Voltaire famously wrote, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

Bill Maher, on the other hand, never said, "If Donald Trump did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." But I suspect the fact that Trump entered politics — and actually became the Republican nominee for president — has made Maher's job, if not easier, than certainly a helluva lot of fun.

The 60-year old host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" is also an actor, filmmaker, critic and standup comic, and it was in that latter guise that he appeared Saturday night before a full house in the Grand Theater at Foxwoods.

If the fact that Maher focused the great majority of his 90-minute set spewing gleeful and scalpel-sharp rage on Trump surprised anyone in the hall, then surely those people spent the last year in a coma. Indeed, based on the crowd's favorable response — at times approaching the zeal of a Chautauqua tent revival — if Maher had spent any less time barbecuing Trump, I suspect fans would have been disappointed.

Striding onstage wearing an unbuttoned dress shirt over a black T, Maher called out, "Who's ready to make America great again?" and was off.

His capsule assessment of voters' choices: "On the one side, we have a hysterical woman, and on the other we have Hillary Clinton." He added, "Yes, I'm really for Hillary" but said he wasn't excited about it. "It's like getting a shot. You just do it." And, as if it wasn't already obvious, he remarked the debates have "made it clear that Donald Trump has the impulse control of a grease fire."

There was Maher's brutal but irresistible description of the sort of people who would vote for Trump. "I'm angry at the people who are angry. It's THOSE morons who have enabled this vile nincompoop to get one step from the presidency." Or, a description of Trump rallies as "a cross between a Klan meeting and a real estate seminar, like people who wanted to get into the tractor pull but didn't have the grades."

Maher saved a lot of his fireworks for Trump's treatment of women. Most of it can't be printed in a family newspaper — and that much of the obscenity factor sprang from Trump's own "locker room" synonym for female genitalia was also telling.

To be sure, Maher had plenty of negative things to say about Clinton's candidacy. "She campaigns like a hospice nurse and has a laugh like she tricked Snow White into biting a poisoned apple."

The pace of the show slowed down when Maher described, with minimal punch lines, the accomplishments of the Obama administration, then revisited older bits about radical Islam and his emphatic take that all religions are based on bad ideas.

There was a truly amusing bit about the Muslim teenager in Texas last year who was detained for building a clock that looked like a bomb — "because that's what bombs look like." And he closed his set with an overly-long take inspired by erectile dysfunction ads. Funny stuff, but it felt stale and tacked on after so much vicious energy. 

r.koster@theday.com