Comedian Bill Maher criticized “Saturday Night Live” during his podcast Sunday for its February sketch featuring actor Tom Hanks depicting a racist MAGA supporter.
During the sketch, Hanks’ character donned a MAGA hat and expressed reluctance to shake hands with a black character played by SNL cast member Kenan Thompson. After guest Jillian Michaels brought up the sketch on “Club Random,” Maher said he despised it due to its dishonesty, arguing that the vast majority of President Donald Trump’s supporters are not racist.
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“I hated it — wearing the MAGA hat, not shaking hands with a black person. And that’s when I thought, ‘You people don’t know MAGA people.’ I mean, they have their issues, and I certainly have my issues with them … of course there’s some racists everywhere who are that bad, but generally, all the MAGA people I know have no problem shaking hands with a black person,” Maher said. “You’re just hysterical and you’re not helping … mostly what I hate is it’s what I call a zombie lie. Don’t lie to me. It’s a lie, that MAGA people won’t shake hands with — I get it, it’s part of a skit, and it’s an exaggeration, and that’s comedy. It’s a little too delicate a subject to just make — to go there for that one.”
“Look, we all in comedy step over the line sometimes or do one that they want to take back. I doubt if they want to take that one back. I think they probably think it’s great. But I’m telling you, as a liberal, I don’t like it. Again, because lying offends me. I’m a comedian. When the premise isn’t real … the joke is not going to work,” he continued. “The premise has to ring true. That premise doesn’t ring true. It might have rang true, I don’t know, X years ago. It doesn’t now. So, you know, but that’s where we are. That everybody has to just play the hate card, because that’s what gets clicks. That’s what gets you loved by your sides.”
Michaels had appeared to compare the SNL sketch to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Sept. 9, 2016, remark that 50% of Trump supporters belonged in what she referred to as “the basket of deplorables.
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“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said at the time. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
“He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric,” she added. “Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”
Despite expressing remorse the following day, Clinton seems not to have learned from that comment as she smeared nearly all Republican women as “handmaiden[s] to the patriarchy” during a discussion recorded May 1 at The 92nd Street Y, New York.
Trump made significant gains among Hispanic and black men during the 2024 election, when he faced off against former Vice President Kamala Harris.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
