ABC had barely finished canceling Roseanne this week when conservatives on Twitter started equating Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett to Bill Maher’s infamous joke in which called Donald Trump the spawn of an orangutan.
“I'm so old I remember when Bill Maher claimed President Trump's ‘mother had sex with an orangutan’ and kept his job,” Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec tweeted Tuesday afternoon. It only snowballed from there, and soon Maher’s name was trending right along with Barr’s.
On Friday night, the Real Time host finally got his chance to fire back at the “snowflakes on the right” who deliberately can’t tell the difference between satire and racism.
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“It was a tough week for the line,” Maher said at top of his monologue. “You know the line? The one that comedians sometimes cross.”
“Half the country wants Roseanne to go away forever, half the country wants Samantha Bee to go away forever,” the host added. “So much for wanting more female voices in television.”
Maher insisted that Barr will “always” be his “friend,” but said, “her world came crashing down this week with a series of tweets she put out on Tuesday that were so full of racism, conspiracy theories and personal attacks they were described as abhorrent bordering on presidential.”
“Now, my friend Roseanne had admitted that she had been admitted to a mental institution,” the host added. “She has said she has multiple personalities and unfortunately one of them is quite a racist. But it is also not a mystery to me that a person with a mental illness could be taken in by a party that has lost its mind.”
Later, after calling Trump a “whiny little bitch” for making the Roseanne controversy about himself, Maher responded to those who were trying to make it about him.
“He was complaining that ABC never apologizes to him,” Maher said of Trump. “Yeah, because no one at ABC ever compared you to an ape. You’re thinking of me.” He noted the “snowflakes on the right” trying to “drag” him into this mess, saying he should be fired for comparing Trump to an orangutan.
Then, in his latest installment of “Explaining Jokes to Idiots,” Maher said, “Here’s why that’s a dumb analogy.”
“One, Trump is an orangutan,” he said. “Two, white people have not been subjected to a racist trope comparing them to apes for hundreds of years.” Third, he explained that offering Trump $5 million to produce his birth certificate in 2013 to “prove that he was not half an ape” was itself a response to Trump’s “racist bullshit” birtherism campaign against President Obama.
“And four, I’ve already been fired by ABC,” Maher concluded.
Finally, in response to Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt,” Maher joked that Trump was “furious,” saying, “I’m the only one who gets to talk dirty about my daughter.”
“Yes, the man who put ‘grab them by the pussy’ into grade school history books is very upset about the coarsening of the culture,” he added.
