When Bill Maher performed his last standup show in December 2024, he knew it would be a while before he returned to the stage. The comedian had grown weary of the travel that came with touring and was struggling with the dissonance that came with watching the new generation of comedy fill arenas, he said on the latest episode of his podcast Club Random.
He was admittedly “tired of being twice as funny as people who were selling twice as many tickets as me,” but there was another layer to his quiet retirement from standup that didn’t reveal itself until after he’d decided to stop. “I feel like it was a great choice because I don’t want to be out there in this country in this political atmosphere,” Maher said. “I could get I could get shot by the left or the right. I mean, it’s just a good time to not be out there.”
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Maher discussed the current divide in politics in September, following the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot at the first stop of his campus debate tour. “It’s a very ugly week in America with violence of all kinds: political violence, regular violence, a lot of people talking about a civil war,” he said at the time. “The only way this starts to get better is if both sides admit, ‘OK, let’s not have this debate about who started it. Let’s not debate about who’s worse because, plainly, both sides do it now.’ And the right has done it too. A lot.”
Maher told Club Random guest Patton Oswald that while he hasn’t struggled to sell out theaters on his tours, he isn’t at an arena level and finds he has a wider — and apparently safer — reach from his series, Real Time. “I’m on TV every week. 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,” he said. “But, you know, when your audience is 35 to 45, they don’t want to see somebody 70. I want to see my generation, right? Someone new, and it’s okay. I still have my show.”
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