The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody but Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass

by Bill Maher

  BRAISEDHEART

  New Rule: Just because the Scottish eat it, that doesn’t make it food. The Obama administration has lifted the ban on imported haggis, a Scottish dish made from sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs, and simmered in the sheep’s stomach. Mmmm. But we already have that here. It’s called a hot dog. Plus, their version looks disgusting, while ours is neatly pressed into the shape of a dog’s hard-on. What I’m trying to say is: Buy American.

  BREEDING RAINBOW

  New Rule: Now that the army is letting in gays and lesbians, Glee has to add at least one character who’s straight. Just for variety. My memories of high school are kind of fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure not every single human being in the building was gay. Television has an obligation to present America as it really is: ten percent gay. Ten percent real housewife. And seventy percent vampires.

  BRISTOL-WHIPPED

  New Rule: Bristol and Levi have to get back together. Come on, you two. You made the baby, fell out of love, and now it’s act three of every horrible Katherine Heigl movie ever. It’s the last scene, Bristol is plodding through one of her abstinence speeches. Suddenly Levi appears in the back of the room, and Bristol says, “Screw this! I love you, and I love sex!” They embrace, and the audience goes wild as they realize abstinence is just a big stupid joke in a world where you can wear a condom and fuck all you want. The end.

  BUDDHA CON

  New Rule: The fortunes in fortune cookies have to be fortunes. “You surround yourself with good friends” is not a prediction, it’s a compliment. Quit kissing my ass, cookie. If I’m going to sit through a plate of MSG-LADEN twice-cooked kitty cat I want a real fortune, like “That meal you just ate is going to give you cancer.”

  THE BUG-EYE STATE

  New Rule: Your sunglasses shouldn’t be bigger than your head. When did looking fly mean looking like a fly? There’s only one reason to wear sunglasses this big: cataract surgery. You don’t look sexy, you look like a transvestite Larry King.

  BUMBLE PIE

  New Rule: Since we’re running out of bees and being overrun with bedbugs, scientists must breed a bedbug that shits honey. It can’t be worse than Splenda. Oh, right, like that’s so much grosser than where we get silk and eggs. Ask for it by name: Bedbug Ass Honey: For When You’re Itching for Something Sweet™.

  BUZZ ALTERIN’

  New Rule: The women’s vibrator industry has to get back to basics. What is this thing? Does it make you have an orgasm or water your plants? Do I use it to play Xbox? Do I speak into it? And why is everything named after rabbits? Jack Rabbit, Power Rabbit, Rabbit Ears, Wascally Rabbit, Bunny Love, Water Bunny, Bunny Honey. I’d buy you one, but I’m worried you’ll get rabies.

  SENIOR, BITE US

  New Rule: When a woman over sixty has a baby, it’s not a miracle from God. It’s a miracle from genetic engineers, fertility experts, and the good people at Merck. Here in California, a sixty-two-year-old woman, with eleven children, twenty grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, gave birth. Again. To a forty-year-old man who walked out. At an age when most women are content to putter around the garden or perform the opening number at the Grammys, Janice Wulf, age sixty-two, told the press at a news conference, “Age is a number. Every time you revolutionize something, there’s going to be naysayers.” To which the reporters replied, “We’re over here.”

  And lady, you’re not a revolutionary. You’re a vagina with no off switch. Twelve kids? Lemme guess: You’re either a Catholic or a hamster.

  Look, I don’t want to be the one to say that this lady is too old and she’s already had enough children, but this lady is too old and she’s already had enough children! Hey, when you’re sixty-two and you want children, you have two choices: (a) in vitro fertilization, or (b) luring them into a house made out of candy.

  I wouldn’t make such a big thing out of it, but it turns out Mrs. Wulf is not the first over-sixty-year-old to have a baby in the last decade—there is a virtual epidemic of granny sluts who insist on squeezing out children who, when they get a little older, will face many uncomfortable moments, like when it’s parents’ day at school and the kid shows up with an urn.

  Why is creating life, under any conditions whatsoever, so applauded when there are already millions of unwanted kids around the world? And Angelina Jolie can’t save them all. In fact, someone’s gotta tell Angie that sometimes when you go to a foreign country—it’s okay just to bring home a T-shirt.

  —February 24, 2006

  C

  CALL GRRR

  New Rule: If I called you, and our call gets dropped, I call you back! See, because if you’re re-calling me while I’m trying to re-call you, we both go to voicemail. Which—to be honest—I was hoping to get in the first place.

  CALLING PAN

  New Rule: It’s okay for AT&T and T-Mobile to merge, just so long as they retain the individual qualities of each company: frequently dropped calls and phantom charges on my bill. Also, they must develop an app that tells the chick texting in the car in front of me that the light has turned green.

  CANNED HAM

  New Rule: On the next season of The Apprentice, Donald Trump has to fire himself. His casinos are bankrupt. The only industry in the world where people give you money in exchange for nothing, and he blew it. Seriously, Choctaw Indians can make this work.

  CANNED JOB

  New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, “Dude, do not mess with Lysol”?

  CAR BERATER

  New Rule: Hey, car, you know that light you keep on for a few minutes after I park? You can go ahead and shut that off when I close the door. Why keep it on? Denial? Because you miss having me inside you? I’m gone. Why does everything have to be a process? I’m getting out of my car, not pulling out of Iraq.

  CARDINAL SIN

  New Rule: Birdwatchers have to wear uniforms so I don’t mistake them for perverts trying to peep in my windows. Look, I’m sorry I chased you down the street naked and screaming—I thought you were TMZ. Can’t we let bygones be bygones and agree to drop the charges? Look on the bright side: For a bunch of octogenarians, you ladies sure can run.

  CARGO KIDDER

  New Rule: Spirit Airlines, the airline that wants to charge for carry-on baggage, must merge with . . .

  . . . Ryanair, the airline that wants to charge for using the washroom, and form a new carrier:

  CELL MATE

  New Rule: If this device tracks my every move, down to the second, but it still won’t let me talk, it’s not a phone, it’s a woman.

  HYPE-OCHONDRIA

  New Rule: Drug companies have to stop making up diseases. I don’t know what the terrorists are planning next for America, but if I had every problem they talk about in medicine commercials—breathing, lifting, walking, sitting, sleeping, crapping, not crapping, getting a boner, and male pattern menopause—I’d welcome death. Bring it on. Deadly nerve gas? Please, I’ve got seasonal allergies!

  It seems like every time I turn on the TV these days I see some ad for some drug I never heard of to treat some disease I never heard of. That’s not a stomachache you have from eating the chili-cheese fries at Johnny Rockets, it’s irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. Or, as I call it, BS. Which would also apply to the dreaded social anxiety disorder, or, as we used to call it, shyness—and we treated it with an old home remedy: scotch and water.

  Your wife doesn’t get turned on? It couldn’t be because you’re a snowman-shaped sausage casing so full of beer you sweat hops. It’s because she has female sexual dysfunction. And before they came up with restless leg syndrome, did it even exist? Did you ever hear someone say, “Sorry I couldn’t make the party, Bill, the old restless leg was acting up”?

  I’m waiting for the ad that tells me my morning hard-on is actually superfluous rigidity syndrome, or SRS, and has a cartoon bunny who says, “Are you both
ered by morning stiffness? Try Flaccidix. Flaccidix is specially formulated to make your penis shiny and more manageable. Side effects? You bleed from your pores, then explode and die. And/or dry mouth.”

  —April 28, 2006

  CHAI NOON

  New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job.

  CHAIN OF FOOLS

  New Rule: The next clever thing you invent that conveniently fits on my keychain must be a device that helps me lift my keychain. Thanks to the dongle that unlocks my car, the gadget that stores my computer files, and the dingus that gives me my supermarket discounts, I’m now the dorkus who can barely get my keys into my pocket. And no, geeks, that bulge in your pants doesn’t make you look cool. It makes you look like you have a Swiss Army penis.

  CHICK CORNEA

  New Rule: Don’t keep the Super Glue next to your eye drops. An elderly woman in Phoenix was reaching for her cataract medicine and—yes, she Super Glued her eyes shut. And after seeing what happened, her husband of many years took the Super Glue and moved it next to the toothpaste.

  CHIME AND PUNISHMENT

  New Rule: Churches have to stop ringing the damn bells. It was a good idea in the Middle Ages, but people have clocks now. It’s not like you’re doing us all a favor by keeping the hunchbacks off the street. Make up your mind, are you a house of worship or an ice cream truck?

  CHINA FILL-UPS

  New Rule: You can mess with your friends when they pass out, but not in the ass. When a Chinese man passed out drunk, his friends thought it’d be funny if they placed a live eel in his rectum. And then it gnawed through his guts and he died. The worst part of this story? That’s how they make moo goo gai pan.

  CHOP STICKLERS

  New Rule: Waiters in Asian restaurants have to stop giving me attitude when I ask for a fork. It’s not a hate crime, you know. Now, if you’d please, I’d like to get that food you just put in front of me into my stomach before it dawns on me what the fuck it is.

  CHROME LIMBS

  New Rule: Stop with Michelle Obama’s arms. Women were clamoring for the issue of Women’s Health magazine in which Michelle’s trainer tells how you can get her guns in just nine minutes a day. But I don’t buy that, because First Lady Laura Bush’s arms never got that cut, and she spent eight years holding on to a dumbbell.

  CHUBBY CHECKER

  New Rule: Before telling me all about your Let’s Move healthy-schools program, you have to explain why the kid in your poster has an erection.

  CLAMBER ALERT

  New Rule: The shirtless douche bag who climbs up on a light post at every spontaneous street celebration must be Tasered immediately. No one is thinking, “Hey, look at that guy high above the rest of us—he’s our leader.” We’re all thinking, “Why’d he wear shorts? I can see his nuts.”

  CLASP WARFARE

  New Rule: When the news story about record home foreclosures is followed immediately by the story about Victoria’s Secret’s new $2 million jewel-encrusted bra, maybe it is time to redistribute the wealth. The bra contains 1,542 carats of white diamonds, blue sapphires, and blue topaz set in 18-carat white gold. And yet it’s still an annoying eyesore when you leave it hanging over the shower rod.

  CLASS ACTION

  New Rule: Scientists must tell us what’s in Tampa’s drinking water that makes teachers want to fuck their students. Remember Debra Lafave of Tampa? Well, three more Tampa schoolmarms have been arrested for having sex with kids in their class. Authorities are warning parents to look for telltale signs of an affair, like a sudden change in your child’s behavior or a note on his report card that says, “Tommy is a pleasure to have in my vagina.”

  CLAYDAR

  New Rule: You can’t call it coming out of the closet when the door was wide open, the closet was made of glass, and everyone could see you in there having gay sex. Clay Aiken says he came out because he didn’t want to lie to his infant son. Dude, even the baby knew you were gay. I can’t wait to see next week’s issue of People.

  CLERK BAR

  New Rule: The lady at the drugstore doesn’t have to wear a lab coat. You’re not Madame Curie, and I’m not shopping for radium. With all due respect, professor, I just want some beer and some Slim Jims, and everywhere else was closed.

  CLOTHES CALL

  New Rule: Ed Hardy fashions need more shit going on. When I run into someone in an Ed Hardy getup, I don’t know whether to compliment his style or start looking for Waldo.

  CLUB FOR GROWTH

  New Rule: California, the state with the most debt and the most marijuana dispensaries, must be allowed to avoid bankruptcy by selling weed to neighboring states. That’s how we’ll get out of this budget crisis—by holding a “baked sale.” It’s the perfect solution. We need the cash . . . and Arizona needs to chill the fuck out.

  CLUELESS

  New Rule: The person who sat in my seat on the flight before me and could not finish the People magazine crossword puzzle has to be ashamed of themselves. I don’t know who you are, but “Desperate _____wives”? Nothing? A three-letter word for “Writing utensil, you’re holding it in your hand.” Here’s one more for you: Four letters, begins with a v, something you shouldn’t be allowed to do this November.

  COIF DROP

  New Rule: If you see me every day and then I get a haircut, you don’t have to ask me, “Hey, did you get a haircut?” No. No. I’m the one person on the planet whose hair grows in reverse. And in a completely neat and uniform way. Isn’t that weird? I’m like the Benjamin Button of hair. I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic, Mass General, Johns Hopkins—no one can figure it out. And now they want to call the condition Maherism. But who wants to be remembered that way? As a man whose hair grew back into his head every six weeks or so? Whose hair will one day grow all the way into my brain and then come out my eyeballs. Oh, the shame of it! Please, oh, vengeful God, take me now! . . . Yes, I got a haircut.

  COLLECTILE DYSFUNCTION

  New Rule: Scientists must explain why we will stop and watch a movie on cable even though we own that exact same movie on DVD and could watch it anytime we want. I call it Shawshank syndrome, and I’ve realized DVDs are a lot like marriage. When it’s there every single night just sitting right in front of you . . . for some reason, you don’t feel like putting it in.

  COLOR COMMENTARY

  New Rule: It’s okay for a black man to be the dumb guy in a commercial. It seems like in every commercial on television it’s always the black guy who knows the fastest wireless network, knows the best car-rental company, knows the best place to buy music. Black people aren’t always smarter than white people. It just sometimes seems that way by comparison.

  COME ON, STYRENE

  New Rule: Stacking cups is not a sport. ESPN has been airing the World Sport Stacking Championships, where kids stack and unstack pyramids of plastic cups at lightning speed. It’s all the pageantry of Little League combined with all the suspense of watching someone unload a dishwasher. Here’s how you know a skill isn’t really a sport: when “turning pro” means you’re a barback.

  COMPUTER CRASH

  New Rule: Instead of getting me the new steering-wheel desk for my birthday, save the $19.99 and just write “I hope you die” on a card.

  CONDOMNATION

  New Rule: Condoms are not sex toys. Trojan has released a new line of condoms that vibrate and heat up. Look, condoms keep people from getting AIDS and the clap. Haven’t they done enough? You want to improve condoms? Invent a wrapper guys can open before they lose their hard-on.

  CORDON BLEW