Tonight I watched a Friday night show that I really look forward to every week. You wouldn’t know it from this blog but I am very active in current events, politics, science, and the IDW (intellectual dark web). I wrote an article of the benefits of podcasts here because I encourage others to expand their knowledge base. I always look forward to Friday nights to watch Bill’s show Real Time. He often has guests that have opposing views, are on podcasts I listen to, or am very interested in their view of the world.  I mostly agree with Maher on many topics, even when most don’t agree with him. Tonight in his final segment, New Rules, he sounded like an elitist asshole and the poster child for what every Trump supporter thinks a liberal is.

Shortly after Stan Lee’s death Bill thought it would be a good idea to voice his opinion on his blog speaking about how people that are still a fan of the comic genre in all forms of production need to grow up. At the time I didn’t think much of it. It was posted on his blog, not his show so the exposure was limited. It’s the same thing I’ve heard from numerous people that have never taken the time to actually try to read and appreciate a comic or graphic novel. I did think his timing was in bad taste. You had essentially the equivalent of Elvis’s or Lennon’s death in the comic world and you decided to shit all over his fan base. It came off as if you’re the kind of guy that would enjoy going to funerals, finding a child relative of the deceased, and telling him Santa doesn’t exist. I get that Stan’s death got that wheel spinning for you so you probably just started typing, as I’m doing now after watching your show, but did you have to post it? You know you could schedule it to post a week or so later right? With your diversity of guests, Hollywood friends, and our current political climate, are you really that hard strapped to think of a topic to post about? In that segment you embodied everything Trump’s base thinks of the non-millennial left. You sounded pompous, smug, arrogant, and out of touch. Having watched you since PTI, I would say they were correct and this was out of character.

What you fail to see by being so blinded by the stereotypes, and what so many tried to explain to you to only be dismissed as know nothing commoners, is that comics support what you claim to love, the arts. Comics employ more artist than your elite friends buying six figure paintings of lines and dots. Artists that spend their whole lives perfecting the craft of drawing the human form, capturing emotion and transferring that to a reader. You speak as if these stories are only of superheroes and villains when many are set in our common reality. You fail to see that many of the writers go on to write the screenplays that make your actor guests seem so important that we should care what they feel about immigration or the economy. You have no problem having a man like Max Brooks on your show and value his opinion. A man who wrote a zombie novel and handbook. At one point in history rap music was looked at as childish and a fad that the youth would grow out of. Now you have no problem holding Ice Cube’s balls for an entire segment on your show as you sit there like every rich kid’s dad trying to be “fresh” sitting next to the black kid’s dad at the high school game. A comic is an easy way for an aspiring writer or artist to independently publish their work in hopes of being picked up by a major producer. Think of it as SoundCloud for writers and artists, or do you not understand how that works either?

Despite being one of the best ways for a struggling artist or writer to get exposure, it is an escape for the reader. I am engulfed in the same media cycles and haunted by the current state of our country daily. Can you blame an audience for wanting an escape from this reality? Not all of us like to get high and smell Ann Coulter’s queefs. Some of us like to get high and go to the future, a forgotten land, or an alternate reality and use our imaginations to do so. Some comics are tied to sentimental events in our lives and reading them brings us back, and many are so visually stunning that you spend the majority of the time dissecting every panel. Is it childish to read the works of Tolkien or Lewis? To read stories of elves and magic? Or is it the fact they use pictures as an aid to tell a gripping story? What exactly makes it childish? Some could say getting in front of people and telling jokes like a class clown is childish, or smoking pot into your sixties. I would disagree with that also but let’s not act like you’re some kind of thespian. As I scroll down your list of work on IMDB I was surely going to find the works of a true intellectual, but I’m hard pressed to do so. Maybe you are not the proper person to be throwing stones.

Even after all this I will be a fan. I consider this a friendly ribbing. Sometimes when your friend acts like an asshole you have to tell him to fuck off. Tonight is that night. I watched a man I respect become the thing he often criticizes. I could give you the benefit of the doubt and think you were just doing this as click bait, but I assume you are better than that. I hope I’m not wrong. You play a big part in intellectual discussion and have a great medium to do so. Try not to use it as a soap box to be a douche just for douche sakes. You are better than that, try to act like it.