Bill Maher: Politically Incorrect--and Proud of It : Cable TV: ‘The world doesn’t need another normal talk show,’ comedian Bill Maher believes. His first hourlong HBO special airs tonight.

Bill Maher sits back in his chair at his favorite--and very crowded--Los Angeles eatery, and it’s clear that nobody recognizes him. Beam him 3,000 miles east to an eatery inside the Beltway, and he’d probably get long, dark stares.

Listening to him, you get the sense that he not only likes it this way, but he’d just as soon it never change.

Unlike many of his fellow stand-up comedians who grew up with in the ‘80s, from Jerry Seinfeld to Roseanne to Brett Butler, Maher does not have his own network show. Then again, Maher’s comic brother and sisters aren’t doing command performances for audiences including the President, the Speaker of the House and various Washington royalty, and turning the royalty into the butt of his jokes.

With his ever-potent nightly chat show, “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher,” in its third season as the flagship of the Comedy Central channel, and his first hourlong HBO comedy special, “Stuff That Struck Me Funny,” airing tonight, Maher is one of TV’s few comic minds who is having it his way.

“When you have what I have,” he says, “you’re God of your universe. And I’m not unaware that it will probably not happen again.”

Maher’s universe also includes hosting this year’s CableACE awards show (“Politically Incorrect” got two nominations this week), and “my one and only novel,” “True Story: A Comedy Novel,” which fictionalizes his early years in stand-up comedy.

Three years ago, Maher was, by his own admission, nowhere. He lost count of how many sitcoms and other TV projects had come and gone (including a collaboration at Fox with Garry Shandling that “basically ate up a year of my life”). He was at the point in his mid-30s where comics either move forward or fade away: “You reach an age where you are Seinfeld or you’re writing for Seinfeld or you’re watching ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

The career doldrums were symbolized for him by one night at the Improvisation comedy club, when Maher was about to come on stage following comic Rick Ducomen. “Rick came over to me,” Maher recalls, “looked out at the audience, and said to me, ‘Is this it, Bill? Is this as far as things go for us?’ That really hit me between the eyes.”

But after Maher was invited by Comedy Central to develop a half-hour show (premiering in July, 1993), it soon became clear that he had not only found a way out of the stand-up rut, but that the whole TV world had let him find it.

“I mean, c’mon, these other talk shows aren’t talk shows ,” he says. “They’re publicity shows where people plug things, with a little bit of comedy. [Johnny] Carson did a talk show. Neither Leno nor Letterman are great talkers, and the actual amount of talk is down to the barest minimum. They don’t want to go near anything controversial.

“So this whole big field was opened up to me, where we could really do a conversation show. It’s not cotton candy, it’s not ‘Nite Lite’ stuff. I can be--and want to be--controversial. I have to be the alternative. I’m on cable. If I’m not the alternative, I’m nothing. The world doesn’t need another normal talk show.”

Carson may have been Maher’s boyhood idol--and little bits of Carson’s physical style visibly seep through in Maher’s presentation as both host and stand-up--but the real model for “Politically Incorrect” is the cocktail party.

“The idea,” Maher explains, “is that you get a bunch of interesting people together who probably don’t know each other, they may not have much in common, but once you throw out a topic, they grab it and run with it.”

Maher is constantly hounded by producers at competing cable and non-cable networks to pick his brain, even to visit his production meetings--”but I absolutely refuse them. I’m not going to show them my special sauce.”

Still, he reveals that the key ingredient is casting. Maher’s guest quartets are constant reminders of the built-in absurdities of American pop culture, so a taping session in Los Angeles this summer included Shandling, Kato Kaelin, LeVar Burton and law professor Susan Estrich. There are “P.I.” regulars, such as author Joe Queenan (who has already appeared twice in the new season), comic Janeane Garofalo and feminist gadfly Camille Paglia.

“The combination of guests with issues is so hard to control, even though we keep these two running lists of people and topics,” Maher says, with quiet frustration. “I try to mix a serious figure, like Ralph Nader, with a comedian, and other people with points of view. I hope they don’t get chummy in the green room before airing, because I want some friction between them. If I have to do the talking, that gets me pissed off. It’s their show as much as mine.”

And while the show can push hot buttons and hotter tempers--Sandra Bernhard spitting in guest John Lofton’s face is one spectacular moment in “P.I” history--Maher works to make sure that “things don’t get turned into a circus. The Bernhard thing got great ratings, it was like ‘Geraldo,’ and I could see why that’s the kind of show networks want. But it bothers me that people are so easily seduced by the most inflammatory things.”

But what does it mean anymore to be “politically incorrect”? It doesn’t mean being conservative, Maher insists. “It’s summed up in my pieces of wisdom that I call ‘Rude but True.’ Smoking causes cancer? Well, you know what? America causes cancer. Rude but true.”

Even Maher admits that he recently started slipping into a kind of political correctness when he announced at the end of last season that he would no longer greet female guests with a “Hi, baby” or “Hey, beautiful.”

“Over the summer,” he says, “I had a change of heart. I got a ton of letters from women telling me not to change, and they were right. That’s me. ‘Politically Incorrect’ is about being truthful, and I have to be true to myself.”

* “Stuff That Struck Me Funny” airs at 10 tonight on HBO. “Politically Incorrect” airs weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central.