Bill Maher under fire after joking about obese Americans

After making several jokes about overweight Americans on last week’s Real Time, Bill Maher is facing heavy criticism from the Obesity Action Coalition.

Can Real Time‘s Bill Maher go one week without enraging an entire group of people?

Last week on the show, Maher talked about a variety of things which he wanted to get off his chest. He dove into “bipartisanship”, and how the left and right can only seem to agree on issues that they shouldn’t. One example he pointed to is the “pro-fat movement” which liberals and conservatives both seem to support.

This led to Maher putting out a handful of jokes about obese people in the segment. This includes lines like “obesity is the main reason people wear sweatpants in public,” offering no sympathy whatsoever to the heavier ones among us. And as TMZ reports, not everybody is finding this funny.

Apparently the “Obesity Action Coalition” (around 60,000 strong) reached out to TMZ to put Maher on blast for the “tasteless” remarks. From their POV, “fat shaming” on a scale as big as Maher’s is alarming, and could literally lead to more deaths in the country. When people dealing with obesity hear Maher’s jokes, it might lead to depression and anxiety. Which could lead to delaying necessary medical appointments, possibly making one’s condition much worse. They even named suicide as a possible outcome for someone taking offense to these jokes.

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This isn’t going to stop Maher. He’s said much worse and has survived. In fact, ruffling people’s feathers is what he’s best known for.