Entering to considerable applause, Maher said, “Thank you for letting a sinner in your midst.
Michael Eric Dyson will be here shortly to take me to the woodshed.”
I did a bad thing."
Credit: Janet Van Ham/HBO
I’m not here to do that."
And that’s why I apologize freely, and Ireiterate ittonight.
I’m not that big of an ahole."
“People don’t think, ‘Oh, Bill Maher is a racist,'” he said.
Maher acknowledged the point but defended himself as a comedian.
“Comedians are a special kind of monkey.”
“So to speak,” Dyson said.
Gathering himself, he continued, “We are a trained thing that tries to get a laugh.
That’s what we do.
… And sometimes we transgress a sensitivity point.”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Maher said.
“Kathy Griffin should not go away.”
Later in the episode, Maher was challenged by another one of his guests, the rapper Ice Cube.
“I love your show, you’ve got a great show,” he said.
“But you be bucking up against that line a little bit.
You know, you’ve got a lot of black jokes.”
The N-word, Cube said, is “a word that has been used against us.
It’s like a knife, man.
It’s been used as a weapon against us by white people.
And we’re not going to let that happen again, by nobody, because it’s not cool.
Now I know you heard, it’s in the lexicon, everybody’s talking.
But that’s our word now, and you could’t have it back.”
