By most measures, Hamilton has been a monster hit, raking in tens of millions of dollars and getting universally rave reviews. But Larry David has a new take on the Broadway show’s success: Liberals who see it are just going along with the crowd to seem “with it.”
In an interview with the Mike Lupica podcast, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star said that Hamilton, the hip-hop musical about the “$10 founding father” was “pretty amazing,” but that he had a feeling that “there are a lot of white people who are saying they are completely blown away even though they didn’t really understand half of the things the people on stage were saying.”
According to David, the liberals who saw the show praised it in polite company just to shore up their social justice bona fides, as though simply seeing Hamilton somehow connected them more deeply to people of different upbringings and backgrounds. He didn’t specify if there were any other characteristics that defined this group of people, though he seemed to think his theory explained the show’s popularity with “a lot of the people that are seeing it.”
If that’s true, then Hamilton is drawing in a surprising number of cultural fakers. The show has made more than $40 million in just nine months, and there’s a national tour (and probably a movie) on the horizon. David would know, though. In 2008 alone, Larry David gave more than $60,000 to liberal candidates.