Bill Maher has come in for tons of criticism since he opted to have dinner with President Donald Trump, but none of it was as biting as a recent takedown by "Seinfeld" creator Larry David.
In an essay for the New York Times called "My Dinner With Adolf," David took Maher to task for attempting to soften the image of a fascist strongman. While David never mentions the "Real Time" host by name, the timing of the piece and its main character's need to hear out all sides past the point of ludicrousness make the target clear.
David's fictional meeting with Adolf Hitler echoes many of the points that Maher has made in the days since he dined with Trump. Maher, a crochety liberal-leaning comic who has grown more crochety and less liberal as societal norms have passed him by, marvelled at the fact that he could make the commander-in-chief laugh.
"I’ve never seen him laugh in public. But he does, including at himself. And it’s not fake," Maher said of Trump. "Believe me, as a comedian of 40 years, I know a fake laugh when I hear it."
Standing in front of the führer, David's narrator has a similar epiphany.
“Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard—the public Hitler,” David wrote. “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.”
David ends the piece with the clueless narrator missing the fact that he's been played. While he still thinks of himself as a critic of history's greatest monster, he snaps a smart salute to Hitler all the same.
”'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,'" he says before Sieg Heil-ing in the Berlin night.
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