Luke O’Brien is senior correspondent for Politico Magazine.

So a comedian undergoing glaucoma treatment walks into the Cognac Room at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. He’s wearing a Mets cap and the black jeans that he might have slept in. He swigs some coffee and complains about a 2 p.m. wake-up call, which is understandable once he explains he went to bed at 9 a.m.

“I haven’t eaten yet today. I don’t know what time it is. Who am I? Where am I? What city? What hour?” says Bill Maher, gazing out the window at a grim November sky. “May I use this interview as a one-issue diatribe against daylight savings? Fucking farmers. For the sake of two or three giant agribusinesses, the rest of us have to suffer. The one time we need more light, they take it away.”


Outside on 55th Street, a pedestrian spots Maher, bangs on the window and cocks his fist in a gesture of solidarity. It should be noted that this passerby is black—as are a considerable number of Maher’s fans (and not just those he’s dated, a roster that includes several black women of the curvaceous gentlemen’s club variety). In explaining the popularity that a pallid Irish-Jew from New Jersey would enjoy with African Americans, New York magazine once quoted Christopher “Kid” Reid, a Maher confidante and one half of the hip-hop duo Kid ‘n’ Play. “What people of color like about Bill is his honesty,” he said. “Black people can smell fear in white people. They’re like bloodhounds. When Bill and I hang out, and there are people of color around, they gravitate to him.”

To be sure, Maher’s fearlessness explains his political posture: He’s unapologetically liberal, populist and outraged. Accordingly, he’s a bête noire to conservatives and inspires their fury even when his commentary veers away from the political. Just last week, he found himself the target of another right-wing freakout after making a crack about the Boston marathon bombing on Real Time with Bill Maher, the HBO show he’s hosted since 2003. Maher took issue on air with the recent Boston Red Sox World Series victory parade, during which a convoy of professional athletes paused with no little amount of fanfare to deposit the team’s 2013 trophy on the marathon finish line, a tribute to victims that Maher deemed a little mawkish.

“I mean, your city was not leveled by Godzilla,” he said.

It was a tin-eared joke, but Maher (who is, as it happens, a minority owner of the New York Mets), wasn’t mocking the victims. He was poking fun at the tacky, compulsory patriotism that gets plastered so casually to public spectacle, especially in sports. So infuriating is Maher to his critics, however, that nuance invariably acquiesces to cliché.

“Bill Maher is a national disgrace,” wrote Jeffrey T. Kuhner in the first line of a Washington Times op-ed last week. Kuhner also called Maher an “example of America’s cultural rot,” a “hate merchant” who “needs at last to be taught a lesson” and a “textbook case of the severe damage drugs do to the brain,” before suggesting a boycott of HBO.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In September 2001, Maher was hosting ABC’s Politically Incorrect, the progenitor of Real Time, when he made the mistake of uttering the following about the Sept. 11 suicide bombers: “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” ABC soon canceled Maher’s show, and America was soon munching on “freedom” fries. But Maher, who took his act, and most of his staff, to HBO, managed to stay politically incorrect, exuberantly so—and there he remains, a dozen years later, a poison barb in the hide of the GOP.

Maher is our one TV host who is well and truly angry; a pugnacious debater and a healthy corrective to the claptrap of cable news.

It’s sadly amusing that so many Americans now get their political news via comedy—sad even to a comedian paid handsomely to dispense it. “You can read the CliffsNotes but you should read the book too,” Maher told me. But rarely has American politics been more laughable. Which means Maher has never been more popular. Today, Real Time is reaching a record-high 4.1 million viewers, an impressive figure for a show that appears only on premium cable and is available in only a third of the country. Maher’s concerned handlers mention the numbers at every opportunity, as if anxious to reassure the 57-year-old host, who can’t help but occasionally worry aloud about the show somehow being cancelled.

But Maher bereft of his platform would be a loss for everyone, even the haters. The truth is, the snide satirists like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert rarely risk the lasting enmity of the lunatic fringe; this is our one TV host who is well and truly angry—a pugnacious debater with an acerbic wit that hits audiences as a healthy corrective to the claptrap of cable news. Like one of his heroes, George Carlin, Maher uses humor to scourge. He can be hilariously mean. On the night before we meet at the St. Regis, he performs his stand-up routine at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway. He abuses Republicans like Napoleon Dynamite on a tetherball.

Consider Maher on Ted Cruz: “the wit of Justin Bieber and the people skills of Scarface.”

On Sarah Palin: “perhaps the least qualified public servant since Caligula nominated his horse.”

And Newt Gingrich: a “man with the moral compass of the pimp from Taxi Driver. A guy who—this is true—left his first wife when she got cancer, left his second wife when she got MS. … But I think the deeper question is: How come when Newt Gingrich fucks you, you get very, very sick?”

The audience, which includes Jerry Seinfeld, who came up with Maher in the New York comedy scene, roars in approval. Stand-up keeps Maher sharp. It also informs his HBO show. Although conservatives label him—not incorrectly—a limousine liberal because he lives comfortably in Los Angeles and pals around with Hollywood types, Maher is on the road almost every weekend doing stand-up, often in red states.

“It’s good. I mean, you do see America in a way that I don’t think a lot of people do—up close and personal,” Maher tells me. “I’m like the old-fashioned spy service. I’m not a satellite up there. I’m actually on the ground, getting human intel.”

One of the main reference points in his comedy is Appleton, Wis., where Joe McCarthy was born. Maher once played Appleton. His agents wanted to cancel the show because of sluggish ticket sales. But Maher refused and did extra press promotion before the show, ginning up interest until the venue was nearly filled. “If you go to the most conservative areas, you will find the liberal people,” he says. “They may not be the majority, but they exist. They are marbled into the population.”

For Maher, Appleton represents a quant idealized 1950s America to which, he feels, conservatives cling, the geographic embodiment of a Saturday Evening Post painting of a blond kid sipping a malt at the drugstore counter. It’s a place, as Maher describes it, that harkens back to a time “before there were Negros and the FBI or Dora the Explorer or regulations or recycling or trial lawyers or gay marriage.” That this America is gone is a fact Maher believes Republicans refuse to accept.

“That is really what’s fucking with their heads,” Maher says. “It’s the combination of black and gay and pot and all this stuff, the ’60s dorm room. … [T]hey were just so afraid that it is going to come to the fore. And it did. And then they see it. … I think it was Bill Clinton that once said that if you thought the ’50s were great, you’re probably a Republican, and if you thought the ’60s were great, you’re probably a Democrat. … That’s really the essence of it. That’s Mitt Romney’s appeal. … He’s a ‘50s guy. That’s in their gut. That’s what they want. They have this idea, this feeling that life was better before all the change started. And now there’s a lot of change.”

Maher has been effortlessly flinging this brand of blue material for more than 20 years. When Politically Incorrect first aired on Comedy Central in 1993, it was obvious that the Cornell English major had finally found his niche after years of relative obscurity as a standup comic and B-movie actor. The show was a loco roundtable of celebrities, journalists and wonks discussing politics and blurring the line between performance and insight. The “McLaughlin group on acid,” Maher called it. Seinfeld appeared on the first episode with Howard Stern co-host Robin Quivers. Another early panel included Dr. Dre, Gay Talese, G. Gordon Liddy and Harvey Fierstein, who have almost certainly not been in a room together since then. Al Franken and Arianna Huffington were Politically Incorrect writers. The show helped define the young Comedy Central network.

Politically Incorrect also charted a new course for politico-comic miscegenation on TV, a trend that eventually gave rise to the likes of Stewart and Colbert. Amid today’s swirl of fake news and stunt commentary, however, Maher has stayed true to his roots. Real Time may be more polished and less trippy than Politically Incorrect, but it shares the same DNA. Maher still zips through a monologue. He still carefully curates the topics of discussion each week, trying both to give political junkies their fix and to inform viewers who don’t have time to closely follow the news. He still mixes it up with eclectic panels of guests, many of who can be as abrasive as he is, such as the conservative agitator Ann Coulter, a longtime friend.

“I know the liberals hate it, and I don’t care,” he says. “First of all, I’ve known her that long. There’s something about an old friendship. You just have history with somebody. Not romantic history. No. I would never date a Republican. I never have. I wouldn’t. Nor would she be interested in dating me. But she is a fun person if you just don’t get political when you talk. When you know somebody that long, you just know where not to go. And she’s a fun New Yorker type of person. And people like her. They expect to hate her.”

“She's a fun New Yorker type of person. And people like her. They expect to hate her," Maher says of his unlikely friend, Ann Coulter. | Charles Sykes/AP Photo

Coulter aside, Maher wants to reinforce a point: He would never date a Republican. “I don’t understand that. How you can go out with someone who is not of your political stripe? Because, to me, politics is an extension of your morality. If you’re going to get serious with someone romantically, don’t you have to think the same morally? There was no daylight between how my parents thought about things. I don’t remember them ever disagreeing on any matter of consequence politically or morally. They spoke with one voice because they thought the same. I don’t get the Mary Matalin/James Carville union. … I don’t know how you raise kids that way. What do the kids think? It’s one thing to be from a mixed religion like I was but that didn’t mean I was from a mixed morality. But I think being of two political parties, that’s a more severe dissonance. I do.”

It’s a curious, half-frightening thing, to hear Bill Maher discuss the rearing of children. A confessed bachelor with a much-discussed thing for models; this is a guy who gets to bed around the hour others head to work. If Maher has slowed down or mellowed after all these years canvassing the country, it hasn’t been much.

I’m like the old-fashioned spy service,” says Maher. “I’m not a satellite up there. I’m actually on the ground, getting human intel.”

“You’re old school with the pencil and the paper,” he tells me, watching me scribble as we talk. “A real reporter. I haven’t seen a reporter since Jimmy Olsen actually writing.” The image gets Maher thinking about the early tools of his trade. “I used to tape my act. When I was first starting here in New York, that’s what all of us did,” he tells me. “Tape your show and listen back to it. And I hated doing it. Hated it.”

There’s a metaphor there about looking forward; about being attuned to criticism to sharpen your voice; about saying what’s funny and true, no matter what freakouts may ensue. The life of the roving antagonist—he plays it well. To paraphrase a dude from the New Testament, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but Bill Maher has no place to lay his head. And God bless him for that, though he will not appreciate the gesture.

“All right,” he says, the clock in the Cognac Room nosing toward a time that would have most people thinking about their commute home from work, “I’m off to breakfast!”

Luke O’Brien, a former senior writer at Deadspin , writes for Details, Slate, Fortune and other magazines.