Bill Maher Thinks We Should Let Louis C.K. Return to Comedy. He Never Left!
Oh look, Bill Maher with a horribly problematic opinion. Who could have seen this coming?
Oh look, it’s Bill Maher with a horribly problematic opinion. Who could have seen this coming?
Maher, who is less of a comedian and more of a nuisance now, was talking with Bill Burr when the topic of Louis C.K. came up and … well, you can see where this is going.
While Burr did have some great moments taking on Maher, he lost me when they started talking about “cancel culture.” On Maher’s Club Random podcast, when Burr declared that cancel culture was over, Maher started talking about Louis C.K. and how he doesn’t understand why he still is on the “outs” with Hollywood.
Let me explain: C.K. was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, and admitted to masturbating in front of female comedians without their consent. He went on to continue performing stand-up just a few months after this situation. Sure, he’s not starring in an FX series anymore, but he still is headlining comedy tours.
As Burr and Maher talked, they acted like C.K. paid his dues (because he lost millions of dollars as a consequence of his own actions). “I mean, don’t get me started on that,” Maher said to Burr when they started talking about C.K. “Isn’t it time everyone just went: ‘OK, It wasn’t a cool thing to do, but it’s been long enough and welcome back.’ Enough! I mean for Christ’s sake, it’s not the end of the world. People have done so much worse things and gotten less. There’s no rhyme or reason to the #MeToo-type punishments.”
“They took $50 million, I think they punished him,” Burr said, referring to C.K.’s own comments on the money he lost after the fallout. Burr went on to say more about his views on Cancel Culture:
It started off with something everyone could agree on, and then quickly it just spun out of control. I remember whenever that cancel culture got to the point of where it was, ‘I don’t like some of the topics in your stand up act,’ right? That’s when it got weird. Cancel culture … it’s over. No one cares anymore.
This is far from the first time Maher has yelled about “Cancel Culture.” In a past podcast episode with Katie Couric, Maher said that actors who regret working with Woody Allen are “a bunch of p—ies” because of the allegations against Allen.
Louis C.K. was a known creep. And he’s still doing stand-up
I’ve talked about it in the past, but being an intern in a comedy venue meant that I knew a lot of things. One of those things was to never go into a room alone with Louis C.K. That knowledge was put onto a fresh-out-of-college 24-year-old and not the (at the time) nearly 50-year-old man preying on women.
C.K. got away with it for years, and then 2017 came. The allegations against C.K. went public and he learned nothing. He went back to doing stand-up, making fun of the situation, and winning a Grammy for his comedy album while selling out Madison Square Garden. Nothing happened to him.
Did he lose out on opportunities because he was a creep who was found out? Yes! And that’s what should happen, but acting like we should all get over it while these men continue to have platforms and perform on big stages and have power over others? That’s actually unhinged. People like Maher really just want the bad men of the world to get a slap on the wrist and be told, “Okay, don’t do it again, wink wink.”
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