Before Bill Maher took his summer break from HBO's Real Time, he did his usual "Future Headlines" segment, including one that said, "Bill Maher Turns Prestigious Mark Twain Prize Into Bong."
The mock headline alluded to the fact that Maher would soon be the well deserved 27th recipient of comedy's biggest prize, named for the US's most revered political humorist. The awards ceremony at the newly, properly renamed John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC is now airing on Netflix.
Maher has been a longtime champion of marijuana legalization, admitting that he sold it in his youth, and enjoys smoking it, including during his podcast Club Random.
Comedienne Whitney Cummings lead off the Twain award tribute with lots of snark, and pot jokes. "Bill is loyal a fighter for equality and justice," she intoned. "Day in and day out, he has committed his life to make sure that women, people of color and the disenfranchised all have equal access to the opinion of unmarried, childless white millionaire for only $23/month." (If ABC hadn't cancelled him, his show would still be free to all. It is watchable now on CNN on Saturday nights.)
Maher, Cummings continued, is like that cool stepdad who tells kids, "If you drink, as long as you call me, I'll come pick you up, no questions asked....but I am stoned so it's going to take me a while."
"Bill embodies the essence of Mark Twain in more ways than you even know," Cummings noted. "Both men: very shrewd investors. Twain put all of his money into new technology including the revolutionary Paige typesetting machine. And Bill just went halfsies on a weed store....with Woody Harrelson" (camera goes to Woody, one of the night's presenters).
Like Maher, Twain tried his hand at a drug business. After reading William Herdon's Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon: 1841-1852, the young typesetter still calling himself Samuel Clemens was struck by Herndon's description of the coca plant and the effect it had on the Inca people, enabling them to cheerfully work long hours with a suppressed appetite. Twain considered the plant "miraculous" and set out to start importing, talking up the idea with associates and jumping on a boat to New Orleans, hoping to get to South America. That's as far as he got, as he had almost no capital and means to transporting himself to the continent.
Maher's been making the talk show rounds talking about how cannabis inspires his work, and this seems to be something else he has in common with Twain.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran an item on September 18, 1865 saying Twain was spotted on the previous day walking up Clay Street under the influence of hasheesh. At the time, concentrated cannabis in tincture or solid form was commonly available in drug stores, such as Richards & Co., which stood at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets and advertised "Hasheesh Candy" in the Chronicle.
While in San Francisco, Twain met Fitz Hugh Ludlow, well known for writing "Confessions of a Hasheesh Eater," published in 1857. Ludlow suggested that Twain should focus on his humor rather than straight news writing and in October 1865, one month after Twain took his stoned stroll in SF, he wrote to his brother Orion: "I have had a 'call' to literature, of a low order - i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit." Weeks later, Twain's humorous piece, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" made him nationally known.
During the ceremony awarding Maher the Mark Twain price, clips were shown of Bill lighting a joint on the air, and joking that when he said Trump wouldn't accept an election loss, people thought he was smoking too much pot. "Turns out, I was smoking just the right amount," he says. Touching on his cancellation from ABC, he's shown saying, "I think religion is bad, and drugs are good."
To introduce Harrelson, a clip was shown of Maher putting up a rather staid photo of them on New Years Eve after Woody briefly gave up pot, and a much more raucous one taken the year before. "That's a strong case," observed Woody. He noted that he and Bill "had a shared policy of breaking the law with regularity. We marveled at the arrogance of our government to outlaw a plant that, according to law enforcement, makes you feel euphoric."
Maher has complained bitterly that the outrageous, 40% tax on cannabis in California makes it almost impossible for his and Woody's cannabis shop and consumption lounge, The Woods in West Hollywood, to turn a profit. "When I bought drugs from a skeezy dealer, he didn't skim 40%," he said on his podcast. "The government is worse than the dealer."
Twain actually lost money on the Paige machine, too. And, no, JFK didn't use marijuana medicinally, but according to one report, he did try it once at the White House.
When Steve Martin won the Mark Twain prize in 2005, he joked, "If ("Saturday Night Live" producer) Lorne Michaels had told me I'd receive this award one year after him, I'd have said, 'Let me have a hit of that." Other luminaries who have won the prize and have toked in their lives and/or work include George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Neil Simon, Carol Burnett, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Dave Chapelle, and Jon Stewart (the "enhancement smoker").
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