Last week, late-night host Bill Maher’s attempt at a boundary-pushing joke resulted in immediate and passionate backlash, with many audiences calling for him to lose his job. The host addressed the controversy on his show last night, bringing in a variety of guests in hopes of shedding light on the power of language.
Maher invited Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University sociology professor, to remind both Maher and his audience the error of his ways.
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“I wanted you to come by here because, you know, I want you to school me,” Maher said to introduce his guest. “I did a bad thing.”
Interestingly, Maher has said on his previous talk show Politically Incorrect, that “there is a lot of bulls**t apologizing in America” and added, “We shouldn’t apologize for slavery and Japanese internment [camps] and Abu Ghraib and Indian genocide and [the] Tuskegee [syphilis experiment].”
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Despite taking a stance against apologizing in this manner, Maher went on to say, “So when it’s appropriate, this was appropriate, because I’ll tell you why. Because for black folks, that word, I don’t care who you are, has caused pain,” and added “I’m not here to do that.”
The incident occurred when Maher was interviewing Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska who has inadvertently been linked to the controversy.
“Now, the guy who was here, it’s not his fault—I feel bad about him, the senator, it’s all on me,” Maher pointed out. “But he said a weird thing, a comic mind goes to a weird place sometimes. But it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t said in malice. It brought back pain to people and that’s why I apologized freely and I reiterated tonight that that’s sincere.”
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“I’m not here to make excuses,” Maher continued. “But first of all, the word is omnipresent in the culture, so the fact that it was in my mind is, you know…I just don’t want to pretend this is more of a race thing than a comedian thing. Comedians are a special kind of monkey, so to speak. We are a trained thing that tries to get a laugh, that’s what we do, that’s all we are always thinking…and sometimes we transgress a sensitivity point.”
Later in the show, rapper Ice Cube attempted to clarify the issue more directly.
After accepting Maher’s apology, Ice Cube explained, “It’s not cool because when I hear my homie say it, it don’t feel like venom. When I hear a white person say it, it feel like that knife stabbing you, even if they don’t mean to.”
