Still, this being Canada - a civilized nation if ever there was one - Maher didn't exactly feel threatened by the demonstration.
"When the Canadians do civil disobedience, it's very obedient," Maher deadpans the next morning, breakfasting in a hotel restaurant.
"As I was going in a couple of the protesters asked for my autograph, so how seriously can you take that?" he adds. "You know: 'Bill Maher is going to hell, pray for Bill Maher, but could you sign?' "
Maher, 52, shot Religulous guerrilla-style last year with Borat director and Seinfeld co-creator Larry Charles. As the title suggests - it's a conflation of religion and ridiculous - the political humorist does not tread lightly over sacred terrain. Hopping from Jerusalem to Vatican City to a truckers' chapel in North Carolina, Maher, an agnostic, questions the faithful's basic tenets and puts the blame for the world's troubles squarely on the doorsteps, and doctrines, of religious institutions.
Talking to fundamentalist preachers, a God-fearing U.S. senator (Mark Pryor, Democrat from Arkansas), a pair of self-described gay Muslim activists, theologians, scientists, Mormon outcasts, Orthodox Jews, a Vatican scholar, and even Maher's own mother (Jewish, but the family was raised Catholic in Park Ridge, N.J.), the comedian probes and provokes, laments and lampoons. The results are blistering, and sometimes brilliant. Ultimately, Maher challenges humanity's need to find solace, and security, in the idea of an all-powerful spiritual being.
"We were certainly never under the illusion that it wasn't a controversial film," says Maher, with considerable understatement. "It is the ultimate taboo and the last taboo, really, when you think about it. So, I just hope it sparks a debate - I think it will at least do that."
It should.
