Bill Maher thinks the bridge between him and Jimmy Kimmel might be burned for good.
“Jimmy Kimmel, you know, he’s very mad at me and I know you’re close to him,” Maher told his Club Random podcast guest Adam Carolla, who cohosted The Man Show with Kimmel on Comedy Central from 1999 to 2004, and have shared a decades-long friendship.
“I hope you tell [Kimmel] that I’m sorry that it got bent out of shape,” Maher continued to Carolla. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. We can have disagreements. I mean, you and I don’t agree on everything, look at this clash now, and yet we’re cool.”
Maher added that Kimmel is “one of the nicest guys,” before going on a rant about what he believes to be the difference between the the political right and left factions in regards to being able to have discussions and differences of opinion.
“I don’t just buy into the left-wing bulls—, and I never stop making fun of the right-wing bulls— at all,” Maher said. “And like, if that’s not good enough for you, then I think you’re the a–hole, and I don’t think Jimmy is an a–hole… I think he’s a great guy, and it bugs me that, you know, because of what the latest thing was, that, you know, we may never talk again.”
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Carolla then suggested that the two should be able to bury the hatchet. “You guys should be thick as thieves and on the same page,” he offered.
While Maher did not clarify what exactly Kimmel is mad at him about, his comments come a few months after the Real Time host called out Kimmel’s wife, Molly McNearney, for saying she had severed ties with Trump-supporting family members amid the president’s ongoing feud with Kimmel and other late-night hosts.
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“It hurts me so much because of the personal relationship I now have where my husband is out there fighting this man,” McNearney shared in a joint interview with Kimmel on a November episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast.
“To me, them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family. And I, unfortunately, have kind of lost relationships with people in my family because of it,” she said at the time.
Then, on his show, Maher addressed McNearney’s comments, saying, “She says she’s lost relationships with relatives because she wrote them an email before the election with ten reasons why they shouldn’t vote for Trump, and some still didn’t obey, so you know. Ultimatums. Ten reasons? I can think of 100. But I would never present it to someone as an ultimatum. Ultimatums don’t make people rethink their politics. They make them rethink you.”
In a different episode of the Club Random podcast, in December, Maher said Kimmel was angry about those remarks, but he hoped they could stay friends. “I was as kid-gloved as I could,” he said at the time, per Variety. “And I see they’re mad at me. Uh, I’m sorry. I mean, I was being, again, as respectful as I could, but I don’t agree with that point of view. And since she went public with it, it wasn’t out of school for me to go public with it. I love Jimmy. I always have. I don’t know him that well, but he’s a great guy… I hope we’re friends forever, but I don’t know. You know, the liberals and the woke, that’s a schism. It just is.”