Larry David delivered a very thinly veiled attack on fellow comedian Bill Maher on Monday with a scathing satirical essay in The New York Times titled “My Dinner With Adolf.”
The star and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm—who appeared on Maher’s long-running HBO show Real Time just once in 2003 and then never again—penned the fictional piece about getting invited to dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 that paralleled the way Maher has spoken about his recent dinner with Donald Trump beat for beat.
“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,” David writes, echoing Maher’s comments about his years as a Trump critic. “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.”
Maher first revealed he would be having dinner with Trump at the White House last month, explaining that the meeting had been arranged by their mutual friend Kid Rock.
“Now, I don’t have some sort of complex where I think I can heal America, I can’t. OK, let’s get that clear. I’m not going to be healing America,” Maher said on his podcast before the meeting. “But if two guys who’ve been at each other for so long—I mean, it’s kind of a Nixon to China thing. I have the credentials. There was nobody who was harder on Trump or more prescient about the fact that he wasn’t going to leave office voluntarily than I was.”
David goes on to describe the imagined meeting with Hitler, who he says he found “quite disarming” and was proud to crack up with a joke about his tan suit. “I realized I’d never seen him laugh before,” he writes. “Suddenly he seemed so human.”
Maher too boasted about making Trump laugh, telling viewers, “I had never seen him laugh in public. But he does. At himself. And it’s not fake.”
“Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard—the public Hitler,” David continues. “But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”
Kid Rock notably said Maher’s “mind was blown” after the dinner.
Similarly, Maher said Trump was more “gracious and measured” than he thought he would be. “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” Maher declared. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f—ed up. It’s just not as f—ed up as I thought it was.”
Ultimately, David concludes of Hitler, “We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.”
At the end of the fake meal, Hitler tells David, “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.”
The comedian replies, “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” The kicker? “And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
Maher has been widely criticized—as he knew he would be—for not just breaking bread with Trump but falling victim to his apparent charms. But no one has taken him on as relentlessly, and with as much pointed humor, as David has here. And he didn’t even have to say his name.
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