Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant (But Bill Maher Is Still Full of Shit)

The comedian embodies the Dunning-Kruger effect: Knowing enough to speak eloquently to certain issues, but not knowing enough to know that you are a complete dumbass.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I woke up this past Sunday with absolutely nothing to do. No papers to grade. No articles due. No lectures to prep. It was the kind of morning that almost doesn’t exist in my life anymore — quiet, unscheduled, mine. I settled in and did what any reasonable person does with unexpected free time: I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole. And somewhere between clips I actually wanted to watch, the algorithm served me Bill Maher interviewing my governor, Gavin Newsom, on Real Time. What came out of Maher’s mouth was so spectacularly wrong, so confidently stupid, so perfectly emblematic of everything that is the matter with this man, that I stopped what I was doing and said out loud, to no one in particular: I have to roast this clown.

For the record, I don’t typically write about Bill Maher. That’s a personal policy I maintain strictly for the preservation of my sanity and my blood pressure. Writing about Maher is like trying to debate a Magic 8-Ball — the answers are always confident, frequently wrong, and the ball has absolutely no idea it’s a ball. But what I watched that morning — Maher casually, smugly, incorrectly comparing Gavin Newsom’s political tactics to Donald Trump’s — was so egregiously wrong that I couldn’t let it marinate. So here we are. Bill, I hope you’re reading this. You won’t understand most of it, but I hope you’re reading it.

Let’s start with who Bill Maher actually is, because his whole brand depends on you not looking too closely. Maher holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and history from Cornell University — a degree he has publicly disowned, saying if he had known what Cornell was like, he never would have gone. He then turned around and spent the next decade telling other people not to go to college either. The man pulled the ladder up and called it wisdom. He is also, and I want you to hold this detail, an English major who routinely misreads statistics. Not a math major. Not a science major. English. He lives in Los Angeles, tapes his show in Los Angeles, and his guest list reads like a Beverly Hills dinner party that accidentally invited a few politicians. I am not saying the show is set in LA on purpose so Maher can be the smartest guy in every room. I am absolutely saying that.

Around Hollywood types, Maher sounds like a political scientist. Around actual political scientists, he sounds like a man who read the Wikipedia summary and showed up to the oral exam in sunglasses. He has constructed a professional universe in which nobody on set can check him — and the one time someone did, we’ll get to that in a minute, it broke something in him permanently.

What Maher is suffering from has a clinical name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Now I could give you the textbook definition, but I have a better one. Knowing enough to speak eloquently to certain issues — not knowing enough to know that you are a complete dumbass. That is Bill Maher. He knows just enough political science to sound credible at a dinner party where the other guests are wondering if their Netflix pilot got picked up. Just enough philosophy to drop a name or two before pivoting to a hot take. Just enough history to construct a half-baked analogy and present it as original thought. The Dunning-Kruger effect is self-concealing by nature — the same deficit that limits your understanding also limits your ability to recognize the limitation. Maher can’t see the shallow end because he’s already standing in it, telling everyone else the pool is deep.

I want to take you back to 1999. I was 18 years old — a fan of crude humor, politically engaged, old enough to appreciate sharp comedy and young enough to still laugh at stupid comedy. I came across Bill Maher’s HBO special Be More Cynical. Around the 36-minute mark, Maher goes after the cultural tendency to call Sophia Loren the sexiest woman alive. His argument, delivered with total confidence: she’s a grandmother of six, and unless you’re planning to, quote, “fuck her with a time machine,” the word sexy doesn’t apply to a 68-year-old. I was 18. I had no particular affinity for Sophia Loren. I liked crude humor. And even I sat there thinking: my man, you do realize you’re going to be that age one day, right? That a teenager watching in 1999 could see what Maher apparently couldn’t — that age comes for everybody, including the guy onstage mocking it — tells you everything about the limits of his so-called cynicism. Real cynicism would have included himself in the joke.

Sophia Loren is 91 years old as of this writing. She is, by any reasonable measure, still stunning. Bill Maher is 70, which means his 1999 punchline didn’t just age badly — it aged embarrassingly, tripped on the way down, and is still lying on the floor. And instead of reckoning with any of that, instead of gaining a single molecule of humility from the experience of actually getting old, Maher just pivoted. Same contempt, new target. Now it’s young people who are too soft. Now it’s Gen Z who ruins everything. He didn’t grow. He just got older and kept the attitude — which, ironically, is exactly what he mocked Sophia Loren for.

Now let’s talk about COVID, because this is where Maher’s Dunning-Kruger found its groove and really started doing stadium tours. Throughout the pandemic, Maher repeatedly claimed — on his show, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in print interviews — that “78% of the people who died or were hospitalized were obese.” He said it like it was scripture. He said it while accusing the media of failing the public on COVID accuracy. He said it with the confidence of a man who has never been corrected in his own house. There is just one problem: it was wrong. Wrong every single time.