WATCH: Bill Maher Once Said N-Word 11 Times and Told a Black Woman He Couldn’t Tell She Was Black — And Didn’t Get Canceled

Comic and political pundit Bill Maher hosted Sharon Osbourne for an extended complaint session about “cancel culture” on Friday night, partially because Maher was able to survive cultural cancellation himself after he said the n-word 11 times on the air in a segment of his old Politically Incorrect show.

On the latest episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher commiserated with Osbourne over her exit from CBS’ The Talk following an on-air meltdown during which she berated a co-host and demanded she not cry.

But for all of his complaining about “cancel culture,” Maher has managed to cultivate an immunity to the alleged phenomenon that would make Pfizer and Moderna jealous.

Lots of people probable remember the flap surrounding his invocation of the term “house nigga” during an interview with Ben Sasse. Maher was moved to release a brief statement of apology that time, which was followed by a lengthy schooling from Professor Michael Eric Dyson and some professional counseling from Ice Cube and Symone Sanders.

But long before that, during the run of his ABC show Politically Incorrect, Maher took some truly atrocious liberties during a discussion of racial slurs with Black actor and activist Anne-Marie Johnson.

During that segment, while advancing the even-in-2001-tired-as-hell argument that white people can say the n-word because Black people say it, he blurted out “nigga” 11 times — including the claim that people regularly walk up to him and say “Bill, you a nigga!” — and told Johnson he’d never know she was Black if she hadn’t alerted him to that fact.

The segment included some other pretty sickening moments, such as David Spade explaining how much the mockery of white people by Black comics hurts him and Sarah Silverman defending her assertion that activist Guy Aoki wasn’t really offended by her use of the word “chink” in a joke, and was just trying to get attention for himself.

She concluded the segment by telling Aoki, to his face, “You know what? There are only two Asian people I know that I don’t like. One is you, and the other is my friend Steve, who actually went pee pee in my Coke.”

That episode aired on August 22, 2001, and it was not followed by any outcry, and Maher’s show stayed on the air for nearly a year after that, even after he said something that actually did eventually get him canceled — at least from ABC.

But Maher landed on his feet quickly, and has since thrived on HBO, where he consistently rails against the “cancel culture” that he mysteriously seems to escape time after tine. How about that?

Watch the full segment above.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.