“New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer”

By Bill Maher

(Rodale, 230 pages, $24.95)

As funny, insightful and cutting as Bill Maher can be in his stand-up and on his current and past TV shows, his new book falls right into the pitfall most books by stand-up comedians encounter. “New Rules” is drawn nearly completely from material already seen and heard on Maher’s current HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher.” So if you enjoy Maher and follow his show, you’ve seen and heard everything in this book before.

One of the few recent books by a stand-up comedian to avoid this trap was “Nothing’s Sacred,” by Lewis Black, in which Black occasionally puts in pieces of his act, but mostly manages to be funny by relating his own biography to comic effect -- material to which not even fans had been exposed before.

Even for comedians like George Carlin (who has published several books in the past few years) who do have classic material and continue to write and perform edgy new material, the trap for a reader is that a book of short quips and jokes, like Carlin issues, can get wearing after awhile -- it’s difficult to read straight through like a novel or other non-fiction book.

Maher falls into this same trap, although not as badly, because he does change-up the pacing of the material with shorter and longer sections -- the longer ones typically being from the ends of his “New Rules” segments from his show, where he segues into a longer monologue on a single subject.

But another problem with this book is that it is supposedly organized around an A-to-Z alphabetical conceit -- but the “new rules” are haphazardly fitted under certain letters with headlines stretched to begin with a particular letter. A better idea would have been to group rules together based on category or theme. As they stand, they seem too random to be coherent in large doses, lacking the segues they might have as part of Maher’s act or in short presentations on his show.

For a casual reader or someone not really familiar with Maher, it’s the longer segments that save “New Rules.” Even for such a reader, though, this is at best a “wait for the paperback” purchase, because if evaluated as value for money, one could get all this material plus movies and other shows, for a lower cost just by subscribing to HBO.