Oh, to love anything as much as Bill Maher loves saying controversial things. At least when he faced backlash over his comments on the writers strike, it was relevant to current events. These latest remarks about Howard Stern’s marriage are completely unprovoked and quite befitting his podcast name, Club Random. But if the goal was to get Stern’s attention, well, it worked.
According to People, Maher recently opined on his pod that Stern should be less vocal about his love for his wife. “How does this gushing about the second wife—how does that make the first wife feel?” Maher wondered. “Could we just not gush about the person while the other person can still hear it?”
Bizarre thing for Maher to care about, and if you ask Stern, Maher “ought to shut his mouth.” During his radio broadcast on Tuesday, Stern responded “What a sexist thing to say! Like, what a convoluted, nutty thing to say. It’s assuming that he knows something about my first marriage. That, of course, the man must be leaving the woman and the woman must be devastated and be sitting around pining away for her famous man.”
If Howard Stern, of all people, is calling you out for sexism, you know you’re in trouble. This is a guy who was not that long ago quite infamous for the degrading things he’d say about celebrity women. A 2016 New York Times profile of the shock jock recalled a conversation between Stern and Donald Trump in which they rated the looks of the Desperate Housewives cast. “Would you go out with Marcia Cross, or would you turn gay, Howard?” Trump asked in the 2005 conversation. “She’s got a good body. Just put a bag over her head,” Stern replied.
But that was an old version of Howard Stern; the Howard Stern of 2023 is woke and proud. “I’ll tell you how I feel about it. To me the opposite of woke, is being asleep,” he said on his show this week (via Variety). And if woke means I can’t get behind Trump, which is what I think it means, or that I support people who want to be transgender or I’m for the vaccine, dude, call me woke as you fucking want.”
Stern went on to praise access to updated COVID vaccines, adding, “This fucking country is so great… I am woke, motherfucker, and I love it. I want to be awake. I want to read legitimate news sources. Here’s how woke I am. I believe the election was not rigged. I am woke. I think that’s a compliment.”
As for Maher, Stern said, “I haven’t spoken to Bill Maher in so long…. I had years when I didn’t talk to him when we were not friends. I did [Real Time] as a favor to him because we were repairing a relationship.” Consider it now unrepaired, as Stern specifically said he thinks they’re “no longer friends” (per Entertainment Weekly). In fact, “I wrote in an email, I said, ‘Why don’t you give me a phone call? Why don’t you tell me what you think about my life and my marriage?’ But of course he never wrote me back. I just wanted to see how brave he was. If he was brave enough to call me and actually get on the phone with me, and zero response.”
And one last writers strike potshot for the road: “This is what happens when Bill doesn’t have writers,” Stern quipped. “He just goes on a ramble about somebody’s life that he doesn’t know. But who cares in the end?”
