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"My Dinner with Adolph." Larry David skewers MAGA Bill Maher's defense of his Dinner with Donald [1]

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Date: 2025-04-21

"My Dinner with Adolph"

Larry David wrote a piece, "My Dinner with Adolph." On Monday, the New York Times published it . (Paywall should be down.) Although he never mentions Bill Maher by name, anyone paying attention knows that Maher was the target of David's satire. But just in case, the following is a refresher on how we got here. (Au courant readers can skip ahead to the section David's Commentary below.)

A mind lost to madness

Maher has lost the plot. He was once a humorous delight who tilted at America's mindless right. But Bill took a darker turn. It wasn't just his strange beef against parenting and children — I assume he had parents, and perhaps some childhood issues were bubbling up.

It wasn't even his tack to the right under the guise of 'bothsiderism.' Everyone is entitled to change their minds and are always free to speak. His audience is equally free to hang in there or turn the dial.

For me, the turn-off was his smug pomposity. His increasing self-regard. And his sanctimonious tone. His words dripped with scorn against people who disagreed with his big brain. They weren't just wrong; they were somehow deficient. Whatever. I stopped watching. And lost nothing by my decision.

Then I heard Maher had taken a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and broken bread with America's autocrat-in-waiting. Again, whatever. We all have relatives who were once indifferent to politics or even quite liberal, who were seduced by MAGA's sadistic charms. I guess that's how cults work. Maher was no more than one of them.

Sometime after his meal, Bill used a monologue on his show to justify his trip. He said there has to be something better than "hurling insults from 3,000 miles away." He called his critics "ridiculous". He downplayed the event's significance by saying it "wasn't a summit meeting.". He claimed that he was no more than a member of a group of "centrist-minded people, who think there has to be a better way of running this country than hating each other every minute."

There's much more. But I think the reader now has an idea of the defensive tone lurking behind the smug bravado. And I don't need to waste anyone's time with more of the same.

Winston Churchill knew Maher's kind. He is reputed to have said, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Did he? Who knows? But you can bet that he would have wished he had if he hadn't.

However, there is no doubt what Larry David thought of Maher's attempt to explain his meeting with malevolence.

David's commentary

Larry starts his Dinner with Adolph piece by echoing Bill's rationale for going:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world's most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. 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.

After some scene setting, David gets to the arrival of Hitler at the soirée:

He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. 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. 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.

Next the dinners get down to dinner. Hitler tells a joke about some dog with diarrhea and how he had to off it — Noem fashion — as David recalls in his account:

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.

David then shared he had gone through a bad breakup. Hitler was empathetic. Larry wrote:

I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, "You'd be surprised. There are still feelings." Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. 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.

All good things must come to an end. Larry's dinner with Adolph was no exception. He concludes:

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.

The brilliance of David's satire is that you do not have to listen to Maher rationalize his meeting with a monster. You can tell by what Larry wrote exactly what Maher had said.

Oy vey!

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