Five-time Emmy winner Wayne Brady is reigniting his feud with perennial Emmy runner-up Bill Maher.
“He is racist, and I don’t care,” Brady, 53, said on the America, Who Hurt You? podcast on Thursday.
“I told people,” Brady declared, hitting his legs to emphasize each word, after host Sarah Jones invoked Maher’s name in a conversation about “racist” expectations for Black creatives.
“Bill Maher can say that I have all these Black friends, dah, dah, dah,” Brady told Jones after mentioning that Dave Chappelle called out the talk show host in his latest comedy special.
“It took Dave Chapelle recently saying something. Then I told people the day that I said to Bill Maher after he was using that joke of saying, well, ‘I wish that President Obama was less Wayne Brady and more,’ I forget which gangster rapper or whatnot,” he said. “Even that, how dare you, as a white man, try to define this thing?”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Maher for comment.
In the 2010 CNN interview that started it all, Maher incensed Brady by comparing former President Barack Obama to the Let’s Make a Deal host as a measure of Blackness.
“I thought when we elected the first Black president, as a comedian, I thought that two years in that I’d be making jokes what a ‘gangsta’ he was,” Maher said at the time. “And not that he’s President Wayne Brady, you know. I thought we were getting Suge Knight.”
If Maher wanted to “know how black Wayne Brady is,” the comedian said a couple of years later, he would “gladly slap the s--t out of Bill Maher in front of Coco and Ebony and Fox, the three ladies of the night he has hired.”
Brady once again accused Maher of an alleged proclivity for Black prostitutes in his new interview, having been in Hollywood circles with him.
“There was a party way back in the day that I went to at the Playboy Mansion I was invited to, and there was Bill Maher with two sisters on his arm,” he said. “I’m never gonna be one to yuck your yum, but yuck.”
“Hmm. This is a cat who believes that his proximity and things you can use gives you the right to say what you want to say about another, people whose shoes you never walk in,” he recalled thinking.
The comedian then clarified his comments.
“So I’ll say it out loud that I don’t hate Bill Maher. I don’t know him as a person like that, but what I do know is, I know his words,” he said. “So based on your words, I don’t like you as a human because you’re harmful to other people with the views that you espouse and the things that he said and the platform that he has.”
“He’s not funny anymore to me. It’s vitriolic because it just encourages the asinine behaviors and reactions in those whose default setting is to be reductive of people,” he concluded.
