Maybe Howard Stern really is woke now.
On Tuesday, the longtime radio host — who once regularly displayed derogatory behavior toward women — proved to be more aligned with feminism when he went off on Bill Maher for a truly ignorant comment.
About 31 minutes into Monday’s episode of Maher’s podcast “Club Random,” Maher criticized Stern for constantly proclaiming his love for his wife, Beth Ostrosky Stern, during “The Howard Stern Show.”
“[Stern] goes on about how much he loves his wife, Beth, which he has been doing on the air for, like, 10 years,” Maher said during an interview with Julian Lennon, the eldest son of Beatles legend John Lennon.
“But we know Howard had this other wife before Beth,” Maher said, alluding to Stern’s first wife, Alison Berns.
“Could we just not gush about the person while the other person can still hear it?” Maher said.
Stern married his current wife, an animal rights activist and former model, in 2008. Previously, he was married to Berns from 1978 to 2001. Stern publicly doted on Berns while the pair were married — and was especially complimentary of her in his 1998 biopic “Private Parts.”
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On Tuesday’s episode of “The Howard Stern Show,” Stern reportedly said Maher “ought to shut his mouth” about his wife.
“What a sexist thing to say! Like, what a convoluted, nutty thing to say,” he fumed, according to multiple outlets. “It’s assuming that he knows something about my first marriage. That, of course, the man must be leaving the woman, and the woman must be devastated and be sitting around, pining away for her famous man.”
In a clip from the show published by the New York Post, Stern added of Maher: “I think I’m no longer friends with him.”
Although Maher’s politics have not changed much since he launched “Real Time with Bill Maher” in 2003, Stern has become increasingly liberal.
“I hear that a lot, that I’m not good anymore because I’m ‘woke,’” Stern reportedly said on his SiriusXM radio show on Monday.
“I kind of take that as a compliment, that I’m woke,” Stern continued. “I’ll tell you how I feel about it. To me, the opposite of woke is being asleep. And if woke means I can’t get behind Trump, which is what I think it means, or that I support people who want to be transgender, or I’m for the vaccine ― dude, call me woke as [much as] you fucking want.”