Larry David cleans up good. On Saturday afternoon, sitting in a director’s chair at a theatre on West Thirty-seventh Street and preparing to be grilled about his life and work by David Remnick, he looked less like Larry David, the schlubby nebbish he plays on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and more like Larry David, the guy who has made a very successful career out of creating and playing schlubby nebbishes. That is to say that instead of a windbreaker, he wore a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, and instead of sneakers, he wore—well, he was definitely wearing sneakers, but, seen from the distant heights of the balcony, where fans nudged each other out of the way to catch a better glimpse of David’s famously gleaming scalp, they appeared to be stylish black Vans rather than some beat-up tennis shoes that your retired uncle might wear to take the trash out.
Things would be pretty, pretty, pretty different for David, who is sixty-seven but looks essentially the same as he did when “Curb” premiered, in 2000, if he had followed through on his mother’s wish that he become a mailman—he could have handled the rain, snow, and sleet, he said, but the hail gave him pause. (His father was in the garment business, “the stuff I had zero interest in.”) Certainly his childhood, in Sheepshead Bay, didn’t presage great things. David was expelled from Hebrew school for acting out, though he barely got the chance to enjoy his freedom before the rabbi, like Pharaoh, changed his mind: “My mother went to the school and blew him, I think, because they took me back two days later.” Did he crave attention as a child? Remnick asked. Did he want to be on stage? Well, there was this summer camp he went to in the Catskills, where all the kids had to audition for the musical. David sang a number from “Annie Get Your Gun,” and then some little punk from Forest Hills started attacking his manhood, and that was it for his theatrical aspirations, at least for a while. It was also, David noted, “the first sign of who I am: a coward.”
After college, David worked as a chauffeur for an elderly woman with impaired vision (career advice: “I can’t say enough about a blind boss”) and as a bra salesman, an experience he later gave to George Costanza, his “Seinfeld” alter ego. At some point, David took an acting class and discovered that all he was doing was waiting for the other guy to shut up so that he could start talking. A friend suggested standup. He became a regular at comedy clubs around New York, falling in with a crowd of comedians that included Richard Belzer, Richard Lewis, Ed Bluestone, and Elayne Boosler. In 1988, he and Jerry Seinfeld pitched a sitcom to NBC, based loosely on the idea of showing an audience how a comic comes up with his material. The rest is history, though, unsurprisingly, David came close to sabotaging the whole deal: “They really liked Jerry a lot. They had no idea who the hell I was.”
For a long time, the same could have been said of most “Seinfeld” fans. As Remnick pointed out, people had some sense that a guy named Larry David was behind the scenes, writing the show, regularly voicing a George Steinbrenner character who turned out to be more idiot boy-king than sinister despot. But it wasn’t really clear how essential the interplay of Seinfeld’s small-bore observational humor and David’s antisocial fantasyland was to the tone of “Seinfeld” until “Curb” came along. Seinfeld worked the superego, picking over the conventions—snooze button, eyeglasses, dry cleaners—that govern the social self until even the most banal assumptions of normal life seemed ridiculous. David started with the ridiculous and transposed it onto the everyday world. He shot straight from the id. “It occurred to me one day, Would I have sex with a Palestinian?” he told Remnick. “I thought, Sure. And what if, when we were having sex, she shouted all these anti-Semitic things? It wouldn’t bother me in the least!” That particular reverie led to “Palestinian Chicken,” an episode, in “Curb”’s eighth and latest season—please, Larry, let it not be the last—that stages the Israel-Palestine conflict as a standoff between a Jewish deli and a neighboring Palestinian chicken joint in Los Angeles. Remnick said that Alan Dershowitz, the legal scholar, had sent the episode to Benjamin Netanyahu in the hope that he would watch it with Mahmoud Abbas and come to some kind of resolution. So far, nothing doing, but crazier things have happened on “Curb.”
“ ‘Curb’ is about what’s beneath the surface of social intercourse, the things we think about and can’t say,” David told Remnick. “I’m normal. If I said the things he does”—he, of course, being the Larry David who goes around eating his in-laws’ manger scene, inviting a sex offender to a Seder, and teaching kids how to draw swastikas—“I’d be beaten up. He’s a sociopath!” A pause. “But I’m thinking them!”
So is everyone else, and that’s the brilliance of “Curb.” The show exists to prove how thin the veneer of social custom and courtesy really is, and to reveal the inner sociopath that we are supposed, at all costs, to suppress. Yes, Larry is standing outside of a movie theatre loudly humming Wagner, but it’s the other guy in line who loses control and throws a fit, accusing him of being a self-hating Jew. Yes, Larry’s scheme to win back Cheryl, his ex-wife, by saving her therapist from a mugging so that she can see that he's a good guy is a hundred per cent insane, but even more insane is the fact that his own therapist agrees to play the mugger.
“Curb” 's great lesson is that you can always count on someone else to match, and then trump, your crazy, and, to that end, the floor was opened for questions from the audience. These started out normal enough. Had David had any mentors when he was coming up in the comedy scene? No! Would he consider going to Comic Con, just down the street, maybe as the caped lawyer he played on “Seinfeld”? Not likely—“I hate costumes. Even as a kid, I never wore a costume on Halloween.” What did he have to say about “Curb” ’s obvious Jewishness? “Jews think that all the time,” David said, grinning. “They think no one else will get it, that it’s a secret show just for them.”
Then, as ever, where David is involved, things started to get a little wonky. A young woman approached the microphone to let David know that she had recently “recommended” someone for a job at her office, a reference to a “Curb” episode from Season 6 in which Larry “recommends”—wink-wink—a director he dislikes to Richard Lewis to avoid pissing the guy off. The woman was distressed; her “recommendation” had been read as a real recommendation, sans scare quotes, and the person she disliked was starting at work on Monday. What did David think about that? “You’re an idiot!” David crowed. The woman began to protest. “O.K., fine,” he said, in what seemed intended as a nominally conciliatory gesture. “You learned a lesson.”
The final interrogator stepped to the mic. In a brash, performative voice, she told David that she had been working on a project to support human happiness across the globe, and would he be interested in being one of the first people to look at it? “Nope!” cried David, and the meeting was adjourned, to much applause. By creating one of the most blithely self-involved, unfiltered, socially maniacal protagonists on television, David has contributed a lot to the cause of human happiness, even if that happiness is mainly of the Schadenfreude variety. Anyone who hasn’t learned that lesson is better off sticking with reruns of “Friends.”
