Jay Leno has had a lot of high-profile guests over the years, and a great many of them returned the favor by appearing in pre-taped bits on his last night at The Tonight Show, wishing him well and giving him some free advice for the future; a bit that included both Charlie Sheen and President Obama.

The media seems to forever be on the lookout for the “new face of the GOP,” always noting that this or the other candidate is representative of a regressive impulse within the Republican Party. Meanwhile, wildly out of step actors on the left almost never get the same treatment.

Bill Maher’s final “New Rule” Friday night took on what he sees as the “next social domino” to fall after gay marriage and marijuana: “puritanism.” Especially went it comes to our elected leaders, Maher said it’s time to “accept that politicians aren’t boy scouts; That’s just a costume they wear on Grindr.”

Stand-up comic and Real Time with Bill Maher host Bill Maher really killed on Friday night with the penultimate joke in his “New Rules” segment. In an episode that featured an otherwise listless audience, the crowd roared with laughter when Maher joked that since the Grammy Awards featured the liberal dream of a mass gay wedding, “conservatives must match them tit-for-tat by having a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards.”

Last year, Bill Maher embraced March Madness by holding his own competitive bracket for the country’s “craziest congressman.” This year, he’s actually going to try to take one of them down. On tonight’s episode of HBO’s Real Time, Maher plans to announce a viewer poll that will determine the worst sitting member of Congress.

Before he gives his full reaction to the State of the Union on this week’s Real Time on HBO, Bill Maher sat down for the last time with Jay Leno and shared a few of his thoughts. While he “can’t help liking” President Barack Obama, Maher was a “little disappointed he didn’t give a shout-out to pot.”

Bill Maher isn’t sure Congress can get back to actually doing anything any time soon because of near-perpetual Republican outrage over scandal after scandal about the Obama administration, mocking the really “deranged” conservatives dragging all sorts of scandals out of the woodworks.

Willie Nelson joined Bill Maher for the second half of last night’s Real Time, and naturally they began by talking ab out their shared love of marijuana. As “one of our nation’s beloved founding stoners,” Maher wanted to know if Nelson was surprised that President Barack Obama’s latest comments about pot didn’t cause more of an uproar on the right.

Bill Maher is getting tired of conservatives touting their masculinity while dismissing liberals as pussies and pansies, and in his show-ending New Rule Friday night, he said that Democrats need to stop letting Republicans claim that “they’ve got the big balls” because, as Maher put it, being a bully is not a real masculine value.

Bill Maher took on the Richard Sherman controversy Friday, defending the NFL star and agreeing with his claim that “thug” is just the politically correct word people use instead of the n-word, saying “racism has really kind of gone underground in this country,” but it still subsides.

With two “very powerful women in politics” on his panel Friday night, Bill Maher decided to bring up the issue of women in government and what the U.S. should do, if anything, to encourage more female candidates. The host’s seemingly innocuous question led to a spirited debate between Republican Mary Matalin and Democrat Jennifer Granholm.

Bill Maher ended his first show of the new year with some resolutions for America, ranging from the War in Afghanistan to a more productive Congress to Duck Dynasty, especially to “stop hanging onto stupid stuff long after it’s relevant just because it’s tradition” like the penny, the Drug War, Daylight Savings Time, and having two Dakotas.

Bill Maher returned to TV Friday night, and kicked things off with journalist Glenn Greenwald to talk about the NSA, and one of the things they addressed was Edward Snowden himself, and Maher admitted that he doesn’t like how every time Snowden speaks, he comes out saying “something completely nuts.”