On last week’s episode of the HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David once again has loud hate-sex with Shara—the anti-Israel Palestinian-Muslim woman of “Palestinian Chicken” fame—this time in exchange for her setting up a life-or-death meeting between him and an Iranian government representative.
During the sex scene, Shara (who in the previous season wanted to “fuck the Jew out of” Larry) presses him to talk dirty and "blaspheme to me like you blasphemed to the Nation of Islam!" Larry’s replies by rattling off names of political figures who have come in and out of Trump-world: "Donald Trump, Steven Bannon, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Mitch McConnell… RUDY GIULIANI!!” Larry screams as he powerfully orgasms.
According to the show’s executive producer, the scene had to be redone multiple times due to the high rate of firings, ouster, and resignation from Trump’s young, chaotic administration. (Casualties which, of course, included chief strategist Bannon.)
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Bannon, who once tried to make it in Hollywood years before he became famous in conservative media and Republican politics, claims he hasn’t had time to watch the humorous hate-sex sequence, yet. Regardless, he’s still flattered.
“I heard [about it] ; no watch no time; larry david a genius,” [sic] Bannon texted The Daily Beast on Saturday evening. The Breitbart chairman had spent the day going between his speech at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC, and delivering a keynote address at Focus on the Family founder James Dobson’s private gathering in Colorado Springs.
In the past, President Trump’s former chief strategist and 2016 campaign CEO has been acutely aware of pop-cultural representations of himself. Ever since the advent of Trumpism significantly raised his national profile, Bannon has been represented on Saturday Night Live (as Trump’s “Grim Reaper” who fights “globalist cucks”) and South Park, and was recently name-checked in Eminem’s anti-Trump rap. In response to Eminem’s diss, Bannon told Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green that "Honey badger don't give a shit."
Sources close to Bannon have told The Daily Beast over the past year that Bannon regularly gets a kick out of his recent cameos in satire and popular culture, and had even emailed friends excitedly about his South Park rendering late last year.
An HBO rep for Curb Your Enthusiasm show did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story—but it is safe to assume that the affection between Bannon and David is not mutual.
Earlier this year, David told the New Yorker for a piece on Bannon’s Hollywood days, that “I don’t think I ever heard of him until he surfaced with the Trump campaign and I had no idea that he was profiting from the work of industrious Jews!”
David was cheekily referring to allegations of anti-Semitism against Bannon (which the Breitbart chairman has repeatedly denied), and the irony that Bannon still gets money from Seinfeld.
After Bannon left his job at Goldman Sachs, he founded his own firm, called Bannon & Co., in 1990. In his time at his eponymous firm, he helped negotiate the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to Ted Turner, according to a Bloomberg profile. Because Seinfeld was produced by Castle Rock, the deal made Bannon a sudden stakeholder in the TV series, which at the time was not the incredibly popular moneymaker we know today. Residuals from the show, and its reruns in syndication, have helped keep Bannon rich. (His Seinfeld money is paid via the French financial services company Société Générale, which acts as an intermediary.)
Late last year, The Daily Beast contacted several former Seinfeld writers, none of whom seemed pleased about the strange twist of fate. “Jesus. No comment,” one texted.
Bannon’s history with the entertainment industry went far beyond accidental Seinfeld money. Starting last year after his official appointment to lead the Trump campaign, The Daily Beast was the first to unearth several of his film scripts and outlines, including his 2006 Shakespearean rap musical about the 1992 L.A. riots. This batch of screenplays also included his adaptation of Shakespeare’s blood-drenched tragedy Titus Andronicus, with his version set “on the moon with [alien] creatures,” according to his past co-writer, and featuring a sex scene set in outer space.
His former Hollywood writing partner, Julia Jones, said on Saturday that Bannon’s expressed appreciation for Larry David’s comedy actually surprised her. “Steve? Comedy? LOL. Never!!! He was all about ideas, philosophers, war and HISTORY,” she messaged The Daily Beast. Back in the day, according to Jones’s recollection, Bannon “didn’t [even] watch TV, except for news. CNN.”
—With additional reporting by Lachlan Markay
