Add Larry David to the list of celebrities who were put off by comedian Bill Maher’s friendly sit-down with President Trump.
In a New York Times opinion piece, “My Dinner with Adolf,” the Jewish creator of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” imagines a get-to-know-you meeting “at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.”
The narrator ends up being charmed by the Nazi leader. “I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion,” he gushes.
The essay doesn’t mention Maher, but in a newsletter Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy acknowledges that David proposed the article in response to Maher’s description of his recent meeting with Trump. Describing their dinner on his Max show “Real Time,” Maher said he found the president to be “gracious and measured” and hardly the “crazy person” he often seems on TV.
According to Healy, David sent him an unsolicited email suggesting his essay. Healy wrote that the Times seeks to avoid Nazi references in the essays it publishes, but felt David’s piece “is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing someone for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”
David joined other critics of Maher’s conciliatory description of his Trump meeting. “Bill is just the latest in a whole series of people who get had by the personal charm, if you will, of some really bad people,” said Democratic strategist James Carville on his “Politics War Room” podcast.
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In the David piece, the narrator banters amiably with Hitler, who laughs at his jokes. “I realized I’d never seen him laugh before,” he writes. “Suddenly he seemed so human.”
Maher said something similar about Trump in his monologue: “Just for starters, he laughs! I’ve never seen him laugh in public. But he does, including at himself. And it’s not fake.”
In his editor’s note, Healy writes that “David, in a provocation of his own, is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what they’re capable of.”
David, who skewered conservative policies on his long-running HBO show, has often used Nazi references in his satire. As a standup comedian, he would goad audiences by saying “The one thing about Hitler that I admire…” before suggesting that the dictator had no patience for stage magicians. He and Jerry Seinfeld created the “Soup Nazi” character on “Seinfeld,” and “Curb” featured a memorable clash between a Holocaust survivor and a contestant on the reality show “Survivor” who too considered himself a victim.
Such jokes have divided audiences, and even individual critics. In an essay criticizing David for a Holocaust joke he told while hosting “Satruday Night Live” in 2017, Jeremy Dauber praised the “Survivor” episode on “Curb.” “In that ‘Curb’ episode,” writes Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature at Columbia University, “David is searchingly moral, flaying a kind of ethical vacuity and historical relativism about the Holocaust.”
David’s piece is also reminiscent of a 2003 skit by the Jewish comedian Jon Stewart, who imagines Hitler being interviewed by the late Larry King, the ingratiating CNN talk show host.
In his Max monologue, Maher, who positions himself as a centrist truth-teller between political extremes, anticipates the blowback he was sure to receive as a result of his dinner with a deeply polarizing president. “You can hate me for it, but I’m not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know,” he said.