Add Larry David to the list of celebrities who were put off by comedian Bill Maher’s friendly sitdown 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.
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.”
In a segment on “Real Time,” Washington Post global security analyst Josh Rogin told Maher he was a “prop” in Trump’s “PR stunt.”
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.
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.
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