Larry David still isn’t over his distaste for Bill Maher’s visit to the White House, their mutual friend Jerry Seinfeld confirmed.
For a profile of Maher tied to his Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Seinfeld told The New York Times that David and Maher have yet to bury the hatchet.
Maher’s praise of Trump following his dinner with the president last March prompted David to skewer him with a satirical essay for the Times called My Dinner with Adolf. Maher hit back, telling Piers Morgan in an interview following the essay’s publication, “The minute you play the Hitler card, you’ve lost the argument,” and calling the essay “an insult to six million dead Jews.”
Seinfeld, who has been friends with both Maher and his Seinfeld co-creator David since the late 1970s, told the Times, “They both got kind of bugged out” during the altercation, and shared little hope that the two would reconcile any time soon.
That said, he added, “Their friendship doesn’t really do anything for me.”
Maher’s rift with David came up as his profile revisited his back-and-forth with Trump over the years, which culminated in the White House’s attempt to block his Mark Twain Award.
According to the Times, despite declaring that Maher’s selection as this year’s recipient, which places him on the lauded list of comedians with last year’s recipient Conan O’Brien as well as Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Tina Fey, was “fake news,” Trump approved Netflix’s selection personally.
That revelation came directly from Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, whose streamer has had the most sway in who gets the Kennedy Center award since it became the official broadcaster in 2024. It also comes after Maher said Trump felt “betrayed” that their now-infamous dinner didn’t result in kinder coverage on his shows afterward.
Maher insisted to the Times that critics of his commentary are too trapped in their ideological bubbles to see that his critiques of both political leanings are “uniquely filling a niche.”
As for why he uses more of his airtime between his Club Random podcast and his HBO show Real Time to slam “wokeness” and “cancel culture” rather than the right’s latest moves, Maher told the publication, “I mean, I only have one hour a week.”
