University of Cape Town – FAM2013S

Alta du Plooy

26 September 2015

‘Enthusiasm Rising’:
How the joke is ultimately on reality itself in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousand-fold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!”

– Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1909, 43)

“The individual may tell himself through dreams of getting into impossible positions.”
– Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959, 14)

“[These] are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

– Groucho Marx

Larry David is perhaps the most radical character to emerge on post-millennial television. And likewise his inseparable show, Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 1999-), is arguably the era’s most underratedly influential. If academia today finds it apposite to directly concern itself with the content of the small screen – as we do under the auspices of studying ‘Modern TV Drama’ – it’s mostly because HBO’s Original Series1have outclassed both the majority of contemporary cinema and all previous aesthetic ventures on the box. However, while the output of the three first-name Davids of HBO Drama (Chase, Simon and Milch) may have nigh on perfected their respective classical genres, as well as the very form of the serialized institutional critique, the task of this essay will be to make evident the fact that only the relatively disreputable work of HBO Comedy’s singular second-name David (Larry, of course)2 has pretty much transcended all its predecessors and in itself marks the arrival of true televisual auteurism. Such grandiose claims are necessarily made here because Curb itself is such a purposefully unprepossessing and inconspicuous program. If NBC’s Seinfeld(1989-98), David’s previous (co-created) opus, was famously “a show about nothing”,Curb Your Enthusiasm is in its turn a show about a ‘nobody’, who, to even his own surprise, happens to be famous.3 What is so revolutionary about this premise is that it introduces a kind of solipsistic subjectivity into the hackneyed framework of the sitcom – traditionally the most family-friendly and inoffensively collaborative species of narrative television. In alienating its protagonist from everything except the most self- centered empathy of his audience, Curb implicitly addresses us as at the level of our barest consideration of quotidian individuality. However much Larry disappoints us, we still know we are somewhat like him. So, this essay will justifiably begin in the

1. Narrative television has, of course, had its glory days in previous decades but the agreeable claim must be made from the outset that just about all of today’s Quality American TV – comprising the commonly singled-out shows broadcast on HBO, Netflix, Amazon, AMC, FX, Showtime etc. – could not have been green-lit or possibly even conceived without the precedent of high-budget experimental complexity evident in the first surge of HBO-commissioned programming: that is, the usual suspects of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and, I would argue, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

2. To avoid too much confusion, I’ll refer to the ‘real’ behind-the-scenes Larry David as ‘David’ and to his Curb character as just good old ‘Larry’.
3. “I couldn’t imagine myself being involved with something successful.” – Quoted apropos David’s feelings of shock after Seinfeld’s finale and canonization in a podcast interview with Bill Simmons (2014).

abyss of his persona and expand to consider the creative method and diegetic conditions which admit its incarnate hilarity, finally venturing to guess at how such a sui generis series could have come into being at all in a zeitgeist of mediated voyeurism and anti-ironic ideological blowback. All that’ll be required afterwards should be just a vacant shrug and a look-around: ‘No Good?’

When I claim that Larry David and his show are inseparable, I’m actually understating things a little. While his amoral minutiae-obsessed sensibility has been acknowledged by all and sundry4 as the true genius of “the Seinfeld show”, it undoubtedly reaches its apotheosis in Curb. I almost need not describe the program any further than to say it depicts an ‘uncompromised’ version of David’s actual life.5Having personally collected, as most sources attest, more than $200 million for the sale of Seinfeld’s syndication rights, he could have happily retired to the Hollywood Hills at the age of 54, leaving show business far behind him. Indeed David often attests that, in the absence of Curb’s distraction in the life of his show’s ‘Larry’, one of the hardest parts of his writing process has been to constantly have to invent new ventures to keep his semi-retired character busy and unhappy. But this he’s thankfully always managed to do, spinning whole season arcs out of Larry’s attempts to invest in a restaurant, avoid donating a kidney to his ‘real’ friend Richard Lewis, star in the ‘real’ Mel Brooks’s made-to-fail Broadway staging of The Producers and organize aSeinfeld reunion show just to win back his wife’s affections, among many others. One can only assume that David writes, produces and stars in Curb because he actually

4. The first few minutes of Curb’s pilot – a mockumentary version of the traditional HBO Comedy special – mostly consist of real interviews with the cast and crew of Seinfeld introducing David as ‘Larry’: an off-beat, misanthropic former stand-up comic whose rise to fortune behind the scenes of network television was only conditioned by the strength of his friendship with Jerry Seinfeld and the fact that he didn’t actually play his proxy-character George Costanza on the show. To finally become ‘himself’, David needed both the creative freedom afforded by HBO and the fallback recognition earned from years spent working in the pit of more normal ‘groundbreaking television’ for NBC.
5. The show’s poker-faced verisimilitude is made so persuasive that, to choose one among so many other matching stories, when the pilot was broadcast it “seemed so real that a friend of the actress playing [Larry’s] wife was offended that she wasn’t invited to their wedding.” (Marin, 2000)

enjoys doing so. And we can guess he does because, in his fidelity to his self-created format, he is perhaps the most liberated television creator in the history of the medium. His contract with HBO gives him both Final Cut and the uncontested choice of ending or renewing his show’s run depending on the whim of his own relatively leisurely schedule6. When asked why he’s freely chosen to spend so much of his golden years convincing the general culture of his innate quasi-nihilistic hypocrisy, David answers:

[The Larry David I play is] my version of Superman. The character really is me, but I just couldn’t possibly behave like that. If I had my druthers, that would be me all the time, but you can’t do that. We’re always doing things we don’t want to do, we never say what we really feel, and so this is an idealized version of how I want to be. As crazy as this person is, I could step into those shoes right now, but I could be arrested or I’d be hit or whatever. (Quoted in (Hiatt, 2011))

Much of the brilliance of the show’s humour comes from the fact that David only ‘idealizes’ himself, and not the world in which he inserts his character. His ‘true’ self is a walking social catastrophe and a complete idiot, but that doesn’t mean this version isn’t abstractly a better person for being so. As such, David’s appropriation of the term ‘Superman’ in this context is perfect. It connects with both the formidable and indestructible singularity of the alter-ego of mild-mannered, inconspicuous Clark Kent as well as Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ubermensch’ : the man who ‘is to man what man is to the ape’, in that he defies all preceding conventions and dogma and accepts only his

6. This is the reason why Curb has had one of the longest discontinuous runs of any contemporary sitcom (12 years from its first to its most recent episode) and also why its cultish fans are still holding out for its return to the air even though its present four-years-and-counting hiatus has been nearly twice the duration of the previous longest gap between seasons. David has never ruled out the possibility of a Ninth round of episodes but the present state of delay probably means that the show’s definitive finale will perhaps only be its creator’s death (Simmons, 2014).

personal judgement as the presiding law. 7 Hiding within such a self-description is also an ingenious joke on fictional characterization in general. If David’s ‘true self’ is a shallow, materialistic, uninventive “bald asshole” then the whole point of Curb’s enterprise is the showcasing of Larry’s disturbing transparency – the fact that there really is ‘nothing more to him’ than his id and the minutiae he lives for8. While The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood are unceasingly acclaimed for continuing the Realist tradition of Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Hugo and Zola,9 very little mind is ever paid to how much Curb follows on in the Modernist wake of T.S. Eliot, Kafka and Beckett. But indeed, if there is a ‘hollow man’ on contemporary television – a combustible clown not even waiting for Godot anymore10 – it can only be Larry David.

The only way, however, that a character as radically anarchistic as Larry is can possibly be funny is if he comes up against the contrast of a world that is in itself utterly substantial. As aforementioned, this almost requires the replication of David’s ordinary life in immaculate detail, but more than that – since Larry pretty much is the show and Larry doesn’t play by society’s unspoken rules – the show itself is obliged to break the conventions of its own confinement within the form and production method of the traditional sitcom, and employ what Ray Richmond deems “the situation comedy equivalent of guerilla filmmaking” (2003). Thus each episode is filmed almost entirely on location, is ten minutes longer on average than the universal standard

7. Though it takes until the ‘Palestinian Chicken’ episode in Season Eight – probably the best of the 80 installments produced so far – for the show to become self-conscious of Larry’s sheer honesty as a ‘superpower’ unto itself, as he is hired as a “social assassin” by both a friend and his manager Jeff’s daughter to eviscerate their family members for their respective annoying habits.

8. For the sake of overselling my immersion in the show, I can bring up the examples here of the addiction to bubble-wrap popping that endangers his life in ‘Krazee Eyez Killah’, the matter of the ring stain he insists on clearing up over the easy continuation of his marriage in ‘The Divorce’, and the ‘shrimp-counting’ dispute that ruins the possibility of his winning an HBO contract for a similarly metatextual new show with Julia-Louis Dreyfus in ‘The Shrimp Incident’.
9. Sex and the City too is often claimed as a post-feminist transplant of Jane Austen’s signature unattached young upper-middle-class ladies to New York City.
10. “Jeff Garlin [friend, Curb Executive Producer, and actor playing Jeff Greene] said Mr. David’s point of view is defined by three things: “anxiety, anger and despair”” (Marin, 2000)

(approximately 22 minutes), dispenses with a laugh-track and has every actor improvise their own dialogue.11 David usually conceives the story and always writes a detailed six- to-ten-page step-outline, but the rest is very much like life. Every participant in a scene knows the general direction of a conflict, as well as their own intentions, but how they actually articulate their respective standpoints is not at all pre-empted. What this means is that the show does not feature any prepared punchlines or traditional gags. It is perhaps the first situation comedy in which the situation truly matters more than the second-by-second deployment of jokes.12 In this paradigm, the situation is the butt of the joke because it is always, at least in Larry’s view, under negotiation. Any appeal to common knowledge and sense carries no weight because Larry’s reason usually refutes it to only his own satisfaction. The sociologist Erving Goffman notes that any scene of performed interaction, staged or real, is constituted such that “[t]ogether the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored.” (1959: 9-10) Larry, though constantly combative, never defends himself in a dispute by claiming a moral rectitude beyond himself. He is always his own judge and jury, though the plot itself – dictated by the ultimate deus ex machina: his own real-life counterpart – usually gets to play his executioner. As such, Larry’s world “is postmodern, without meaning, a place where anything can [and does] gain the status of absolute significance.” (Leverette, 2004: 10) And so even the most uncommentable and miscellaneous details of Curb’s diegesis become the arbiters of Larry’s weekly downfalls. It is because the show is so weirdly naturalistic that all of its particularized reality can be swept up into the butterfly-effect model of its narrative. Yet the whole production remains ultimately under David’s

11. And every actor, besides David, only knows the content and import of their immediate scene, requiring most episodes to be shot in sequence, with two cameras to ensure ‘coverage’. The only other famous practitioners of this technique are the cinema auteurs Mike Leigh and John Cassavettes who, in contrast, mostly use it to convey their actors’ spontaneous dramatic sincerity.

12. This is I think why Curb is the one recent sitcom to rival the best of absurdist sketch comedy (Monty Python, The Goons and co.) in sheer unwatchability for first-time viewers. It takes no time at all to find its feet in its format but its intentional awkwardness, verite aesthetic and unlikable characters require you to spend at least six episodes just getting into its discordant rhythm. But as its Metacritic rating and huge fan community attest, this is a worthwhile initiation.

control, with all its readymade mise-en-scene correlating just to his character’s lack of an internal life.

Hopefully we can so far see why I so emphasize and valorize David’s auteurism inCurb; in many ways it seems to manifest as the work of an amateur comic savant. Insulated from most immediate influences, David has here pretty much invented his own form of avant-garde television for almost no other reason than that he could13, and that the sitcom form was flexible enough to accommodate him. His original contributions to Seinfeld’s famously ‘Jewish’ sensibility – its occasional morbidity, rudeness, and the catastrophically arbitrary convergence of plot and sub-plots – are just imported into his own post-success reality, and they merely aid in confirming the age- old logic of ‘once a schmuck, always a schmuck’.14 Respawned in the faux- mockumentary incarnation of Curb’s pilot, these mainstays of David’s comedy serve as both the means of his own caricature and as a parody of the predominant aesthetic of ‘Reality’ in which they emerged. The period between the mid 90’s and just after 9/11 can now be seen in overview as a watershed era for naturalistic, ‘anti-ironic’ depiction at all levels of taste in cinema and television. Just as Lars Von Trier’s Dogma movement in Denmark was ‘purifying’ independent world cinema, Michael Haneke in Germany and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran were making minimalist films starring long takes and ‘real people’, Christopher Guest was directing straight-faced documentaries about fictional characters in the weirdest corners of America, Michael Moore was breaking box office records with documentaries edited and presented as liberal melodramas, Reality TV shows like Survivor, Big Brother and The Amazing Race were creating

13. Of course, there are any number of extraneous reasons why David committed himself to Curb – it’s kept him busy, he’s stayed famous and, because he gets to vicariously live his life through the show, he’s realized many personal dreams (meeting and hanging out with other famous comedians, being in a Broadway musical etc.) and made many diehard Seinfeld fans happy – but all of them are perks discovered during the show’s run more than contributing factors to its genesis.

14. Complaints by the occasional critic and viewer that Larry’s life is too banal to be interesting because it is that of a lazy rich married Jew in California thus miss the point entirely. Larry’s Jewishness is otherwise besides the point excepting that it exacerbates his self-consciousness of his being essentially the same misanthropic person he is now as when he was a lazy poor unmarried Jewish comic in New York decades earlier. We can all be Larry David because he convinces us that hell is both other people and ourselves.

global audiences and franchises, and, just a year after Curb’s debut season, Ricky Gervais independently introduced many of its innovations (patented awkwardness, handheld camerawork, the absence of a laugh-track) to British sitcom viewers through his own star-making show The Office, to perhaps even greater success than David had had on either Seinfeld or Curb.15 Very little, of course, connects all these productions except that their creators sensed that a new audience existed for an apparently less artificial form of entertainment. It is in the context of this global anti-formal milieu thatCurb reveals its most radical side. By constantly contrasting the banal with the hilarious, spontaneity with greater cohesion, the real with complete personal fantasy, the show implicitly closes the gap between the world and its representation. Differentiating between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ Larry David – except as a means of avoiding confusion – is ultimately beside the point. As aforementioned, David himself identifies more with his television persona than his everyday self, and thus he exposes how much of the real world is always already a concerted act of performance.16 In Goffman’s words again: “life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.”17 (1959, 72) It is the pre-eminent quality of contemporary television that it can allow such an ambiguous state of affairs to exist in seeming perpetuity. Without Curb as a role model in this regard, sitcoms like Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s Flight of the Conchords, Louis CK’s Louie, Lena Dunham’s Girls and Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project would either simply not have made it to air or wouldn’t have become so synonymous with the actual lives of their writer-creator stars. It is because Larry David wanted nothing else than to get to play a ‘more real’ version of himself that he could

15. Gervais has also inevitably appeared as himself on Curb, and had previously interviewed David for his Ricky Gervais meets… program on BBC’s Channel Four, during the course of which, amidst much mutual fawning, David commented that their basic similarity as comedians and show-creators ultimately comes from their both being “sticklers for realism”. (Gervais, 2006)

16. It should be mentioned here perhaps that Robert B. Weide, the director of bothCurb’s pilot and many of its classic episodes, had previous to the show only helmed documentaries on the lives of his and Larry’s heroes of American comedy: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and The Marx Brothers.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche again too: “It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance; it is, in fact, the worst proved supposition in the world.” (1909, 50)

lead the way in bringing self-dramatization into the upper echelons of Quality Television.

Thus the question of this essay – of the nature of Larry David’s televisual auteurism, representational ethics and current influence – ultimately concerns the future of what I deemed in my proposal ‘Autobiographical Television’. In the absence of any vestige of God, David himself takes over as the all-powerful, all-knowing deity of his own Curbuniverse. However, being Jewish, his version of divinity is certainly not all-loving too, and indeed, as Robert B. Weide attests, the show’s slogan behind the scenes (likeSeinfeld’s ‘No hugging, No learning’) was agreed upon as “no good or bad deed [on Larry’s part] goes unpunished.” (Quoted in (Lavery, 2009: 210)) This extreme dialectic between complementary desires for pure agency and utter subjection in Larry David’s self-representation (i.e. that ‘he’ is always the butt of the joke he himself is making) is also the central conflict in all the aforementioned shows constituting Curb’s legacy. In the same way that a writer’s and a performer’s life are necessarily spent in perpetual self- consciousness, these shows are essentially living, continuing metatexts of themselves and the person whose words and image they showcase. As my analysis has shown, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is most probably television’s first complete instantiation of this more commonly literary moebius-band-like structure, and its close study evidences how it stems from an underlying instinct for self-‘improvement’ through self-fictionalization. It is the stand-up comic, in all his confessed pettiness and solitude, who cuts the most righteous figure on contemporary television.

Word Count (Excluding Footnotes): 2350

Reference List:
David, Larry. HBO, 1999-. Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Gervais, Ricky. 2006. Ricky Gervais meets… Larry David. Objective Productions for BBC Channel Four. Available:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bUpF2d4H3x8

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

Hiatt, Brian. 2011. ‘Larry David Talks Dating Post-Divorce, ‘Seinfeld’ and Wealth. InRolling Stone Magazine. July 20, 2011. Available:www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/larry-david-talks-dating-post-divorce-seinfeld- and-wealth-20110720

Lavery, David. 2009. ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ in The Essential HBO Reader. Pgs 204-13. Eds. Edgerton, Gary R. and Jones, Jeffrey P. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Leverette, Marc. 2004. ‘Deconstructing Larry, “The Last Man”: Larry David, ‘Seinfeld’, ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, and Comedies of the Self’ in Studies in Popular Culture Vol. 27, No.1 (Oct. 2004)

Marin, Rick. 2000. ‘The Great and Wonderful Wizard of Odds’. Article in The New York Times, July 16, 2000. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/16/style/the-great-and-wonderful-wizard-of- odds.html

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1909. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans: Zimmern, Helen. Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis

Richmond, Ray. 2003. ‘Unscripted: Directing HBO’s Improv Comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. Article in DGA Magazine, July 2003. Available: http://web.archive.org/web/20090530143948/http://www.dga.org/news/v28_2/feat_u nscripted.php3

Simmons, Bill. 2014. The B.S. Report: Larry David on the Future of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ and the ‘Seinfeld’ Finale. December 2014. Available: http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/b-s-report-larry-david-on-the-future-of- curb-your-enthusiasm-and-the-seinfeld-finale/