On a late December night many years ago, I was riding around midtown cheerfully stuffed into the back seat of a taxi with two of my kids. One was around seven, the other around four. We passed the skaters and the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. We passed by the twinkling displays in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, and the clusters of people clutching shopping bags and peering in. There were Santas tolling bells for the Salvation Army, venders hawking blistered chestnuts, flocks of pedicab drivers, tree hustlers, carollers, the whole frenetic birth-of-Jesus, half-off-at-Macy’s phantasmagoria.
My kids gazed out the window. A long silence set in. Finally, the four-year-old turned to me and said, “Daddy, why is there so much Christmas, not so much Hanukkah?” As I went about drafting an explanation in my head, the seven-year-old answered with absolute assurance: “Hitler.”
I admit, I felt some alarm, because it’s hard to take on board that your very young children already have an awareness of their own difference, much less an awareness of tyrants and of what tyrants have done to peoples of difference. But I was also filled with pride: one’s seven-year-old had just landed a one-word joke with the aplomb of a dues-paying member of the Friars Club.
Later, these progeny would begin to encounter at least some of the comic classics in the syllabus: “Gimpel the Fool,” “The Trial,” “Herzog,” “Catch-22,” and “Portnoy’s Complaint”; “Duck Soup,” “The Producers,” “Sleeper,” and “A Serious Man”; the whole borscht-belt litany, from Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers lighting up “The Tonight Show” to the more avant-garde Jewish mother jokes of Nichols and May. And Mr. Morty Gunty, of course. (Alav ha-shalom.) Then came the TV moderns: “Seinfeld,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Broad City,” Sarah Silverman, Adam Sandler strumming “The Chanukah Song.”
The history of shtick is thick. In the “Encyclopedia Judaica” (Volume IX, page 595), we encounter a hard-to-confirm statistic from the late nineteen-seventies: “Research has shown that among the most famous nationally known humorists in America, 80% are Jewish, while Jews represent only 3% of the American population.” The author of this entry, one Avner Ziv, provides a survey from early Biblical irony (“Because there was no grave in Egypt have you taken us away to die in the wilderness”: Exodus 14:11) to a somewhat later specimen of Biblical irony, “The 2000 Year Old Man.”
Professor Ziv’s account, however, should one day be expanded to include Larry David’s HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which has now concluded its twelfth and final season and deserves a prominent place in the canon. As a comedy of manners, “Curb” is the “Tartuffe” of Leo’s Deli.
In “Curb,” David plays himself, but magnified and distorted. TV Larry is Larry David only in the sense that Portnoy or Zuckerman were Philip Roth. The author exploits his own intelligence, subversive curiosity, social indifference, and dirty secrets, and, in turn, makes a comic monster of himself. Larry is the fabulously wealthy co-creator of “Seinfeld,” whose fortune provides him with an immense house and limitless time to potchky around on various projects at the office, play golf, have long lunches with his friends, particularly Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and Richard (the late Richard Lewis), or, in later seasons, puzzle things out with his permanent house guest, Leon Black (J. B. Smoove).
If Larry loves anything, it is talk—unhindered, impolite, and (the highest value) funny. He is never so happy as when he is riffing with his friends about sex, religion, age, sandwiches, the body, ethnic differences, words—anything that irritates or interests him. There are no boundaries; the conversations over salads and chicken sandwiches in “Curb” are as free as Portnoy’s sessions with his analyst. And, though Larry’s talk wildly trespasses every precept of modern liberal manners, he is not exactly a tribalist. Where Leon screws around with Black stereotypes (he proudly declares himself a member of the “big-johnson community”), Larry does the same with Jewish ones. (Larry, for his part, is a member of the “long balls” community).
If the show has an animating impulse, it is Larry’s vexation with social conventions. He is deaf to what is “appropriate” and rebellious when called to order. At every turn, he prods (and burns to the ground) the countless social and linguistic niceties that supposedly hold civilization together. He insistently interrogates everyone’s most shameful secrets (a woman rumored to have a “big vagina,” an elderly Japanese man who is alive because he chickened out, at the last minute, as a kamikaze). He will ask any question, press on every tender wound, and conclude the interrogation with his high-pitched “Huh!” or “Interesting!” As Adam Gopnik writes, David, like one of Molière’s creations, “incarnates the man who will innocently say the uncomfortable truth—that a parent’s death, for instance, suddenly creates an all-purpose excuse for avoiding obligatory socializing.”
Ten years ago, I interviewed David at The New Yorker Festival and asked him about the impulse behind the show. “ ‘Curb’ is about what’s beneath the surface of social intercourse, the things we think about and can’t say,” he said. “I’m normal. If I said the things he does”—“he” being the Larry David who, for instance, eats his in-laws’ manger scene—“I’d be beaten up. He’s a sociopath! But I’m thinking them!”
In the show’s finale, Larry’s ex-wife, Cheryl (who finally left him in Season 6 after he all but ignored her terrified phone call from an imperilled plane so that he could attend to his problems at home with the TiVo guy), is distressed that he has told his friends that she doesn’t like Mexican food. Cheryl won’t quite admit it, but she is clearly worried that an indifference to enchiladas may signal, in their social set of anxious liberals, an indifference to Mexican people. Larry finds this ridiculous. He finds the world ridiculous.
The premise and sensibility of “Curb” has a network antecedent. In “Seinfeld,” all four of the characters—Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer—are, each in their own way, Upper West Side nihilists, given to interrogating social conventions when they are not oblivious to them. Privileged knuckleheads, they are content to while away their lives at the diner and the kitchen counter talking, plotting, undermining.
But in “Seinfeld,” which Larry David created with the titular Jerry Seinfeld, the ethnic particularity, the Jewishness, of the enterprise was at least partially obscured. Brandon Tartikoff, the head of NBC Entertainment at the time, initially pronounced it “too New York, too Jewish.” (Tartikoff was himself Jewish.) The network went ahead with the show but not before making George—and his echt Jewish father, played by Jerry Stiller—Italian. It was never clear to me what Kramer and Elaine were supposed to be. (Kramer was once made to explain that he wasn’t Jewish, and Elaine occasionally would cross herself.) Still, as a friend once remarked to me, “Hitler would have had thoughts.” Only Jerry himself is identified as Jewish. Among his transgressions against piety is to be spotted making out with his girlfriend at a screening of “Schindler’s List.”
With “Curb,” David ended the sham. In life, as on the show, he is insistently himself, and he calls on the details of his actual biography for the show. David was raised in Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, where his performance in school did not suggest future greatness. His mother had hopes he might get a job delivering the mail. (David, for his part, thought he could endure the rain and the sleet, maybe, but not the hail.) He was thrown out of Hebrew school, but, before he could enjoy his newfound liberty, the rabbi changed his mind. As he put it to me, “My mother went to the school and blew him, I think, because they took me back two days later.”
After college, David worked as a bra salesman and as a driver for a woman whose vision was impaired. (“I can’t say enough about a blind boss.”) As an aspiring standup, he hung out with his early summer-camp pal and future castmate, Richard Lewis, and had some modest success in the clubs, but he was too hot-tempered to win anyone over. Sometimes he would get up to the stage, take one look at the audience, and walk off. For a brief period in the eighties, he wrote for “Saturday Night Live.” Then, in 1988, he and Jerry Seinfeld pitched “Seinfeld.” A show about talking, about nothing. The following year, it launched—and, though ratings were modest at first, it eventually became an enormous hit.