Shock jock Howard Stern has made peace with on-again, off-again friend Bill Maher after the two had a “pretty blunt” conversation.
The SiriusXM host, who is openly feuding with former buddy Donald Trump, revealed on his Monday show that Maher called to apologize for comments he made on his “Club Random” podcast about Stern’s wife, Beth Stern.
Stern said he sent an email to Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time,” inviting him to bury the hatchet over criticism of the radio host for constantly “gushing” about his wife on the air.
“I spoke to him over the weekend and I told him about my shock at this commentary and he was apologetic,” according to Stern.
“We talked for a while, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, ‘Okay, you know, listen, we’ll move on. We’ll move on.’”
“I’m not going to go into the details of the conversation, but I was pretty blunt,” Stern said.
“He seemed to get it. And he was gracious.””
“I said to him basically at the end of the conversation, ‘I think what you do on HBO is so important.’ It was like the Writers Guild. We reached a tentative agreement,” Stern said.
“So we’re back on good terms.”
Stern last week declared that he was “no longer friends with” Maher over a snarky remark about Stern’s penchant for “gushing” about his second wife on-air.
Stern was married to Alison Berns from 1978 until 2001. He married Beth Ostrosky Stern in 2008.
“[Howard 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 on an episode of his “Club Random” podcast in which he interviewed Julian Lennon.
“We know Howard had this other wife before Beth, so he’s trying to make me seem like I’m the slightly immoral one because I won’t settle down and all I could think of is, ‘How does this gushing about the second wife, how does that make the first wife feel?’ Could we just not gush about the person while the other person can still hear it?”
True to form, Stern addressed Maher’s comments on his SiriusXM radio show.
“He took a big shot at me,” Stern said.
“Basically, he says, ‘Howard Stern always gets on the radio and says he loves his wife.’ I’ve never been criticized for this. He goes, ‘Haven’t we had enough of that? What about his first wife? I feel really bad for her.’”
“What a sexist thing to say. What a convoluted, nutty thing to say,” Stern continued.
“He says it must hurt [Berns’] feelings that I’m in love with a different woman. 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.”
“He ought to shut his mouth! I mean, I don’t think I come on the air every day and say I love my wife,” Stern added.
“But I thought it was a pretty positive message, especially with my audience, to say to guys, ‘Instead of ragging on our wives, how about talking how we appreciate and love them?’”
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