In addition to the Brooklyn bray, a bald head, and being in their 70s, Larry David may have had an even closer relationship to Bernie Sanders, whom he famously impersonated on several episodes of “Saturday Night Live.”
They were related. It’s included in an upcoming episode of “Finding Your Roots” and was revealed during a session for David’s returning “Curb Your Enthusiasm” at the TV Critics Association’s summer press tour.
Though he was peeved it was out of the bag (“They told me not to say anything”), he admitted, “he’s in the line, yeah.”
“I was very happy about that,” he said. “I thought there must have been some connection, you know.”
David said he went on the show to find out about his past. “I’m sure everybody’s curious about their roots. I am human, so I thought I thought that would be interesting to find out who my relatives were, who my ancestors were. And yeah, we traced all the lines and everything, and then they told me later on that Bernie Sanders was part of that line somehow, somewhere. Probably some distant cousin. I don’t know. Maybe a third cousin or something. I don’t know.”
But he enjoyed the connection. “I love Bernie.”
And it seemed so perfect, two years ago now, that David play Sanders on “SNL.”
“During the first debate between Bernie and Hillary, Lorne Michaels got emails and calls during the debate, telling him that I should be doing Bernie Sanders. And when the debate was over, [agent] Ari Emanuel called me up and said, ‘What did you think?’ “Every time I watch Bernie Sanders, I repeat everything that he’s saying because I know that I can talk like that. So I started talking to my Ari, the agent, I started talking to him like Bernie.
And he goes, ‘Oh, my God. You’ve got to do that,’ you know… He said, ‘You’ve got to put that on the Internet.’
“I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not me. I’m don’t do that.’ But it would be a good thing for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ not thinking in a million years” it would happen.
“He hung up immediately and called Lorne Michaels, and then they were both on the phone ten minutes later.”