Bill Maher revealed that he and Larry David are no longer friends one month after the comedian called out the Curb Your Enthusiasm star for critiquing Maher’s April meeting with President Donald Trump.
Maher gave an update on his friendship with David during an interview with The Free Press posted to YouTube on Monday. Host Maya Sulkin asked Maher if anything he’s said publicly has “cost him invites, friends, [or] anything of that nature,” to which Maher replied, “Fuck yeah.”
“I mean, Larry David certainly is not really my friend anymore,” Maher continued, adding that he no longer speaks to him, and David has not reached out.
“I said my piece on my last show. … I put him in my last editorial right before Thanksgiving,” Maher said, referring to the Nov. 21 episode of Real Time where he addressed David’s satirical New York Times essay titled “My Dinner With Adolf.” The piece mocks Maher’s comments about Trump, whom he called “gracious” and “measured,” following their meeting at the White House earlier this year.
Maher told Sulkin that he was “surprised” by David’s essay, but produced a “great clapback” on Real Time.
“You should watch it,” he told Sulkin about the segment, where he showed the headline of David’s piece while addressing “childish” and “purely emotional” critics. Maher called out David by name during the episode.
“The people who got all butt-hurt because I had dinner with [Trump]. You know, ’cause he’s Hitler. Except he’s not,” Maher said on Real Time. “So unhelpful and dumb. … Every year, I used to ask Larry David to do Real Time and he’d always say, ‘Bill, I can’t, I’m not smart enough about politics to do your show.’ Yeah, I get that now.”
Maher continued to defend his dinner with Trump during the episode, saying that those who refuse to engage with the president are “not serious people.”
“What exactly is the argument?” he questioned. “That by talking to Trump I’ll elevate him? Oh my god, don’t tell me he could become president.”
In David’s NYT op-ed, he wrote from the viewpoint of someone going to have dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939.
“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,” David penned. “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.”
