Larry David has written a long spoof essay in theNew York Timesin response to Bill Maher’s recent glowing account of his dinner with President Trump in the White House.
The essay, entitled My Dinner With Adolf, purports to be written by someone who was “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”. But he agrees to dine with the Führer because he “concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side”.
The dinner proves an eye-opening success, with the author much tickled by Hitler’s jokes, struck by his warmth and humanity and impressed by his skills as an agony uncle. As he leaves, he tells Hitler he’s pleased he came. “‘Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.’ And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
The late-night pundit Bill Maher had dinner with the president on 31 March, and many predicted it would have been a combative meeting. Both men have been frank about this dislike of each other, with Trump calling Maher a “lowlife” and his show “dead”.
But on the 11 April episode of his show, Real Time, Maher described the president as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”.
“Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy,” said Maher. “He mostly steered the conversation to, ‘What do you think about this?’ I know: your mind is blown. So is mine.”
He added: “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up. It’s just not as fucked up as I thought it was.”
In his essay, David closely mirrors Maher’s tone, saying that one of his own jokes “amused him to no end, and I realised I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard – the public Hitler. 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.”
He details a joke Hitler makes about his dog having diarrhoea, as well as an even more amusing follow-up: “Then a beaming Hitler said, ‘Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night – and believe me, there were plenty.
“But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself.”
David’s essay was accompanied by an article by New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy, who confirmed the origins of the spoof.
“Larry listened to Bill Maher talk about his recent dinner with Trump,” Healy wrote. “Bill, a comedian Larry respects, said in a monologue on his Max show that he found the president to be ‘gracious and measured’ compared with the man who attacks him on Truth Social. Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”
David has previously written several spoof articles concerning Trump for the New York Times, including anaccountof his meeting with Russian agents in June 2016, and a 3amconversationbetween Trump and his wife, Melania, about the future of Ukraine.
David has also made multiple guest appearances on Saturday Night Live as the Democratic senator and one-time presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, to whom it emerged he was distantly related.