Jewish World Review Oct. 24, 2001 /7 Mar-Cheshvan Teves, 5762
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Catherine Seipp
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
LARRY DAVID is notoriously prickly. Still, at the HBO press conference
for "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the series starring comedy writer Larry David as
comedy writer Larry David, he made a game effort to be brightly quotable. "I
might be the first bald man to actually be starring in a television comedy
since Phil Silvers," David began. Charles Dutton! the audience
fired back. James Coco! Michael Chiklis! Herschel Bernardi!
"All right, so it's not," sighed David, who visibly found the whole situation
barely endurable. "OK." Someone asked what the new show was about, since
"Seinfeld," which David co-created, was famously about nothing.
"I would describe it as a show about Larry David," David responded,
"which is pretty close to nothing as it is."
"Seinfeld" was also tacitly about a Jew's-eye view of life, and "Curb
Your Enthusiasm" (the new, second season premiered Sept. 23) ramps that up
several notches. David's constant, silent scream about other people and their
infuriating ways (always at a seething roil on "Seinfeld") erupts each
episode into personal disasters of surreal proportions.
These can be roughly divided into two types. Appalling encounters with
other Jews, such as David's porn-addict manager and the manager's meddling,
straight-out-of-Portnoy parents, are annoying but routine, like Tevye's
quarrels with fellow villagers. (The Pacific Palisades/Brentwood/Santa Monica
borders of a successful Hollywood writer's world can be as insular and
provincial as a Sholom Aleicham shtetl.) But in these cases, David actually
sometimes gets the last laugh. An infuriated neighbor berates David for
whistling a Wagner tune outside a movie theater ("You wanna know what you
are? You're a self-loathing Jew!"); David hires an orchestra to play Wagner
on the man's front lawn in the middle of the night.
"I do hate myself," David protests angrily, "but it has nothing to do
with being Jewish, OK?"
Appalling encounters with gentiles, on the other hand, are excrutiating
moments of mutual misunderstanding. In one episode, David meets a
charity donor named John Tyler, a pale, humorless guy who's driven up from
Fullerton (a particularly bland Southern California suburb) to claim his
auctioned lunch-with-the-celebrity. The scene is basically an object lesson
of the mutual irritation that can happen when a mile-a-minute Jewish brain
encounters an I-don't-get-it gentile from Squaresville, U.S.A.
"John Tyler!" David exclaims. "Like the president. President Tyler. Shall
I call you Mr. President? Tippecanoe and Tyler too. You know what Tippecanoe
was? You don't know? If I were named after a president, I'd know everything
about the president...I'm related to King David."
"Really?" says Tyler, looking blankly nervous.
"Yes. So, a president and a king, at the same table."
"It's a family name, really," says Tyler.
"I feel aggravated that I am missing what other people are getting," he
erupts in exasperation to his wife in a recent episode, explaining why a
day at the beach for him is just a tedious purgatory of heat and schlepping.
"Jews buy 85% of all sunblock," he theorizes, slathering some on. "I have
never seen a gentile ask for, or put on, sunblock."
But it's David's additional burden to constantly get what other people
miss. Only he would have the misfortune to also encounter at the beach (along
the the sun and the ennui) the horrific sight of his dignified, gray-haired
therapist wearing nothing but a thong.
On "Curb Your Enthusiam," David plays himself, without benefit of a room
full of comedy writers, in an improvised half-hour slice of pseudo cinema
verite. "I just thought this could be a lot fresher and more spontaneous and
unusual," David says, over coffee at HBO headquarters. "Also," joked
supervising producer Robert Weide at the press conference, "Larry can't be in
a room with more than two other people at the same time, so that sort of
nixed the whole idea of a staff of writers."
As it happens, some of the still discussed mysteries of "Seinfeld" -
why were three of that extremely Jewish quarter of characters supposedly
gentile? --- evolved from casual, almost improvisational whims rather than
careful consideration. Take George Costanza's Italian last name. "We didn't
have any idea we were doing a show!" David says. "We were doing a pilot, and
Jerry knew a guy named Costanza, and it was, oh, we'll call him Costanza."
So then why were the princessy Elaine and Kramer not Jewish either?
"Elaine wasn't Jewish," David says thoughtfully. "I knew she was from
Maryland, and at least in my head she wasn't Jewish. Costanza's half-Jewish.
And Kramer ... hmm ... so maybe he wasn't a Jew? He said he wasn't Jewish --
that was in the show? I wasn't there [at that point.]"
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" addressed the Jewish issue early in the first
season, when David's wife organized a dinner party that, naturally, he did
not enjoy. "The next time you have one of these things, I want some Jews
here," the on-screen David complains to his wife, played by actress Cheryl
Hines and called Cheryl on the show. (David's real wife is a former David
Letterman talent coordinator named Laurie.)
Still, David has mellowed since his bitter, lonely guy period. Now 54,
he's a family man with two daughters, ages seven and five. Also, these days
David lives in a moneyed beach enclave of Los Angeles, a far cry from his
grueling stand-up days in New York.
"Just leaving your house and taking any mode of transportation will be
irritating in New York," David notes. But even in L.A. there's the
possibility of transportation disaster. In the Sept. 23 episode, David plays
cowboys-and-Indians with some kids in another car only to be screamed at by
their father, a seven-foot-tall blond wrestler named Thor. "Don't you ever
point your finger at my kids again," yells Thor, a terrifying combination of
violence-prone white trash and Aryan godhood. "I will body-slam you so hard
that you will poop your bald pants!"
A shorthand way of describing "Curb Your Enthusiasm" might be as
"Seinfeld" with an older, married George Costanza in the lead, and a running
joke this season is David's hurt reaction at the notion of George as pathetic
fool. Jason Alexander's agent confides to David that his client is having
trouble getting work because he's so closely identified with his "Seinfeld"
character. That's really a shame, the agent adds (here the camera zooms in on
David's appalled face), "'cause Jason's brilliant and George was an idiot."
"I don't see him as a yutz, a schmuck and idiot!" David yells
defensively at Alexander later, about some of George's memorable "Seinfeld"
misadventures. "I wentto a girl's house and stole a tape out
of an answering machine. I ateout of the garbage!"
"Seinfeld," which has garnered David an estimated $100 million, was one
of the biggest hits in the history of television. But David doesn't miss the
constant iterference from network executives intent on reaching as wide a
broadcast audience as possible. He certainly doesn't need the money.
"Right now, and I don't say this often, I'm very pleased with what I'm
doing," he says. So does he hope for another third 10-episode order from HBO
or not? "I'm fine either way," he says. "It's one of the few times I'm in a
win-win situation." Of course, he could always go back to stand-up, a notion
that generated the orignal "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fake documentary, which
pretended to follow David around as he prepared for an HBO stand-up special.
The last time David really did stand-up was in 1989, just before the
"Seinfeld" pilot. In those days he was notorious for throwing the mike down
and stalking off the stage when audiences were too dim to get his jokes. But
his swan song, for some reason, went well. "So I left with a good taste in my
mouth," David notes. "One of the few times in my
This Larry David show is about something --- "Larry David"
Catherine Seipp is a Los Angeles-based journalist. To comment, click here.
