Bill Maher sees the world a little differently than most: He said Michael Phelps deserved the bong he smoked, religion is more a nuisance than a saving grace and Sarah Palin is a "moron he'd like to forget."
Maher performed to a packed house at the Hard Rock Live Orlando on Friday night. And as politics have taken the foreground of discussion since the economic downturn, Maher has been given a brand-new batch of material.
Maher's stand-up act serves as a way to get everything in the political world that frustrates him off his chest. He saved his infamous pet peeve, though, for the end.
Maher learned from past performances to stop bringing up religion at the beginning of his shows; too many guests would get upset and leave as soon as his holy rants began.
He knows his beliefs are controversial, but he doesn't care.
If you really had that big of a problem with his thoughts, he said, you wouldn't be at his show in the first place.
Maher's act relies heavily on analogy, and most of his stories relate to politics in some way.
In a particularly memorable story, Maher described the scene of a drug dealer's home in 1980.
During a trip to the house to buy mushrooms, he noticed that the dealer had lit his house entirely with candles and open windows, but what Maher thought was a classy and economical way of life was actually just a poor drug addict's electricity getting shut off.
Maher claims that, just like the drug dealer, America has a reliance on "dressing up old, ugly crap and pretending it's new."
Maher has long called himself a staunch libertarian, although his act portrayed him as much more of a Democrat than he'd like to admit.
His act was almost entirely about his support for President Barack Obama and his disdain for the Republican Party.
It was odd hearing Maher sound more like Al Franken than the biting libertarian commentator we're anticipating.
Not that there's anything wrong with these views; it's just that Maher used to take a much more centrist view.
Instead of being an equal opportunity offender, Maher's vitriol was directed heavily at Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, with sideswipes at former President George W. Bush.
He praised Obama for his work on issues such as stem-cell research, Guantanamo Bay and the stimulus.
Despite his recent political inconsistencies, Maher's act has always been consistently funny.
He rarely strays off-topic and he only gets flustered when drunks yell at him from the back of the auditorium.
During the climax of a joke with a long and deliberate buildup, a shout from the back of the room interrupted Maher, to which he, clearly annoyed, replied, "That's not funny; my joke was funny. Now you ruined it."
But while staunch Republicans may not enjoy his verbal abuse of the GOP, everyone else will get their money's worth at his show.
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