What To Know
- Wayne Brady reignited his feud with Bill Maher by calling him racist.
- Brady criticized Maher for using his platform to promote harmful views and for attempting to define Black identity as a white man.
- He said Maher’s rhetoric encourages reductive and vitriolic attitudes toward others.
Wayne Brady just made a scathing claim about Bill Maher — reigniting a public feud that started sixteen years ago.
On the May 7 episode of Sarah Jones‘ America, Who Hurt You? podcast, the Let’s Make a Deal host, 53, addressed something that the Real Time With Bill Maher host, 70, said about him in 2010.
“He is racist, and I don’t care,” Brady bluntly stated, pointing out that Dave Chapelle recently called out Maher in his Netflix special The Unstoppable.
The Whose Line Is It Anyway? alum explained, “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 [Barack] Obama was less Wayne Brady and more,’ I forget which gangster rapper or whatnot. And even that, how dare you, as a white man, try to define this thing?”
Additionally, Brady pointed out, “Bill Maher can say, ‘Oh, I have all these Black friends.’ Look, I don’t know Bill like that, and back in the day… I grew up watching Bill Maher and thought he was funny. But listen when people tell you who they are.”
After noting that he doesn’t “hate” Maher, Brady said that he doesn’t “like” him “because you’re harmful to other people with the views that you espouse, and the things that he said, and the platform that he has.” He added, “It’s vitriolic because it just encourages the asinine behaviors and reactions in those whose default setting is to be reductive of people.”
Brady’s comments about Maher stemmed from an interview the former Politically Incorrect host did with CNN.
“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,” Maher said in 2010. “And not that he’s President Wayne Brady, you know. I thought we were getting Suge Knight.”
In 2012, Brady publicly replied to Maher during an appearance on Aisha Tyler‘s podcast Girl on Guy.
“Just because you f**** black hookers, just because you had that particular black experience… I have to stop myself to getting into it because I realize the thing is if I had gone on his show, or even doing it online, I’m not going to win,” Brady said, per HuffPost. “Because as soon as you back off, he still has his platform to say whatever he wants to.”
Additionally, Brady said that if Maher wanted to “know how black Wayne Brady is,” he would “gladly slap the s*** out of Bill Maher in front of Coco and Ebony and Fox, the three ladies of the night he has hired.”