Wayne Brady has reignited a long-running feud with Bill Maher.
In conversation with Sarah Jones on the newest episode of her podcast America, Who Hurt You?, Maher’s name came up and Brady took the opportunity to share his opinion on the Real Time host, with whom he has engaged in a war of words dating back more than a decade.
“He’s racist and I don’t care Bill Maher can say that I have all these Black friends, dah, dah, dah,” Brady told Jones after he mentioned how Dave Chappelle called out Maher on his comedy special late last year. “It took Dave Chapelle recently saying something. Then I told people the day that I said to Bill Maher after he was using that joke of saying, well, ‘I wish that President Obama was less Wayne Brady and more,’ I forget which gangster rapper or whatnot. Even that, how dare you as a white man try to define this thing?”
Brady was referring to a 2010 interview Maher gave when he compared Brady to then-president Barack Obama. “I thought when we elected the first Black president, as a comedian, I thought that two years in that I’d be making jokes what a ‘gangsta’ he was. You know. And not that he’s President Wayne Brady, you know. I thought we were getting Suge Knight,” Maher said at the time.
The sentiment kicked off a back-and-forth, and found Brady challenging Maher to see if he wanted to “know how Black Wayne Brady is,” how he would “gladly slap the shit out of Bill Maher in front of Coco and Ebony and Fox, the three ladies of the night he has hired.”
Back on Jones podcast, Brady said that he grew up watching Maher and thought he was funny. He later encountered him on the Hollywood rounds. “There was a party way back in the day that I went to at the Playboy Mansion I was invited to, and there was Bill Maher with two sisters on his arm. And, I looked at him and I don’t even know. I’m never gonna be one to yuck your yum but yuck,” he said. “And I saw that for what it was, and was like, hmm. This is a cat who believes that his proximity and things you can use gives you the right to say what you want to say about another, people whose shoes you never walk in. So I’ll say it out loud that I don’t hate Bill Maher. I don’t know him as a person like that, but what I do know is I know his words. So based on your words, I don’t like you as a human because you’re harmful to other people with the views that you espouse and the things that [you] said and the platform that he has.”
Brady continued: “He’s not funny anymore to me. It’s vitriolic because it just encourages the asinine behaviors and reactions in those whose default setting is to be reductive of people.”
Jones, a Tony Award-winner for the Meryl Streep produced Bridge & Tunnel and known for her recent Sell/Buy/Date, is currently rolling out the second season of America, Who Hurt You? which features interviews with Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, Monica Lewinsky, Yvette Nicole Brown, Bryan Stevenson, Baratunde Thurston, David Alan Grier, Stacy London, Busy Philipps, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, LaTosha Brown, Liz Plank, Aida Rodriguez and more. The podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube.
She has been commissioned to present a live event at Oxford University’s Schwarzman Centre to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The May 22-23 event — presented with the National Black Theater in association with Foment Productions — will be directed by Eric Ting and produced in association with Jayson Jackson.
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