After Fatwa! turns him into a target, a disguise-wearing Larry seeks the counsel of the author, who famously had an actual fatwa put out on him in the 1980s because that Ayatollah found The Satanic Verses blasphemous. "Yeah, it is all those things, it can be scary, can be bewildering, etcetera," Rushdie tells him. "But there are things that you gain. There are a lot of women who are attracted to you in this condition. You are a dangerous man. There are many beautiful women who like that... It's not exactly you, it's the fatwa wrapped around you, like kind of sexy pixie dust."
But the key, Rushdie insists, is to own it and "fatwa sex will follow."
Married four times, most recently to Padma Lakshmi before they divorced in 2007, maybe he wasn't entirely riffing for the sake of ridiculousness.