“Curb Your Enthusiasm” Was Larry David’s Book of Manners

Suppose you’re out at brunch and find yourself in a buffet line that a fellow diner does not appear to have noticed. He casually approaches with his plate and tries to serve himself. Do you A. join the hangry mob cursing him or B. rise to this man’s defense, because you can see that he’s holding a plate, which means he already waited in line and is now returning for another helping? If you’re Larry David, not only is the answer B. but the misunderstanding warrants, in your scratchy Brooklyn accent, a triumphant clarification: “That’s not how we do things here in America! We don’t wait for seconds! Never!”

Larry knows from buffet breaches. He once caught someone pulling what he termed a chat-’n’-cut, gaining proximity to food by talking to someone with a choicer position in line. He doesn’t like it but is impressed anyway. (“I respect your skills.”) Another time, when a restaurant employee accuses him of violating its buffet policy by sharing his plate with his manager and main man, Jeff, a lawyer magically appears to clarify for the employee that after a diner purchases a meal what he does with it is his business. Justice — and brunch — have been served.

But now let’s suppose that you’re a serious, middle-aged woman named Marilyn, and you’ve decided to host dinner for your new beau’s closest friends, and the guests include this Larry David, whom you’ve already had to shoo from the arm of one of your comfy chairs. The group raises a glass and toasts your hospitality — well, everybody except you know who. Susie, who is married to Jeff and clearly finds Larry as much of an irritant as you’ve begun to, asks, “You can’t clink, Larry?” Why should he? “Because it’s a custom that people do, which is friendly and nice.” Larry takes a sip of water and asks the most peculiar question: “What is this, tap?” It is. His response? “Surprised you don’t have a filter.” Do you A. serve him your coldest glance and witheringly reply, “You have no filter,” or B. ask him to leave your home? If you’re Marilyn, you do both.

These stories hail from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is scheduled to deliver its final episode on April 7, after 12 seasons and 24 years on HBO. In each incident, bald, bespectacled, wiry, wealthy Larry has stepped out of line, once physically, to defend or offend. I went back and watched the whole series and would like to report that television has never had anything like this show, nothing as uncouth and contradictory and unhinged and yet somehow under a tremendous amount of thematic control, nothing whose calamity doubles as a design for living. It presents the American id at war with its puritanical superego. Sometimes Larry is the one. Sometimes he’s the other. The best episodes dare him to inhabit the two at once, heretic and Talmudist.

Even people who don’t watch the show (and that’s most of the country) seem to know the gist, that Larry, as performed by Larry David, is a monstrously entitled crank, the Godzilla of western Los Angeles. But “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is about more than Larry’s probable narcissism. It’s a supreme comedy of manners. How, it asks, do we share a meal, a drive, a party, a meeting, a bathroom, an office pantry, a city — how do we courteously enforce norms and, with modesty, uphold standards? Are courtesy and modesty necessary? It’s the only show we have left that’s been this curious about, this keen on the fine print of living an ethical, civic life, about interpersonal candor and the maintenance of a kind of civility while also allowing for the liberty of letting you do you.

Larry makes liberty want a drink. He is insensitive, selfish, monomaniacal, prone to flagrance, frequently wrong in every single way a person can be wrong — by accident, via misunderstanding, out of malice. He can be a bad friend and has been a lousy husband, a worse boyfriend, a dubious lay and an iffy boss. Don’t go into business with Larry or tell him a secret. Don’t invite him to your funeral. Don’t rely on him to watch your newsstand so you can pee. Probably, don’t be his co-star or co-author, either.

I’ve never seen any actor with David’s grasp of how to play skepticism for laughs. Eyebrows as up-yanked drawbridge, forehead creases as lasagna of vexation. That rawboned voice of his soars, if not in octaves, then certainly with tickly, prickly dynamism. He can shout anyone down. For insinuation and seduction — for seductive insinuation — he can drop it low. David has imbued Larry with so much guilt, exceptionalism, cluelessness, terror, cowardice, innocence, avoidance, vindictive zeal, genuine curiosity and joie de vivre that the performance becomes what Larry loves: a buffet. Also, what a liar. And yet who else in the last quarter-century has done more to insist on some standard of alternative etiquette, to speak to the humiliating, exasperating paradoxes of doing just about anything in 21st-century America?

Larry’s plight is ours. His struggle with gratuities and plastic packaging and stop-’n’-chats (never to be mistaken for the chat-’n’-cut); with dinner-party conversation, appropriate in-flight attire, social slights and trick-or-treaters; with behaving neighborly, compassionately; with spills, stains, rashes, snags, dents, nicks, knocks — his, yours. Larry’s confusion about greetings and salutations, about language itself, would crowd an hourslong supercut. Who else, in his attempts to do good or simply enjoy himself, has been as thoroughly misunderstood, maligned and stamped “pervert,” “racist,” “sexist,” “sick” — by strangers, friends, their wives, potential mistresses, fundamentalist Muslims, fellow Jews. This, then, is to say that Larry’s struggle is also Larry’s. He’s the apotheosis of “unforced error,” a person for whom the expression “Where do you get off?” is eternally meant.

The show constitutes a behavioral gestalt. It stress-tests our understanding of how to treat one another and what not to ask, how not to act. Until a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought to put it quite this way, but: Larry David is Emily Post. He’s Amy Vanderbilt. The show is “Larry David’s Complete Book of Etiquette,” his (ungraciously) gracious guide to living.

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” began, in 2000, when TV functioned the old way: on a fixed schedule and network-dominated. The top shows still included “ER,” “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”: expensive, scripted, written, performed. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ran on HBO, after “The Sopranos,” a drama that conducted itself with the grittiness and opulence of a major film. Early “Curb” episodes are like a bad independent movie — shakily shot on washed-out video, too tightly framed, mis-scored, haltingly acted. It was a world away from “The Sopranos”: an anti-production.

But that unkempt, feral quality was a source of the allure. Its episodes are improvised and tend to exceed the 30-minute mark that’s still the limit for a network sitcom. The on-the-spot approach to creating comedy brings it closer to the raw timbre of documentary. Its wildness matched a chaos brewing around us. That first season wrapped up during the hazy fury that followed the 2000 presidential election. Episode 5 aired the Sunday after Election Day and conducts itself in rancorous spasms. At his doctor’s office, Larry makes the gentlemanly choice of letting a woman off the elevator before he exits. It’s part of his “you first” era. But even though Larry has an earlier appointment, the doctor’s first-come-first-served policy means she gets seen before he does, too, arousing Larry’s spite. “My days of elevator etiquette are over,” he declares. Everybody in the episode wields a policy of some kind — for reading scripts, for borrowing cash from strangers, for giving out phone numbers. Their values clash, sometimes violently, with Larry’s.

You might be looking for trouble, marrying “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to a political climate. But politics do suffuse the show; they’re social and correspondent with the new century’s choleric base layer. There’s no one whom Larry won’t go up against — seniors, Girl Scouts, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Most of the show’s run occurred during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. If war, national security, recession, police killings of Black Americans, fraying democracy, hate crimes and a pandemic were tearing the country apart, belligerence looked different within the world of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Its vision sidestepped sweeping philosophy. It rarely sought bigger fish to fry, nor was it ever content to shoot them in a barrel.

As Americans’ distrust in unifying systems, like the truth and the social-safety net, ballooned, as we grew ever more trollish, more righteous, more tolerant of tumult and of the dissolution of certain rules, the show didn’t waver; it luxuriated in the bawdy, tactless and loony. For God’s sake, its theme song conjures a clowns’ circus suite — whoopee-cushion tuba, banana-peel woodwinds. The headlines, when they perforate this fiction, wind up beneath its big top. This isn’t so much a matter of the show’s zagging while the national mood zigs (although there is that). It’s a pointed acknowledgment that most of us have no idea what the national news is, let alone the mood. We do know that it’s Tuesday, which means “alternate-side parking,” which means doing etiquette battle in the street.

For gaseous macrocosmic poli-sci, people can turn to Aaron Sorkin. For gripes about the stale array of doctor’s-office magazines, there has been Larry. Nonetheless, the show couldn’t help capturing a tension in our ideas of propriety. Is sampling, I don’t know, seven flavors of ice cream considerate when Larry’s right behind you? How about two? Divisive stuff! The show identified a shift in comportment toward shamelessness. The character actor Robin Bartlett plays the seven-flavor sampler. When Larry tells her off — when he says what we’ve all thought (Seriously? Another sample?!) — Bartlett conjures more than “unfazed.” As she makes her exit, having almost villainously settled on vanilla, she is tickled by his rage. The show’s disharmony over not-nothing, over what for a Tuesday can be everything, was onto and up to something. It understood the cheap delight some of us take in eliciting exasperation.

By 2000, television’s protagonists were undergoing a nearly identical makeover that prized antagonism, a transition lubricated by “Seinfeld,” the sitcom David helped create. It ended two years earlier and on “Curb” is the reason Larry enjoys some celebrity and is set for life. We called the new archetypes “antiheroes.” Only, Larry’s brand of antiheroism — insouciance, insolence, disregard for other people’s wishes — cries out for an adjacent designation, one that honors his rudeness, his monomania, his unsolicited two cents, both his indifference to and pleasure in the sour reactions his behavior sometimes garners. Larry is an asshole. This is scarcely news in Lar-Lar Land. You could compose another extended supercut of the number of times the show’s other characters have stamped him with that.

David’s timing was perfect. “Survivor” also premiered in 2000 and became America’s top-rated TV show, opening a portal to a form of television ruled by these people: reality TV, where the country’s lofty policy crises weren’t the going concern, either. This version of the genre sloshed around in grubby, conniving, interpersonal manipulations, in captivating personalities that cast members wanted either to impress or vanquish. Here was a less varnished landscape of avatars — for our co-workers, bosses, neighbors, acquaintances, hookups, bad dates and in-laws. What fun to watch them squabble and squirm. Reality’s parallel universe, premium cable, had long been a haven for the type. HBO alone has been a white-jerk paradise: “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Mind of the Married Man,” “The Sopranos,” “Da Ali G Show,” “Lucky Louie,” Samantha Jones, Valerie Cherish, Amy Jellicoe, every one of Danny McBride’s comedies, “Girls,” “Veep,” “Game of Thrones,” “Succession,” “The White Lotus.” Even amid that company, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” distinguished itself. Its jerk created a crisis for everybody else. How do we live with, work for, work alongside this guy? Is this guy me?

The show’s interest in comportment always felt ripe for a completely online age. “Curb” has no native facility for gadgetry and apps. Its big-font, flip-phone personality is part of its old-ways appeal. Yet gradually, modern technology has crept into the show — when Cheryl (Cheryl Hines, who has contributed an appalled chirpiness to the stock sitcom wife) phones Larry from a plane she swears is going to crash, he is more worried about the TiVo guy leaving before the job is finished. And the opening episode of this final, 12th season pits a furious Larry against a nonchalant Siri. Still, it’s very offline. What it personifies instead is the internet’s clashing, bludgeoning moods over identity politics and politics-politics. One way of looking at social media tribalism is as a symptom of our sense of powerlessness, even when some of the tetchiest tribesmen are the ones with all the power. The show has always struck me as a perversely optimistic, perfectly basic rebuke. Upholding these codes of conduct, picayune and crazy-making as they can seem, is how a disordered culture strives for order.

In real life, the comedy of coexistence tends to sparkle less. Often, it feels terrible. You appreciate the padding of a Larryesque moment when a Larry-worthy confrontation chafes you. One evening last October, I was biking down a sidewalk in my neighborhood, whose charms include its cobblestone streets. Usually, to avoid the rumbling bumps of the final block, I opt for concrete, which isn’t kosher but is convenient. I don’t have to do much to ensure no one’s walking past this patch of sidewalk because no one ever is. This particular night, however, I shared the pavement with a man walking two dogs. He was stooping to gather their leavings when I announced that I was passing on his right.

“Get off the [expletive] sidewalk.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Get off the [expletive] sidewalk.”

He took a look at my bike and motioned toward the tires.

“What are those? 32s? They can handle cobblestones. I ride. Nobody’s more bike-friendly than me. Sidewalks are for pedestrians.”

“Sir, why the anger?”

“Because I’m tired of people like you coming into my neighborhood riding on the [expletive] sidewalks.”

“Sir, I’m your neighbor.”

“Well, then you know in this neighborhood we handle the cobblestones.”

I told him what street I lived on.

“Good for you. Stay off the [expletive] sidewalk.”

It’s here I should say that this man was long, balding, middle-aged, bespectacled. Larry, essentially. I followed him up the block, futilely deploying neighborly contrition to defuse him. But neighborliness wasn’t his concern. He wanted to be rid of me, because I represented either a composite of policy breaches or a wave of racial ones. My spidey sense tingled. So I retreated, still asking, though, from a widening distance, why he was so furious and receiving only F-bombs in return.

A few minutes later, putting my bike away, I thought about why the altercations on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are so magnetic. Justice has something to do with it. So does personal certitude — there is a right way to do things, and I know what it is. There’s also the show’s music. It conjures the circus, yes. But it’s also as Old World as the values are old-fashioned. (Larry loves to invoke the Golden Rule.) The music excuses, mocks, farcifies, soothes. It evokes klezmer, polka and vaudeville: this melodiousness of Jewish tradition, of which Larry David is a part, assaying the large type and fine print of American life with the same meticulous relish as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. The music reminds you that the stakes are ancient but low, that there is no danger in the show’s world that is inexorable. The music is transitional, but it’s a binding agent, too. It helps make the city a village, a shtetl. I’ve tried to imagine how scenes on this show might feel without it. A different kind of ridiculous, I guess. Ominously ridiculous. Me chasing a stranger who has reduced me to my infraction, who is maybe convinced that an infraction is all I am.

The show’s trivial obsessions — more or less turning the hunt for whose drink left a ring on an antique table into an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” — do seek to address grand questions. Are we our misbehavior? Our shame? Our opprobrium? Is there ever any point in pleading to be heard out? So many times, Larry has been caught in the middle of what appears to be an insult or obscenity — beep-locking his car as a Black man passes, humping a sex doll that, really, he was only struggling to deflate. Is there no defense that would de-escalate the altercation, no clarification that would exonerate? That night with my neighborhood Larry, it wasn’t forgiveness I was chasing him for. I think it was grace. And it hurt to discover that I warranted none. I’d like to think that Larry David himself would’ve stopped to consider my case.

All this time, the show has been wondering: How much decency must we demonstrate to be worth keeping around? What’s a tolerable balance of crank and good Samaritan? With Larry, we’ve been watching that meter fluctuate for 24 years. But the needle’s position has yet to cost him his most meaningful people. After the TiVo incident, Cheryl falls in love with someone else and leaves Larry. But they remain in each other’s lives. So does his friend Marty Funkhouser (Bob Einstein), who would be within his rights to eternally expunge Larry, simply for the time, at Marty’s father’s funeral, that Larry removed from the coffin a golf club he was convinced belonged to him. “Why should this guy be buried in eternity with my club? That’s not fair.”

It’s not that Larry is loved per se. He’s tolerated. But on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” tolerance constitutes a type of love. Larry has never lacked for a seat at anybody’s table even when the odds are good that he’ll be asked to vacate it. Tolerance is another way to think about etiquette. Not blindly. Constructively perhaps. The show has been a marvel of that — constructive tolerance. Tolerating Larry is, as Susie would say (and does), a nice thing to do.

Emily Post’s “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home” made its debut in 1922 and argued that, in what she called “Best Society,” we owe one another our finest selves. The book covers everything from formal introductions to declining invitations to courteous shopping. A centenary edition by two of Post’s heirs is less fussy and a little cooler; it includes an entry on pronouns. The Larry of “Curb” would seem inveterately Post-proof. And yet ... in the show’s inaugural episode, when he denounces a girlfriend of his best friend, Richard (Richard Lewis), for not getting up from her seat at the movies so he can scooch past and Richard defends her by saying she reads Elie Wiesel, Larry explodes. “You know what she should be reading? Emily [expletive] Post!”

Etiquette is a pact. In a functional society, it’s also an offering of goodness, decency, forbearance and respect, a flavor of the social contract, in which we all pay a small personal freedom tax so that everyone feels accommodated. The offering risks rejection, risks offense: Some people just won’t care about their civic duty. They won’t care that you’re performing yours. Some of them won’t care with zeal. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” takes up that risk. It’s Emily Post with boxing gloves.

Larry is hardly the show’s only offender. It knows too well that we all have our moments, our ... things. Clanging differences are what drive the show. And through it, I spy Post’s ideal out on some faraway horizon, an ideal we call “America.” It taps into a puritanical force so strong that etiquette becomes an almost religious expression of gentry; we’re not even sure how we’ve come to abide by it. Susie (Susie Essman) has been the show’s true superego, there to zap Larry and curse his transgressions. Her denouncements are bangers. But they always come down to what she once tells him after he more or less asks whose rule he broke: “I don’t know the derivation,” she snips. “It’s just not done.”

On this show, no stable etiquette emerges. Susie’s version is aspirational and oriented toward propriety. She’s a proud Jewish woman whose etiquette tax seems to entail the public tamping of her full ethnic self. A stern Japanese man, Mr. Takahashi (Dana Lee), owns the country club Larry belongs to and insists upon a strict etiquette of his own that, come Season 12, the membership has revolted against. For the last seven seasons, Larry has had a housemate named Leon (J.B. Smoove), a do-ragged sex machine who has surmounted an entertainment stereotype to provide a haven for Larry’s insecurities and a resource on etiquette (no, Larry, you can’t break up with a woman in a wheelchair — or anybody! — over the phone) and its Black alternative, which often entails slipping into and out of respectability. In other words, within that pact resides variety. The ideal that etiquette might aim to provide is harmony. But America has always made its attainment laughable. We are a nation of etiquettes — well, for the show’s purposes, we’re a Los Angeles of etiquettes, a New York of them.

It identifies etiquette as an M.R.I. of our character, as glue for our communities. To build a data set, its makers have sicced Larry on us. He’s simultaneously our great crusader against shoddy parking, wobbly cafe tables and getting together for no reason and a white man run amok, telling you he knows better than you how your gender is best expressed, what your true sexual or personality orientation is, how to rear your child. Here is a white man who has managed to upset and insult us all — and at this point, I do mean all of us: every service professional, every race, every executive, every religion, every body. And yet, crucially, nearly every single time, he is told off, cast out, ignored, tsked, dumped, pitchforked, closed in on.

But the one thing Larry has never been (until April 7 at least) is canceled. I’ve thought about that over these three decades, what it has required to tolerate this man. I’ve worried whether my attraction to this show, my fascination with him, is akin to devotion to the brashness of a certain former president of the United States. But I remember that Larry has never cried “witch hunt” or “fake news.” He has no lackeys, no suck-ups, no enablers. What Larry has is friends, and a friend lets you know when enough is enough. Larry isn’t irredeemable. He can admit defeat, can confess that “when you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” that “I’m hoisted on my own petard.” When his mouth doesn’t say “mea culpa,” his body does. That, I think, is what we’ve been watching this show to experience: Larry’s duality. A whole other side of his character and David’s performance radiates warmth, generosity, concern, devotion — joy in people, belief in them, patience for even those of us in error. Empathy stirs within him. He can attach strings but can snip them too. The man whose defense he came to at that brunch place? Larry served him potatoes!

The splits in Larry’s personality inform the show’s journey to the heart of manners, as does his Jewishness. His contrarianism refuses him even a harbor among his people — because ultimately he’s still him and they’re still ... people. What amount of etiquette justifies surrendering to the whole American shebang, particularly if you’ve gleaned the country’s etiquette biases. His explanation of a mezuzah to the handyman preparing to install one outside Larry’s front door is a practical blasphemy. “This is like a Jewish thing. You know, we put it over the door so that every antisemite in the neighborhood will know that we live here in case they want to burn down the house.” David’s performance basks in the terrible awkwardness of being someone you suspect everybody already hates. He hails from a people who followed the rules and lost everything anyway. And yet here’s Larry, trying and trying, in spite of history, in spite of himself.

He seems to know: As divine as it would be to inhabit and maintain some universal standard of comportment, this is the United States, a nation enthralled by an idea of absolute freedom, of being absolutely right. The show knows that we’re too Black, too white, too Spanish-speaking, too Jewish, too Muslim, too bald, too disabled, too mentally unwell, too affluent, too impoverished, too straight, too Asian, too Asian diasporic, too MAGA, too two-party-system, too Tesla, too TikTok to stay on the same page for long. And yet: Think about what it takes to actually make this show, that it’s improvised, which means that it’s people standing around behaving together — for comedy, for a comedic truth that here becomes absurdist human truth. To improvise isn’t necessarily to know; it’s to search, to try, to fail, to trust, to negotiate. This show has been the work of funny people. As it progressed, you could detect some of them barely keeping it together. This would be a breach of comedy etiquette. Laughing at your own jokes is a no-no. But the show has known that the stakes of civility are too high not to crack up from time to time. Consider the alternative: If they weren’t laughing, we’d be crying.