At the Fox Theatre on Thursday night, comedian Bill Maher imagined what his critics must say about him.

“There goes Bill Maher, hating America first,” he said. “But I don’t hate America first. I have my coffee, burn an American flag, perform five abortions, and then I hate America.”

He was joking, of course.

As political — or politically incorrect — as Maher’s material got during his nearly two-hour set, funny always came first. Among his topics were the recession (“Don’t you miss the days when America was just morally bankrupt?”) and financier Bernie Madoff’s fraud plot, which Maher called “the worst pyramid scheme for the Jews since the pyramids.”

Maher had some fun at the new president’s expense, noting that “Obama has only been in office about 75 days and dropped $2 trillion. Is that black enough for you?”

But he laid a heavier hand on Republicans, who, he said, buried the country in debt only to suddenly worry about spending tax dollars on infrastructure.

“Like it’s a big liberal thing to want to get across the river in one piece,” Maher said.

The host of “Real Time” on HBO also went after former President George W. Bush, recalling Obama’s use of a quote by Voltaire.

“Voltaire, who George Bush thinks is a Harry Potter character,” he said.

At the same time, Maher said that Obama has already made some mistakes as president.

“He’s not some infallible chocolate Jesus,” he said. “That’s Kanye West.”

Maher, who last year released the documentary film “Religulous,” riffed on the creation myths of various faiths. “I’ve been high a lot in my life, but I’ve never come up with (anything) like that,” he said.

Other targets included the food and pharmaceutical industries (“Other countries have socialized medicine, we have the Nasonex bee,” he said) and the gullibility of many Americans who believe “anything you write on the Internet is true if you don’t add LOL.”

As he is on TV and film, Maher’s standup was intelligent, sometimes mercilessly caustic and deeply thought-provoking.

The bottom line, though, is that it was also very funny.