The problem is that Mr. Maher swung as if the sport still had a Negro League. “Work in the fields?” he asked in a tone that was both funny and incredulous in a way that with certain white people right now, you’d call “woke.” He turned his nose up like someone who had just smelled curdled milk or watched Amy Schumer in “Snatched.” He could have stopped there: a kind of check-swing. His disdain was evident. But apparently he felt that moral obligation to swing: “Senator,” he said, throwing up his hands, “I’m a house nigger.” Immediately, he told the audience that he was joking. (On Saturday, he apologized. HBO called his remarks “inexcusable” and said it would edit that segment out of future broadcasts of the show.)

I’m not a regular “Real Time” watcher, but as someone who encounters Mr. Maher’s comedy almost exclusively in moments like this, I had to ask: Isn’t this something that just happens on every Bill Maher show?

He has compared his dog to developmentally disabled children. He has questioned vaccines and claimed that Islam “has too much in common with ISIS.” After the Sept. 11 attacks, he wondered, on his old late-night ABC program, “Politically Incorrect,” about the nature of bravery, comparing the terrorists’ suicide mission to American missiles, which he saw as a hands-off “cowardly” approach. Advertisers pulled their spots, and the network suspended the broadcast. (It was canceled the next year.)

This is all to say that Mr. Maher has views, but what he said on Friday night isn’t among them. For one thing, it’s not even a view, per se. It was an attempt to mock Mr. Sasse’s unfortunate choice of words. (I think I knew what he meant, too: Nebraska grows too much corn for grown people to fret over who to be for Halloween.) But intention is tricky in comedy. Mr. Sasse said something that was, on its face, unsavory. You don’t need much of an imagination to envision Chris Rock, Larry Wilmore or Wanda Sykes taking a whack at that line. ABC’s sitcom “black-ish” exists, partly, to satirize these sorts of conversational bloopers.

But Bill Maher isn’t Chris Rock. He’s not on “black-ish.” He’s a 61-year-old white man who would never get a pass for jesting about slavery or the N-word. (His track record inspires too much doubt to give any benefit.) That’s a license reserved, arguably, for Louis C.K., or Sarah Silverman in her performance-art prime — white comedians who have really grappled with what it means to flirt with racially inflammatory language and ideas, what it means for the flirtation to fail. Mr. Maher’s approach to television doesn’t necessitate that kind of rehearsed rumination. The appeal of “Real Time” is its on-the-spot discourse, its anti-rehearsal. That looseness can tip easily into blurting, flatulence and worse.