.

Yet in a cutthroat talk-show world that eats its young, Maher has outlasted many of the people who started as hosts before or soon after him: Jon Stewart and David Letterman and Craig Kilborn and Jay Leno and Tom Snyder and even the character of Stephen Colbert.

What�s more, he has lasted long enough for the zeitgeist to come to him. Ratings for �Real Time� have inched up, according to HBO, hitting an average viewership of 4.3 million, the highest in many years.

Maher hasn�t changed his on-screen persona much during the past two decades, but because his version of comedy is of a more firebrand sort than his counterparts � a person of relative privilege (he went to Cornell) speaking up for the common man, against a rigged system and really against political correctness � it makes him the ideal entertainer for this age of populist anger.

Billy Martin, who serves as the show�s head writer and an executive producer, said: �We�re living in a time when people are in love with Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders because they�re tired of politicians or people in the media telling them what they want to hear, mirroring back what they believe. And Bill never mirrors back what people believe.�

This season has animated Maher because of its comedic possibilities. But it�s also clear that there�s a more complex reason that this moment of truth-telling outsiders has galvanized him: He sees himself as one of them.

�I fought myself for a while, thinking �I can�t talk about this guy' (Donald Trump). But then he started to dominate, and it seemed wrong not to talk about him."

Maher has, politically, been unabashed in his support of the upstart Sanders, even though the candidate�s appearance on �Real Time� stayed somewhat wanly on message.

Maher�s political ideology might be described as �progressive with a side of stridency,� usually aimed at those he thinks are not acknowledging the obvious.

�You see a smile on Bill�s face when he�s saying things people think he wasn�t going to say,� said Dean Johnsen, executive producer of �Real Time.� �But he�s not doing it for the smile. I think it just works for him � the more honest he is, the more successful he gets. It feeds itself.�