Larry David > Bill Maher
Larry David Is a National Treasure Whose Veracity, Wit and Wisdom We Need More Than Ever
I want to celebrate Harvard University for not bending its knee to the Mump-Nazi Reich. Until May 31, I am offering faculty, staff and students with an .edu e-mail 50% off forever.
I hope more educational institutions, especially those in higher education, learn from Harvard’s and history’s example of colleges and universities remaining bold against tyranny and autocracy.
For all of The New York Times' failures to cover political news with truth and courage, its editorial page editor at least had the sense to publish Larry David’s phenomenal op-ed “My Dinner with Adolf” last Monday. This op-ed should be nominated for and win a Pulitzer.
David’s brilliant satire would have made Mark Twain proud. Demonstrating a comedic bravery and uniqueness that Bill Maher only dreams to have, David skewered Maher’s sycophantic and idiotic take on Useful Idiot Krasnov following his White House dinner with the felon-in-chief.
Like the felon-in-chief’s cult members, craven cabinet and dimwitted advisors, Maher found the felon-in-chief charming. He exclaimed the felon-in-chief is genuine, “self aware.” and, most of all, misunderstood.
“I’ve never seen him laugh in public, but he does, including at himself, and it’s not fake,” Maher told his Real Time audience after his visit. “Believe me, as a comedian of 40 years, I know a fake laugh when I hear it.”
Do you though, Bill?
Sorry not sorry, Bill. Like millions of others, you were nothing but a mark. Unlike you, David sees who the felon-in-chief is and has always been.
Emma Brooks of The Guardian wrote in her column after Maher’s visit:
Trump chose his target well, promoting the encounter as a robust piece of engagement with a foe – “a man who has been unjustifiably critical of anything, or anyone, TRUMP”, posted the president before the meeting – when in fact Maher’s been a creepy little men’s rights guy dispensing fat jokes and gags for some time that turn on the punchline “retarded”. He’s not Stephen Colbert or even Bill Burr, and it’s significant that Trump hasn’t, for example, taken up Jon Stewart’s offer to publicly debate him. Instead, this meeting, apparently “brokered” by Kid Rock, was another example of Trump’s ability to spot an easy mark. “That’s how it went down, make of it what you will,” said Maher whimsically, and what people have made of it is that Bill Maher’s an idiot.
Maher is only the starkest example of a general softening since January of the cultural resistance to Trump.
Not that he would ever admit he'd been conned. Maher's ego and narcissism won't permit it. His own narcissism never stood a chance against the felon-in-chief’s much stronger malignant narcissism.
The stink Maher claims sticks to people who support, work with and defend the felon-in-chief has now attached itself to him. Forever will he reek of it. No amount of tomato juice can strip this foul odor.
Maher refuses to recognize the same authoritarian playbook Hitler used. In real time, the felon-in-chief has inflicted cruelty and destruction upon immigrants, African Americans, women, international students, Muslims, and dissidents. His unbound evil even deported a four-year old who is not only a U.S. citizen but battling stage-4 cancer.
Typing that last sentence physically sickens me.
The ironic gravy coating Maher’s dimwittedness is that despite an ivy-league education from Cornell University, he demonstrates no critical thinking and analytical ability. Though Keith Olbermann would tell me I’m giving too much thought toward and credit to Maher.
Instead Olbermann argues Maher is a self-serving creep without moral principles. Olbermann graduated from Cornell a year ahead of Maher. He recounted on his Countdown podcast last year an unpleasant encounter with Maher when they were students.
On his April 12 Twitter post, Olbermann wrote:
The felon-in-chief is not just a con-man and a malignant narcicisst. He’s a psychopath. Especially terrifying is the felon-in-chief's choice of reading material.
According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article written by Marie Brenner, when the felon-in-chief was married to Ivana Trump he “{[read] a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he [kept] in a cabinet by his bed ... Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist."
Maher’s legacy is not his comedy. It is his sanewashing of Hitler 2.0.
A decade before Maher’s latest self-own, the late Norm Macdonald recognized Maher’s shallowness and lack of talent. Macdonald never found Maher funny. Most striking was that he pointed out Maher is not as smart as he believes himself to be.
“One time Bill Maher was on Meet the Press [sic], and it was hilarious. George Will like tore into him, because once you get in with the big boys who actually do it for a living, it doesn’t matter what you know,“ Macdonald told Seth Abramovitch of The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “George Will had huge contempt for him and was slapping him around, and suddenly Bill Maher wasn’t confident at all anymore. It was really funny to watch.”
Later Abramovitch corrected later that Maher and Will instead appeared together on ABC’s This Week.
Lack of expertise and mediocre comedic talent fail to arrest Maher’s boisterous pride and condescension. Instead they magnify them and his sanctimony.
Because Maher is so limited with emotional and cognitive intelligence, I was not surprised David responded as he always has to arrogant mediocrity and obtuseness. Years ago, like his “Larry David” character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, David called Trump sycophant Alan Dershowitz “disgusting” not only to his face but in public while on Martha’s Vineyard.
Behold this sampling from the glorious and genius “My Dinner with Adolf”:
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.
. . . .
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.
. . . .
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. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. 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.
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.
Clearly David ’s acuity inflicted a narcissistic injury upon Maher’s thin skin—something he shares with the felon-in-chief.
David provoked Maher to defend himself. Because he’s insecure, Maher whined to the equally obnoxious Piers Morgan that David insulted the six million Jews who died in The Holocaust.
Something tells me it was not David who insulted the 6 million Holocaust victims. Maher also managed to insult the non-Jewish people killed by the Nazis:
Approximately three million Soviet prisoners of war
Approximately 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles
Between a quarter milllion and half million Romani
Over 310,000 Serbs
Between a quarter million to 300,000 people with disabilities including children
Tens of thousands political opponents and dissidents
Approximately 35,000 criminals and people deemed “asocial,” i.e., lesbians, transgender women and men, sex workers
Approximately 1,700 Jehovah Witnesses
Approximately hundreds or thousands of gay and bisexual men
Possibly hundreds of Black men, women and children
I’m positive Maher’s reaction doesn’t phase David. As David told The New Yorker’s David Remnick a decade ago, the humorist S.J. Pearlman argued that"the office of humor is to offend.”
Unlike David, Maher’s comedic offensiveness does not and will never reach David’s superior farcical brilliance. His wisdom and wit will not only shepherd us through this valley of death but spotlight self-serving blowhards and quislings like Bill Maher.
Yes!