What’s Bill Maher’s latest peeve? “Clueless, useless” dads in pop culture — and on broadcast TV in particular — who, in the comedian’s mind, are part of a problem that sends teen boys into the misogynistic online groups known as the manosphere.
“Let’s make the Father’s Day we just celebrated the last one that takes place in a culture where dads have become such punching bags — literally the last demographic group that TV, ads, and movies can still depict as clueless, useless dips***s, basically, just another child that mom has to look after,” Maher said on his show Real Time on Friday, June 20. “Every sitcom is, ‘Tonight on ABC, Larry burns down the house,’ and the tagline in the commercial for every household product is basically, ‘Because your husband is a moron.’”
He went on: “You know, I’m not sure when this trend started, but I’m going to blame the 1987 movie Three Men and a Baby, the premise of which is that three grown men can’t manage to keep a baby alive. The same year gave us Married… With Children with its idiot shoe salesman of a father, followed by an endless parade of eye-roll, short-bus dads.”
(Note: The term “short-bus” is ableist language, as noted by Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn, public policy director at the National Disability Institute.)
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Maher listed the TV dads from The Simpsons, Family Guy, Modern Family, Malcolm in the Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, and According to Jim as examples of these depictions.
Meanwhile, TV moms are “always the smart one, the good one,” whose orbit a TV dad is “just lucky to be in,” Maher said. “And I get it that this is a correction to centuries of women being deemed the weaker sex, but how long does the correction last? And when will men stop making me throw up in my mouth with the way they pander so nakedly?”
Maher claimed Queen Mary, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were political leaders who weren’t “any less violent or hard-a** than men.” And he said the “cringy pandering” to women as superiors is the reason teenage boys “flock to jerks like Andrew Tate,” the social media personality and self-proclaimed misogynist currently facing rape and human trafficking charges.
“Yes he’s a huge a**hole, and your kid thinks he’s cool because that’s the choice of role models that an American teenage boy has: either performative p***yhood, or the manosphere,” Maher said. “Jesus, can’t the pendulum ever land in the middle in this country? Can’t we have something in between a complete cuck, who dares not open his mouth for fear of mansplaining, and owning a tiger? The Democrats are always asking, ‘How do we win back men?’ Just be real, not a monster and not a doormat. Is that so hard? … I’m just saying, men, we’re not completely useless. So if you want to if you want to know what to get dad next Father’s Day, how about a little respect?”
Real Time With Bill Maher, Fridays, 10/9c, HBO