Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’ Talks About…What Else? That Will Smith Slap To Chris Rock

deadline.com:

You knew going into Friday’s Real Time on HBO that Bill Maher would cover the topic that everyone in Hollywood is talking about.

And did he ever, starting from the top.“Thank you all for coming and putting on a brave face,” Maher said right at the start, adding that he knew everyone was still processing the week’s biggest moment. “To Will Smith: stay strong and I got your back.”Maher paused a beat. “April Fools.

You’re a dick.”That set the tone for a run of Will Smith jokes. “I’m not here to humiliate Will Smith. He gets enough of that at home.”.Maher allowed that “Every single person in America was talking about the sucker punch heard ’round the world,” and noted, “That whole ‘Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth’ didn’t really work out.”The physical confrontation between Smith and Rock was short. “There was more action in three seconds than in three hours of The Power of the Dog,” Maher said, adding, “Who would have thought the movie coming out of the Oscars with all the buzz was GI Jane.Maher turned serious for a moment, noting that comparing a woman to Demi Moore at her hottest was not a huge insult. “Alopecia is not leukemia,” he said. “I blame toxic femininity.”There was controversy on top of controversy, Maher said.

Smith got into a shoving match with Liza Minnelli, he claimed.Of course, there were other things going on in the world this week. “But we don’t care about that,” Maher said.The panel portion of the show featured Laura Coates, CNN Senior Legal Analyst and author of Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness and host of SiriusXM’s “The Laura Coates Show”; and Andrew Yang, founder of the new political third party Forward and author of Forward: Notes on the Future of our Democracy.The