Bill Maher on not pulling punches

If you catch yourself laughing at something Bill Maher has said lately on HBO's "Real Time," his Friday night perch for the past 21 years, just be careful: next time, the joke could be on you. No one is spared Maher's humor, or as he sees it, truth-telling – not the right ("If you're gonna turn over your party to a foreign power, at least pick the right one. Russia? Are you kidding? It's like the Republicans looked over all the companies they could merge with and picked Sears!"), nor the left ("You call yourself the resistance? Then fight behind enemy lines. That's what a 'resistance' does. That's the difference between blowing up a tank and tweeting about it. Get out of your echo chamber and infiltrate theirs!").

Asked if you can make an audience laugh and think at the same time, Maher replied, "Totally, of course. The great thing about laughter is that it's involuntary, so if you laugh at something, something in you tells you that's true. It must be true; I laughed at it! Maybe I wasn't supposed to."

He said the throughline for everything he writes and says is, "Keep it real. Don't be tribal. Don't say something just because that's going to make the audience of one side applaud, or boo. Practical solutions as opposed to ideological. And don't pull a punch."