Bill Maher got the award, but Trumps free-speech impact is the real prize

Bill Maher is the perfect liberal, at least on paper — yet despite his talk shows being nominated for Emmy awards more than 40 times, it’s only in Donald Trump’s Washington that Maher finally gets the recognition he craves.He’s now the 27th recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, an award first won by the late, legendary Richard Pryor in 1998 and last year given to Conan O’Brien.Not every recipient has been politically left-wing, but Maher stands out as a rare left-leaning comic who dares criticize his own tribe — and he’s paid a price for it. Liberals like Maher might not like Donald Trump or the stamp he’s placed on the Kennedy Center, which awards the Twain Prize.But in Trump’s Washington, a rebel like Maher can be given his due — which can’t be said in precincts that cultural liberals control. Maher certainly checks the boxes of a good left-liberal.He’s a street-corner atheist; a male feminist who’s a 70-year-old bachelor with an endless succession of younger girlfriends; he’s a pothead — and pot dealer, the part-owner of a West Hollywood dispensary — who makes Snoop Dogg look like Nancy Reagan; and he’s an accurately self-described “libertine.”He ought to be the ideal celebrity Democrat.But the hypocrisy and ideological nuttiness of the party are too much for him.So is the more-than-puritanical humorlessness of the left — and its holier-than-thou intolerance. Maher is nobody’s idea of a conservative, yet he’s the closest thing many in the television industry today can imagine to a right-winger.He kicks back against cancel culture, and if his shows aren’t altogether balanced, they’re nonetheless places where conservatives and contrarians get to have a say.Amid the smarmy partisanship that smothered late-night TV in the era of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, “Real Time with Bill Maher” has often been an oasis.He’s undeniably entertaining, hence his dozens of Emmy nominations.But he’s enter...