Comedian Bill Maher felt ashamed about a night he spent in jail more than 30 years ago.
Maher, 68, was thrown into a jail cell at the Beverly Hills police station in 1992 with a driving under the influence charge.
He and his podcast guests, Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin, better known as comedy stoner duo Cheech and Chong, exchanged their experiences of jail. Maher confessed he believed the police only took him to jail because of the clothes he was wearing.
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“I spent a night in the Beverly Hills jail, a DUI in 1992. I’m not proud of [it],” he said during Monday’s episode of his podcast, Club Random.
“But I was barely over the limit. Both with the speeding and with the drinking. With what I was wearing at the time, leopard-print shoes, I feel might have influenced the officer.”
“It is sobering… I ordered raisin toast, no raisins. I mean the room service was like an hour, the air conditioning made a noise… you can’t get a good jail cell these days. And there was nothing on the spectrovision,” Maher joked.
Newsweek contacted Maher’s representatives by email on Wednesday morning.
Cheech and Chong then shared one of their experiences being jailed, when they were thrown in the slammer in Tampa, Florida, more than 50 years ago. The pair were arrested for disorderly conduct after their performance at the Curtis Hixon Hall in 1973.
“We got busted in Tampa for obscenity,” Cheech said, and Chong added, “We got arrested and put in Tampa Florida Jail. We’d just got off stage, [and] they took us right off stage… to jail.”
When in the jail cell, Chong recounted “we still had that performer kinda vibe going,” where they requested pink-colored toilet paper and “bugging” the guards.
Eventually one of the guards got fed up with their antics and took Cheech away to another part of the jail, “the steel doors just closed behind me,” he recalled.
According to reporting at the time of their arrest in 1973, police said the duo had “used obscenities and made gestures of masturbation,” which led to their arrest, per theTampa Bay Times.
But the cops got it completely wrong, according to Chong.
“We never insulted or hurt anybody,” he told the Tampa Bay Times in 2022. “We did a bit called ‘The Dogs’ where Cheech and I crawled around on all fours … and sniffed each other’s butts. Well, that was OK.”
But it was the next part of that bit when Cheech pretended to urinate on a cop working at the show that got the pair arrested.
“The cop, he did not like being part of the act,” Chong said. “And so, they decided to arrest us.”
