Bill Maher: Kathy Griffin ‘Owes Me a Fruit Basket for Getting Her Off the Front Page’

On the subject of his use of the N-word on Real Time, Bill Maher wanted his guest Michael Eric Dyson and everyone else to know this is less of a “race thing” and more of a “comedian thing.”

“Comedians are a special kind of monkey,” Maher began. “We are a trained thing that tries to get a laugh.”

He then pivoted the conversation to Kathy Griffin.

“Look at what happened to my friend Kathy Griffin,” he said, “who, by the way, owes me a fruit basket for getting her off the front page.”

Griffin received major blowback after she posed in a photo shoot with a bloodied severed head of President Trump. Maher acknowledged the “similarities” between her controversy and his.

“As much as I hate Trump… that’s wrong. You don’t do that to whoever the president is,” Maher said, “but she was going for a laugh, and I understand that. We do sometimes cross the line.”

Reacting to Griffin when she said her career was over, Maher said, “No, it’s not. You make a mistake, you don’t have to go away. Everyone makes mistakes.”

He concluded, “Kathy Griffin should not go away.”

Watch the full interview above (the relevant part starts at the 8-minute mark), courtesy of HBO.

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