Bill Maher Tears Into ‘SNL’ for Mocking MAGA But Not Dems

“If you’re gonna make fun of people, go both sides,” the comedian complained to Dana Carvey and David Spade.

SNL
Noam Galai/Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images

Bill Maher called out Saturday Night Live for being more harsh with Republicans and showing favor to the Democrats during election season in a new episode of SNL alums David Spade and Dana Carvey’s podcast Fly on The Wall.

“It is amazing the way this country is so partisan, including in the media and the entertainment parts of it,” Maher said in the episode, released Wednesday, “that when something happens for your team that’s bad, it’s like the angel of death flying over the house on Passover.”

“It’s just wrong,” Maher said, “If you’re gonna make fun of people, go both sides,” he continued, “Don’t play that game. I don’t like that.” For example, he continued, “Why didn’t they make fun of Kamala [Harris’] husband Doug [Emhoff] when he got me too’d?”

Emhoff was accused of “forcefully slapping” an ex-girlfriend in 2012. That ex-girlfriend went public with the claim in October, with The Daily Mail reporting accounts from friends of the accuser who say she told them about the “slap” that night 12 years ago. Emhoff dismissed the allegation as “a distraction” that’s “designed to try to get us off our game.”

But Maher felt like SNL purposefully sidestepped the story, he told Carvey and Spade Wednesday, despite Carvey’s interjection that the story “wasn’t plastered everywhere.”

Maher previously called out the media for not focusing on Emhoff’s accuser’s story on Real Time, though he admitted at the time that it should only get more attention “if it becomes more credible” since “these things have to be checked out.” He added, “[Emhoff] is not going to be president and the guy on the [Republican] side who is running for president did these things himself.”

But he was back on the offensive again on the Fly On the Wall episode. “Doug Emhoff was credibly accused of things that other people have been accused of,” Maher argued. “It was as credible as many other accusations I’ve heard, but somehow it was just Andy Samberg [playing him] as funny, kind of dorky Doug.”

Maher also said the show decided with intention not to make fun of Hunter Biden, after Spade—who did play Hunter opposite Carvey’s Church Lady in a post-election sketch—suggested the show could have done some sketches with the president’s son on a “hot tub talk show” with “guests and girls in the tub.” According to Maher, SNL’s lack of attention to the president’s troubled son was yet more evidence of its bias towards Democrats.

In that vein, Carvey, who played Biden over the course of several episodes leading up to the election, said he was bracing for backlash from the live audience when he portrayed the president as suffering from “dementia.”

“I had a comeback just in case, but they went for it, I guess because he wasn’t running anymore,” Carvey said. “But the rules all changed after Biden was no longer the nominee. They became a lot looser with it. So I caught a lucky wave, I think.”

“Well, also, nobody else really got how to make him funny,” Maher replied, getting one more dig in at the current SNL cast. “So they had to go to the bullpen. They had to go to the old school.”