The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Editorial Notebook: Watching Bill Maher’s New Rule segment–“Quiet on Set”–from mid-April, the one about the abuse of child actors morphing into the supposed hypocrisy of criticizing Ron DeSantis for Ron DeSantis’s criticism of Disney supposedly sexualizing children and as long as we’re at it, what about drag queen story hour, I got the impression Maher was taking a kitchen-sink approach to a series of subjects that repeats the rankest old prejudices: it’s one thing to point out the child-screwing at Nickelodeon and the rehiring of a molester by Disney. No one would ever doubt that child-entertainment factories, though probably not nearly as much as churches, have their predators. But to then immediately go to drag queen story hour puts the two on the same plane of aberration, which they most definitely are not. The whole idea of drag queens is to normalize something that, to my way of thinking, is as unremarkable as different color hair or eyes, but for the alleged sexual element that only the phobes–the dragophobes, the honomphones, the sexophobes, basically all the Savonaralas of the world–obsess about. The connection Maher made between predatory studios and the “hypocritical” of DeSantis was dishonest enough: DeSantis did not go after Disney’s predators. He went after Disney as a business. He may have had a pont doing even that much. But that’s not what Maher was referring to. He stretched his claim for a laugh and a little shock value in defense of DeSantis. Worse: Maher’s segue from child predators to drag queens is the very same bigotry of equating, say, gay teachers with pedophiles. You’d think we were over that by now. Not Maher. He wants his laughs. He went on: “Maybe it’s time to admit that sometimes, drag queen story hour is more for the queen than the kids.” Says who? “Sure, kids love a clown, but does the clown have to have tits?” Not only is the joke vulgar. Not only is it drag panic. But it happens to be its very own kind of piggish sexism. Why the hell should a clown not have “tits”? But that was the bend of the whole segment: set ups for laughs soldered by a little convention-busting shock. It was shallow. It was bigoted. It was poorly informed. And unlike Jon Stewart or John Oliver, there was zero informational value. Maher reverses what Oliver and Stewart do. For the latter two, the laughs are incidental, or at least the lubricant byproduct of their riffs and outrage. For Maher, the punch line comes first. Everything else is contrived to that end, whether it stuffs a circle peg into a square or not. In “Quiet on Set,” it was all squares and round pegs. 

—P.T.