Maher, the merrier: Comic hits with primarily political humor.

The attendees Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall got Maher than they bargained for.

Comedian Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time, was largely preaching to the converted in his one-hour, 40-minute, first-ever Little Rock appearance. What he called “gentle good humor” carried a lot of barbs, and the audience of mostly “progressive” people was hooked from the get-go.

Maher professes to be an iconoclast, and perhaps he’s the heir to the mantle of idol-shatterer George Carlin; his language was certainly salty enough (I counted only three of Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television, but he used them a lot; many of the other words are not suitable for recounting in a family newspaper).

He’s not entirely partisan — “I go after the stupid; I go wherever the stupid is,” regardless of party affiliation, he noted. But he aimed his barb-arity primarily at Republicans (“I love going to the red states” was practically his opening line), twitting pretty much the entire GOP political establishment and taking particular glee in lampooning their agenda (“protecting insurance companies from sick children”) and their objection to everything for which President Barack Obama stands. (“He’s ‘soft on terror.’ Remember that time he found bin Laden and let him off with a warning and a stiff fine?”)

In contrast to the suit and tie he wears on TV, Maher deliberately downscaled for the stage, clad in the customary club comedian’s costume — dark jeans and open plaid shirt over a black T-shirt.

Not all the “gentle good humor” was overtly political; Maher, like Carlin, professed his attraction to marijuana (offering to be its commercial spokesman when it’s legalized) and, like Carlin, took out after organized religion, with special skewers for Mormonism and the central tenets of Christianity, comparing the concept of the Holy Trinity with an Abbot and Costello routine.

And of course, no comedy set is complete without a segment on sex; Maher struck gold with a depiction of what “sexting” would have been like for the Founding Fathers (sitting several hours for a portrait, and then transmitting it by carriage through muddy streets) and, to close, a scathing indictment of sexual-dysfunction medications and a hilarious send-up of movie sex.