Maher doesn't even need to open his mouth for you to know what a smug bitch he is. But for the life of me I can't figure out what he is feeling smug about.
I thought his smugness worked... for a while. He's been right on a great many things across his career, and was able to frame his scathing critiques in fairly unique, clever ways. (and/or his writers were) Indeed, at one time I admired his ability to look at things from pretty daring angles, even if he was sometimes way off.
Problem is, he's not the same anymore. Sort of like Joe Rogan, who at least started out with honest, interesting, amusing takes in a sort of 'college student+' kind of way. But something seems to have happened to these guys across the years. Not just the wealth, but the growing insulation from reality and.. the normalisation of right-wing extremism. Something like that, anyway.
Still, I can't just forget that Maher was killing it for plenty of years, there, even if he did rub people the wrong way.
You hit it on the nose. He had, and to some extent still has, a whiplash in his dialogue but man has he really gone off the deep end in the last couple of years. When he started sounding like some soap box winey resident from the villages blaming millennials for random shit that’s when I started to tune him out. His interview with Musk was boarder line creepy. Kind of like the age of the women he dates.