“Can we put this in perspective?” Maher said. “No one died. A guy made a bad joke, a bad joke because a — it was a disgusting sentiment that he was evoking and also because it wasn’t even a joke. It’s a stupid fat fuck who is not funny and it annoys me that people who cannot keep two disparate thoughts in their own mind lump me in together with him and say I’m defending him. I’m not defending him. I’m defending living in a country where people don’t have to be afraid that they might go out of the bounds for one minute. Do we all want to be talking like White House spokesmen?”

Maher faced a similar threat to his show’s advertisers in 2002 in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he called the United States’ tactics in the war on terror “cowardly.”

“Let me give you a quote from the ACLU, liberals,” he said. “[T]he ACLU — what more liberal bastion is there than that? ‘It is easy to defend freedom of speech when the message is something that many find reasonable, but the defense of freedom of speech is more critical when the message is something that most people find repulsive.’ We’re looking at you, Rush Limbaugh. But you know what? I would rather put up with Rush Limbaugh and live in a country where we all do have freedom of speech. And the people who I’ve heard say, when they put pressure on his sponsors, the system is working. No it’s not. That’s the system being manipulated. I lived through that 10 years ago.”