MAHER AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY BASHER

Bill Maher is a patriot. He said so Friday, during his 90-minute comic
diatribe at the Palace of Fine Arts.

It's just that there are a few things about his country that embarrass him
or make his blood boil. More than a few, actually -- dozens upon dozens.
Thousands, really.

If he is still feeling the sting of controversy over his infamous post-Sept.
11 comments, he didn't let on. One of the very few public figures to wax
critical just after the terrorist attacks -- when he compared the bravery
of steering a passenger plane into the side of a building against that of
"lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away" -- his name is still marred
by the incident.

But he made the comment on his show, ABC's "Politically Incorrect." It's
right there in the title: Maher's comic commentary ruffles feathers by
design. He delights in it.

On Friday he managed to ruffle feathers only intermittently, to his mock
dismay. The sold-out audience was clearly predisposed to the comedian's
caustic brand of political and social chastisement. Yet he earned his
laughs honestly: He was very funny.

There's always someone at his stand-up shows who laments the rampant
"filth" in his act, he noted. He shrugged.

"I tell the truth, and it's full of filth."

Few sacred cows escaped his sights -- Arabs and Jews, the Catholic church,
America's inalienable rights to sloth and gluttony. His whole act, in fact,
was a declaration of independence.

George W. Bush, he noted, billed himself during the presidential campaign
as a "Washington outsider."

"Yeah, he's straight outta Compton, isn't he?" he said, rolling his eyes.

Maher marveled at the president's steady 80 percent approval rating. "He
couldn't get more popular if he fell down a well," he spluttered.

"If I knew a war would have added 100 points to his IQ, I would have
started one."

But Maher, a self-described Libertarian, is an equal-opportunity hatchet
man. Al Gore, he said, deserved to lose for running a campaign "ending
charisma as we know it."

(The comedian did, however, express wonder at the notion that the country
is better off with Bush as commander-in-chief: "It's not like Gore would
have had Posh Spice and Peewee Herman in his cabinet.")

The San Francisco audience appeared to be craving a counterpoint to the
political correctness that sometimes seems synonymous with the city. Only
occasionally could Maher elicit the oohs and aahs he so adores, when his
comedy pushes the outer limits of taste.

When he declared early on that he would have welcomed school shootings
during his high school years, most in the crowd laughed heartily. But Maher
detected a few stray gasps of uncertainty.

"Folks, it's gonna get a lot worse than that," he said, grinning wickedly.

Dressed down in an untucked black satin shirt, he roamed a bare stage,
occasionally consulting some notes on a music stand. More so than his TV
show allows, he seemed a direct descendant of the late, great comedian Bill
Hicks, another ruthless social critic.

Like Hicks, Maher finds plenty to eviscerate in his own culture. We shop
with forklifts, he fumed.

In one segment, he called for the legalization of marijuana. A few minutes
later, what looked like a joint mysteriously appeared on the lip of the
stage, apparently tossed there by a fan.

"Someday I'm gonna try this s--," Maher said with a laugh, scooping it up.

A notorious womanizer, the comedian saved some of his touchiest material
for last -- a lengthy riff on the ways Americans have elevated women to
"rock star" status, and what that's done to men.

He longs for the days when his married friends were single. They used to be
mustangs, he said. Now they're like the horses in Central Park, he
complained, trudging in a desultory circle with imaginary blinders on.

He railed about a growing form of discrimination -- against single people.
One surefire way for married couples to get out of work, he said, is having
twins in the school play.

"What if I have twins in the Jacuzzi?" he huffed, drawing one of the
night's biggest laughs.