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IT ONLY TAKES a few seconds of watching Bill Maher to realize that this is a man who relishes the role of contrarian. He was famously fired from his show, Politically Incorrect, in 2001 after he argued that the 9/11 hijackers should not be labeled as “cowards,” a comment deemed insensitive at the time. But this was hardly a career killer: Maher bounced back with several comedy specials, railing against everything from George W. Bush to restless leg syndrome, and in 2003 resurrected Incorrect’s roundtable discussion format with HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. This month Maher sets his comedic sights higher with Religulous. We sat down with the iconoclast to find out just what makes religion funny. Say your prayers….

LOS ANGELES CONFIDENTIAL: What was the genesis, no pun intended, for making this film?
BILL MAHER: It’s certainly a film I’ve been trying to make for many years. I’ve been talking about this subject on television since 1993; when Politically Incorrect started, it was one of the first issues I was thrilled to be able to get to. So it’s been a long time coming. I always thought this would be a funny type of documentary movie, and I could never find the right director. It finally came together when I found Larry Charles.

LAC: Why did you feel he was the right director?
BM: One, he’s a comedy director. I mean, he had just done Borat and he had done Seinfeld. We had a very similar sensibility about humor and he and I are exactly simpatico about how we feel about religion.

LAC: And how do you feel?
BM: I detest it!

LAC: What do you ascribe that emotion to? Was it how you were raised?
BM: No! It’s not emotional. The religious people always try to cast me as a bitter former Catholic, and I always say, “That’s not the case, I was raised Catholic but I was never abused and I’m a little insulted.” [Laughs] It’s really two-pronged: There’s an emotional element to it but it’s not personal. Intellectually, rationally, I honestly believe religion is a skin that mankind needs to shed if it’s going to have any chance of surviving in the 21st century and beyond.

LAC: In the film you travel around the world debating with religious leaders and the faithful. Why that format?
BM: Well, we wanted to go on a journey to religious places, so we started out in Jerusalem. The first thing I said, in the treatment I had written, was that if you’re going to start off anywhere you’ve got to go to Jerusalem. It’s the most holy city; three faiths are there. I never saw this as a television documentary. It’s not something I was interested in selling to PBS or HBO. I wanted this to be, for a documentary, a fairly high-budget, rollicking-Saturdaynight, let’s-go-to-laugh kind of movie. We didn’t want to just interview Bill Moyers and call it a day.

LAC: What did you hope to accomplish with it?
BM: Mostly to make an entertaining film, to make a comedy, because the subject of religion, and what religions believe, is a giant load of silly in the middle of the room. I mean, talk about an elephant in the room that no one’s ever pointing to or laughing at but really is so funny…. If you can get people to just strip away the fact that they’ve become used to this their whole life and see it anew, through virgin eyes, and say, “Really? Life started in a garden 5,000 years ago with a talking snake? And on Sunday you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space God?” This is funny, funny stuff.

LAC: So the emperor has no clothes?
BM: Yeah! It’s like, hello? I know we all pretend this is sacred, and we don’t laugh at it anymore, but we should laugh at it, because if you go back to square one and try to forget for a second that this is holy… it’s not holy. It’s silly. Extremely silly.

LAC: But how do you poke fun at religion without mocking it?
BM: I always say, and I think it’s true of this film, “I don’t make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.” All I have to do is lay it bare. As far as mocking people, I don’t think we’re pointing fingers, trying to belittle people. I think one reason it’s done so extraordinarily well in the screenings and people have liked it so much is because it does have a good attitude…. Really what I say in the movie, and what I believe, is that I don’t know what happens when you die. People say to me sometimes, “It could be Jesus, couldn’t it?” Yeah, it could be… and it could be Furby. It could be the lint that lives in my navel. I don’t know!

LAC: But how do you poke fun at religion without mocking it?
BM: I always say, and I think it’s true of this film, “I don’t make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.” All I have to do is lay it bare. As far as mocking people, I don’t think we’re pointing fingers, trying to belittle people. I think one reason it’s done so extraordinarily well in the screenings and people have liked it so much is because it does have a good attitude…. Really what I say in the movie, and what I believe, is that I don’t know what happens when you die. People say to me sometimes, “It could be Jesus, couldn’t it?” Yeah, it could be… and it could be Furby. It could be the lint that lives in my navel. I don’t know!

LAC: Did you have a favorite moment or subject during the filming?
BM: There’s this one guy, Jesus Miranda. He believes he’s the Second Coming of Jesus and says he’s got a million followers around South America, Latin America, and Miami, where we interviewed him. He’s a piece of work. I love him because he had this twinkle in his eye and little laugh, he reminded me of Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld episodes where you can see that he’s actually breaking up in the middle of the scene. You see him actually losing it and not staying in character, that’s what this guy reminded me of. He can almost not stop himself from laughing at his own story. That endeared him [to me] a lot.

LAC: What kind of blowback do you expect after the film’s release?
BM: There will definitely be people who don’t like it—religious people! I also think folks will be surprised at how many people are like I was some years ago, in the sense that they’re not particularly religious or antireligious. It’s just not something they think about a hell of a lot. If they would think about it a little bit, even for the 90 minutes that they’re watching this movie, I think we could turn a lot of heads.

Religulous opens October 3.