Maher Steps to the Edge--of Stage

The monologue Bill Maher delivers at the start of “Politically Incorrect,” his irreverent late-night talk show, gives the comedian a chance to weigh in on the issues of the day before he and his guests tackle the evening’s hot-button topics.

But Maher gets only 2 1/2 minutes a night for his solo spotlight--barely time enough for a handful of jokes on subjects from gun control to Bill and Hillary.

It’s sort of a plate of comedic hors d’oeuvres. But Maher prefers serving up a full-course comedy meal, which is why he still relishes any chance he gets to do stand-up comedy.

“Stand-up,” Maher says, “is a performance; a monologue is just a guy standing on a corner watching the parade pass by and making very detached, wry comments on it. It’s clever, but it’s bloodless. It’s dispassionate, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. But with stand-up, I get off [stage] and I’m sweating. It’s a performance.”

After two decades of doing stand-up, he said, “I’m very comfortable on stage, and it’s a pleasure to really perform this material, to really take it to them. So, you need a shower if you’ve done a performance.”

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Maher will be in Irvine on Saturday, working up a sweat at the Improv as he hones a new act for his next HBO special, coming next year.

Maher, however, doesn’t want to give his Irvine audience the impression he’s “just practicing” on them.

“I’ve got my act together; I’m just ‘taking it on the road,’ ” Maher, 43, said by phone from his home in Bel-Air, which he shares with Blackie and Odie, two “beasts of uncertain origin” that he rescued from the dog pound.

The HBO special will be the fifth in 10 years for the genial yet opinionated “Politically Incorrect” ringmaster.

The show, which Maher created, debuted on cable’s Comedy Central in 1993 and moved to ABC in 1997.

It’s a provocative half-hour in which an eclectic group of guests--from Harvey Fierstein and G. Gordon Liddy to former Connecticut Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and comedian Howie Mandel--offer lively, sometimes witty opinions on a variety of topics. The show has earned multiple Emmy nominations and has won four CableAce Awards, including best entertainment host and best talk show.

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Although he seldom appears in clubs since he began hosting “P.I.”--an L.A. resident since 1982, he considered the Improv in West Hollywood his “home” club--Maher hasn’t abandoned stand-up.

He still does several dozen dates a year, mostly at colleges, and “the occasional corporate gig, as we say.” He also recently completed three days at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas and has another hotel engagement coming up at the Sands in Atlantic City, N.J.

Maher said he began working on his new stand-up act the day after he taped his last HBO special in December 1996.

“It’s inevitable,” he said. “If you’re a comedian, you just can’t help but think of new jokes. But good ones don’t just come along. It’s brick by brick. Every week you get a brick. You put them together and you have a wall. But it takes a couple of years to make a wall. If you’re working hard, you can do it in a year.”

Although he’s now got a full hour of new material, Maher said, his act “will change and get edited and refined” in the coming months. “But I’ve got the basis,” he said. “That’s why I’m happy. It’s like having a new car: I’ve got something to drive now.”

Maher said he’s thinking of calling the special “Be More Cynical” because “that is certainly the theme I open with. It goes into different areas, but one of my basic things is we’re not too cynical. If you think Rosie O’Donnell and Penny Marshall shop at Kmart, you need to be more cynical.”

Maher was born in New York, the son of an NBC Radio news editor, and grew up in River Vale, N.J. He majored in English at Cornell University, where he took his first stab at making an audience laugh by doing comedy at a coffeehouse poetry reading.

Graduating in 1978, he turned professional comedian the next year. Within 3 1/2 years, he had landed his first appearance on “The Tonight Show.”

Although the 1980 presidential election steered him into doing more political material, Maher said he’s never been a “straight political comedian.”

“Even ‘P.I.’ is only about politics, I’d say, 25% of the time, and most of the time it’s about what I’d call social matters.”

And when he does discuss politics in his act, he said, it usually leads into something else.

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In his new show, he said, “I certainly vent about the Clinton scandal. Is that political? Well, it is. But it’s also about privacy and sexuality and that gets me going on a long session on sex.”

Maher said that even using the term “politically incorrect” as the title of his ABC show doesn’t mean “political.” As he sees it, “The term politically incorrect means brutally honest.”

And that’s how he views his role as a stand-up comedian.

“I have a section in the show I call ‘Things Women Never Hear’ because women, God love them--no one loves them more than I--but if someone goes on about a man’s bad traits--that men are dogs, pigs, snakes, rats--a man will just sheepishly go, ‘Uh, OK. You got me.’ He won’t object.”

But if a woman is criticized for something, Maher said, “Well, that’s politically incorrect. It takes on a political dimension because women have cast themselves as a minority. If someone says, ‘You’re anti-woman,’ I say, ‘No, I’m not anti-woman; I’m just pro-truth, and sometimes those two things collide.’ ”

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* Bill Maher will appear Saturday at the Irvine Improv, 4255 Campus Drive. 8 p.m. $25. (949) 854-5455.