Bill Maher does not approve of Larry David’s satirical “My Dinner With Adolf” essay.
The Curb Your Enthusiasm creator wrote a satirical piece for The New York Times, which published on Monday, in response to Maher’s early April White House visit with President Donald Trump. The Real Time host slammed David’s article on Thursday, stating that it was “insulting to six million dead Jews” for him to satirically joke about visiting Hitler and enjoying his company in the piece.
“To use the Hitler thing — first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews,” he said during an interview with Piers Morgan. “That should kind of be in its own place.”
Maher argued against David invoking Hitler. He continued, “It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil. We’re just going to have to leave it like that.”
In David’s “My Dinner With Adolf” essay, he satirically recalled having dinner “with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.” He added, “I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’ But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”
The guest essay pulled similar verbiage from Maher’s visit with Trump and Kid Rock. During an April 11 episode of Real Time, the host said the president was “gracious and measured,” and not like the “person who plays a crazy person on TV.”
During the visit, Maher said, he “never felt I had to walk on eggshells around” the president. He added, “Honestly, I voted for [Bill] Clinton and [Barack] Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down, make of it what you will.”
With respect to David’s essay, Maher said that this “wasn’t my favorite moment of our friendship,” adding that “nobody has been harder, and more prescient I must say, about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to a rep for David for comment.
However, he didn’t completely write off reconciling with David amid the turmoil.
“I don’t want to make this constantly personal with me and Larry. We might be friends again,” Maher explained. “I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it. Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.”
