Ted Danson sighs. “Larry David? Now he is not funny.” The actor best known as Sam in Cheers plays himself as a regular character in Larry David’s offbeat sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. “He is manipulative, does not even write the scripts — he’s the laziest human being on the planet. He stayed in our guesthouse when he was getting divorced two years ago and we could not get rid of him. Literally. We used to call him Larry the Lodger.”
Ten minutes later, Larry David stumbles over in person, dressed in black and looking exactly as he does on screen — a groovy rabbi. “Danson says you’re the laziest man in the world,” I say. “That bum,” David barks. “He’s not with me when all these scripts are prepared. I’m the guy who makes him look good.” But he says you stayed over when divorcing from your committed environmentalist wife, Laurie? “Yeah, but first I went home and turned all the lights on,” he grins.
Of course, Danson is wrong — deliberately so. C’mon, this is Hollywood. He was ribbing. David may actually be the funniest man on the planet. He is, at least, a comedy master. (“Master?” He looks scornful when I say this. “I am not a comedy master.”) With Jerry Seinfeld, he devised, wrote and produced Seinfeld — still the most successful sitcom in history, famously based on the concept of “a show about nothing”. Of the show’s four regulars, the smart Seinfeld fan always loved George, the atavistic, solipsistic and egotistic version of Larry David.
After the series finished in 1998, David wrote and directed the movie Sour Grapes, then — initially as a one-off stand-up special — created Curb Your Enthusiasm for HBO, in which he seems to play himself, a retired sitcom millionaire coping with the eccentricities of LA life. David’s character, confusingly called Larry David, is the human id fully grown. What he wants, he tries to take. What he thinks, he says. And what he doesn’t like, he pretty much makes plain — although he attempts the occasional awkward evasion to fit in with social convention, which always leads to fresh nail-biting humiliation. Meeting a deaf woman, for instance, he accidentally signs vicious insults to her. Then, when attempting to make up with her, he happens to have his neighbour’s pest exterminator with him — it’s a long story — and the man mistakes her chihuahua for a rat, bludgeoning it to death in front of her horrified, screaming face. Later, walking down Sunset Boulevard, a beautiful woman tells him: “Hey, smile!” “Hey, mind your own business,” he replies. “How about that?”
“That’s based on real life,” he nods. “When I was walking around New York in a foul mood, people would always say, ‘Cheer up.’ Why would you say that to someone? What if I yelled, ‘I just found out I’ve got cancer’?” For a second, he looks regretful. “I should have put that in the show.”
David’s delight in the minutiae of embarrassment and the epic, insensate fury the tiniest irritations can produce in all of us has shaped modern comedy perhaps more than any other single influence. With Seinfeld and Curb, he begat everything from American shows such as Friends, Everybody Hates Chris and Sex and the City to British offerings such as The Office, Marion and Geoff, Peep Show and even Outnumbered. Ricky Gervais, Ben Stiller, Steve Coogan and Woody Allen are professed fans; Stiller, Mel Brooks, Shelley Berman, David Schwimmer, Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen have appeared in Curb. Woody Allen has even cast David as the lead in his latest movie, Whatever Works, because he loved the show so much.
Is there any difference between the real-life Larry and the on-screen Larry?
A: He’s a person I would like to be.
Q: How’s that?
A: Well, he’s honest; he’s not shackled by all these social conventions like the rest of us are. He says what he thinks. I don’t think he’s a mean person, or even a curmudgeon. In fact, I am sort of melding with the character as time goes on.
Q: The character is changing you?
A: Yes. The character is changing me.
Q: Is that like therapy?
A: Yes, I love the Curb Larry, and I’ve always hated this Larry, so I’m becoming a little happier.
Q: Where do you come up with the ideas?
A: I don’t know, I just… I’ll look at my daughter’s doll and think to myself, this doll could use a haircut. And if I did cut the hair, what would happen? Oh, boy, my daughter would be really upset. And I can see that could be really funny. [It was: see the Curb episode called The Doll, from season two.]
Q: Have you cut off your daughter’s doll’s hair?
A: No. I love my daughters. Most of the TV shows they watch, I’ll watch just to spend time with them. So I watch Gossip Girl.
Q: Do you like it?
A: No, not especially, but I can see why they do. I’ve watched Hannah Montana… I mean, you can’t believe what I’ve had to watch. I told my daughter just the other day, “Do you know how much I love you? I sat through Rugrats in Paris. Okay?”
Q: Do they watch your show?
A: I didn’t let them for a long time, because it was inappropriate. Now they can watch it, they don’t have any interest in it. They’ve never been fans of the show, and they’re not fans of their father. I have to edit my show every day for six hours — it’s brutal, to tell you the truth. I look horrible. I just can’t believe people would watch me. It’s grotesque. I can’t even laugh at it, it’s too horrifying.
Q: Does that explain the title?
A: Yes. I mean, who likes enthusiasm? It’s sickening, isn’t it? To see enthusiastic people when you’re miserable. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to ask “How’s everything?” and hear: “Fabulous! Things are fantastic! I feel great!” No. You want to hear: “Ehhhh, you know.”
With anyone else, the downbeat misanthropy would feel like shtick. In a world of professionally morose funnymen, however, David seems like the real deal. His route to the top was not just accidental, it was wilfully perverse. His almost-first gig was when, while working as a bra salesman, he tried to gate-crash the stage at a New York comedy club because he couldn’t believe how bad the guy telling the jokes actually was. When he was working the circuit a few years later, much of his material went over the heads of the two-drink-minimum Saturday-night crowd. One evening, he stepped on stage, surveyed the audience in silence for a few minutes, sighed, said “This isn’t going to work”, then walked right off.
“People say to me, ‘Is he really like that?’,” muses Jerry Seinfeld, whom I meet a few weeks later when he is in Europe to promote a new venture. “Maybe it’s because I’m a comedian and he’s a comedian, but I don’t see anything in him that seems odd. That’s normal to me. Everybody else is odd. He’s one of my favourite people in life that I’ve ever met.”
He recalls their working relationship as perfection, but that can’t be entirely true. During Seinfeld’s fourth season, there was a running story about how the real Jerry and Larry actually pitched the show Seinfeld to NBC (although clearly Larry is George, played by Jason Alexander. Keep up). At the height of the meeting, George butts into Jerry’s desperate pitch, insisting: “It’s a show about nothing. It’s just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read.”
“You read? You read on the show?” the NBC exec says, aghast. “Well, why am I watching it?”
“Because it’s on TV,” George barks, testily, brushing aside Jerry’s plaintive “Well, we won’t have reading…” “Okay, look,” George storms, “if you want to just keep on doing the same old thing, then maybe this idea is not for you. I, for one, am not going to compromise my artistic integrity. And I’ll tell you something else: this is the show, and we’re not going to change it.” NBC throw them out then and there.
Was there more than a grain of truth to this scene? “Umm, sort of, yeah,” David smiles wanly. “Seinfeld was pitched as a one-camera show, like Curb, but that was ‘no sale’. Like in the scene. And that’s when I said, ‘This is not the show!’ I looked at one of the guys from the production company and he was going, ‘Jesus Christ, who is this guy? What the hell?’ And I’m there yelling, ‘This is not the show!’” Of course, the show was made — the first to command $1m ad slots, the third-highest-rating finale in history, yada yada yada. For those millions of Seinfeld fans, the seventh season of Curb, already airing in America and here next week, includes a full-scale Seinfeld reunion. “I always said we would never do that, it’s a lame idea,” David admits. “Then I thought it might be very funny to do that, on Curb.”
written by stephen armstrong – the times oct 09
“Those two episodes of Curb really belong in the Seinfeld DVD box set,” Seinfeld explains. “We actually did one more episode — and it’s a great one. Although it was a little odd. We would be rehearsing a scene, and we would forget it was actually a scene in Curb. Larry would come on the set like he always did and say, ‘You know, I think it would be funnier if you stand over here and she stands over there.’ Then, in the next take, we would do that, and he would say, ‘No, no, no — you don’t actually do that. The point is, I tell you to do that.’ Ah, of course, it isn’t Seinfeld, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was like three-level chess.”
It’s that improvised element that adds the real docu-soap feel to Curb. David sketches out scenes, but the actors vamp the lines themselves. “My first big scene, the only direction Larry gave me — no script, mind — was ‘Rip Jeff a new asshole’,” explains Susie Essman, who plays the foul-mouthed wife of Larry’s best friend, Jeff. “I thought, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ After the first take, he pulls me aside and says, ‘You’re not going for it. Make fun of Jeff’s fat.’ I said, ‘He’s my friend, I can’t.’ He said, ‘It’s okay, he knows you’re acting.’ So I did — ‘You fat f***!’ Later, Larry says to me, a bit taken aback, ‘Wow, you really went for it.’
“But Curb has spoilt me,” Essman continues dolefully. “I read the outlines Larry writes and I can’t believe how funny it is. Then I get these other scripts and I say, ‘I can’t do this crap.’ Larry tells me all the time, ‘You’re never going to have anything as funny as this for the rest of your life.’ Gee thanks, Larry.”
I always watch everybody hates chris.-:,