Larry David Pens Satirical “My Dinner With Adolf” Essay, Mocking Bill Maher’s White House Visit – The Hollywood Reporter
2025-04-23T01:24:54Z
“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,” David jokes in his guest essay f…
Larry David has penned a satirical essay, titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” for The New York Times, mocking Bill Maher’s recent White House visit with President Donald Trump.
In the opinion piece, the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator-star imagined it was 1939 and that he had been invited to dinner “with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.” David joked, “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. 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.”
“I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like,” David added. “That amused him to no end, and I realized 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.”
The Seinfeld co-creator’s guest essay came weeks after Maher met with Trump. Following his visit, the comedian and longtime foe of the president detailed the dinner on his HBO show, Real Time and shared his new perspective on Trump, calling him “gracious and measured” and not like the “person who plays a crazy person on TV.”
“The guy I met is not the person who the night before the dinner shit tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this was a bad idea and what a deranged asshole I was,” Maher said at the time. “I read it and thought, ‘Oh, what a lovely way to welcome someone to your house.’ But when I got there, that guy wasn’t living there.”
The comedian added that he learned “a crazy person doesn’t live in the White House” during the meeting. However, he said, “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 spoofing the dinner, David concluded, “Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. ‘I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.’ ‘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.’ And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy also wrote a companion piece, detailing how David’s essay came about, as well as clarifying that he wasn’t comparing Trump to Hitler.
“Larry listened to Bill Maher talk about his recent dinner with Trump; 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,” Healy wrote. “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.”
He added, “Larry 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 that person is capable of.”
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