LOS ANGELES — During the latest episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher was forced to use an accrued day of vacation while waiting for the audience to laugh at or applaud his joke.
“Doubt that’s gonna go well,” he said to camera, with his quintessential smirk. The audience seemed to not recognize a joke had been told, and Maher began to look around like he’d been personally slighted. “Guess we have some of the woke crowd here tonight,” he said to a portion of the audience, to further silence.
As the silence stretched, it became clear Maher would not move on.
“The rules are clear. He stopped working,” said HR consultant Bradley Norfolk. “We often start a timer when he delivers a joke, as he’s well-known for taking these bizarrely long pauses. Whenever he’s asked about them, he turns to whomever he’s with and says ‘get a load of Stopwatch over here,’ and does his smirk. Which we, uh, we love, of course. Here at Real Time and around the world, we all love how Bill Maher smirks.”
Norfolk shuddered visibly.
“Anyway, he’s used up only two days this year. The other one was when he took a drug test,” Norfolk continued. “He hadn’t smoked weed in the past week, and it’s in his contract that he has to do that, or else he can’t work. He’s not addicted or anything, he just has to do it contractually.”
At press time, Maher was seen making skeptical faces in response to CDC guidelines on washing hands.
