Not to shock everybody, but it looks like Larry David has gone and put his foot in his mouth by doing something that probably seemed relatively reasonable and inoffensive to him but seems appalling to us. You know, like he does on the show! Unfortunately, this one isn’t super funny, as David inexplicably took some time during a New York Times profile to say that he’s been reading Woody Allen’s new memoir Apropos Of Nothing—which was released in late March after getting dropped by its original publisher—and he thinks it’s pretty, pretty good. No, but seriously, he said that it’s “pretty great,” a “fantastic book,” and “so funny.” In fact, he likes it so much that he thinks “it’s hard to walk away after reading that book thinking that this guy did anything wrong.”
Ah yes, because if there’s one source we can definitely trust on whether or not Woody Allen abused his daughter when she was a child, it’s Woody Allen’s memoir. If you wanted to give David the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that he’s not saying he thinks Allen did nothing wrong, just that the book makes a compelling argument that Allen did nothing wrong, but that’s… not much better. David, of course, appeared in Allen’s 2009 movie Whatever Works, so it makes some sense that he’d follow Jeff Goldblum and Scarlett Johansson in sticking up for a guy he knows, but also he should probably know how a statement like that is going to be received. Then again, he is Larry David, so maybe he doesn’t care?
Anyway, the rest of the interview is the kind of likably misanthropic commentary we enjoy seeing from David, so maybe it’s not fair to blow one bit out of proportion. Then again, he also says that he thinks Bernie Sanders should drop out of the primaries and hand the Democratic nomination to Joe Biden, which is also not going to be an especially popular position, but maybe that means we should just chalk this all up to being the kind of “Larry David says whatever he’s thinking and doesn’t care who gets mad” shtick that we generally love him for.