Bill Maher thinks it’s not safe for him to do stand-up comedy anymore.
Maher told comedian Patton Oswalt on his Club Random podcast Monday that it was “a great choice” to stop touring because, “I don’t want to be out there in this country, in this political atmosphere. I could get shot by the left or the right.” Maher has been consistently called out for his contrarian takes over the years. “It’s a good time to not be out there,” he added, though he admitted there are more, less shocking reasons: “I just got tired of being twice as funny as people who were selling twice as many tickets as me.”
The low ticket sales are not because he’s not as funny as he thinks he is, Maher argued. It’s “because I’m on TV every week. So, and not that I didn’t sell a lot of tickets and do great theaters—but I didn’t sell arenas. And some people did, who, frankly, are not that great. But, you know, when the audience is 35 to 45, they don’t wanna see somebody 70,” the 69-year-old explained. The former stand-up comedian and Real Time host told Oswalt that he stopped touring at the end of 2024.
Maher said he feels his stand-up specials speak for themselves at this point in his career. “I just did my 13th HBO special. I feel like that’s a good body of work… I felt they all, they basically got better as it went along. I feel like the last one was the best one, which is a good way to get off,” he said, adding that he was also “tired of the travel.” Maher has been the subject of rebuke from his peers for his praise of Donald Trump, though he said he hadn’t voted for the president. He waited until this September to reveal that he had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
In the months prior to that admission, Maher was skewered by other comedians, perhaps most effectively by Larry David, who compared Maher’s glowing review of his White House visit to his having had dinner with Adolf Hitler. Though Maher remains critical of Trump and MAGA, much of his most incendiary comments have been saved for what he calls the “woke train.”
“There’s a lot of people in this country who just go, ‘Yeah, I don’t love Trump. He’s crazy, but these people are even crazier,’” Maher said on his podcast in September. He concluded then, “I always say to my woke friends, we voted for the same person. You’re just why she lost.”
As for the end of his stand-up touring act, Maher said Monday, “I still have my show. I have” the podcast. “I didn’t need it,” he added, but “I miss it.”
