Comedian Bill Maher brings his disarmingly direct humor to the topic of religion in Religulous. The results are often as surprising as they are funny. Maher is the most straightforward of our top comics, even among those like Jon Stewart who regularly offer running commentary.
Stewart, in his own smart, humane and up-to-the-minute way, is today what P.J. Corkery said Johnny Carson was for earlier generations: "The Village Explainer" (borrowed from Gertrude Stein), meeting with his audience nightly to provide some realistic ballast in an increasingly unsteady world. (Stewart really is fair and balanced, even when he's angry.)
Maher is the village needler and even its provocateur. He comes at you full-throttle: He's fair and unbalanced. On HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, one of the few shticks he uses that doesn't work is the childish apology, "I kid the president," after turning Bush on a spit. His exasperation isn't a put-on. Neither are the personal tenets he puts right out on the table: hedonism, healthy eating and hemp.
In Religulous, Maher establishes a full, frank air of disclosure that's quite daring for a comic who has to wonder if we'll still find him a crack-up when we really know him. (We do.) He remembers growing up with a Jewish mother and a Catholic father with the on-camera help of his feisty, intelligent mother (who died last year) and his supportive sister. His father brought the kids to church every Sunday until Maher was 13; his mother tells him her husband halted then because they practiced birth control, an anathema.
These family scenes allow Maher to be something I never expected him to be: moving. They're also full of lived-in details that will set off sparks of recognition in many an audience member, like the cap pistols little Billy never took off, even at bedtime.
Maher carries that spirit into the rest of his interviews. During interactions with Christians, Muslims, Jews and ex-Mormons (no practicing Mormons would talk with him), Maher displays the nimbleness, the preparation and, yes, the humanity that's often lacking in conventional reporters.
For all Maher's seriousness of purpose here, he isn't afraid to get silly, such as when he pulls classic pothead jokes on a fellow who runs a church based on cannabis.
