My hero Larry David, the master of universal specificity

Curb Your Enthusiasm is back, and this should be a cause for celebration

Larry David reinventing the medium of sitcom for a second time with ‘Curb’, the first season of which was broadcast in 2000

The promotional material for the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm was released this week and features Larry David clad in full Roman attire accompanied with the words, “He left. He did nothing. He returned.” In keeping with the theme, I have come here to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

Larry (always Larry, partly because it feels familiarly familial and partly because he’s a man with two first names) turned 70 this month and, while he’d no doubt balk at the prospect, it seems the right moment to reflect on the career of a man whose work is dearer to me than that of any artist that’s ever worked in any medium. Mozart may have written some pretty decent tunes, but he didn’t create Seinfeld, baby.

Jerry Seinfeld, despite having his name on the product, has readily admitted that Larry was unquestionably the key creative force behind the show. The co-creator wrote more episodes than anybody else and revolutionised what television comedy could be with the “no hugging, no learning” ethos that flew in the face of established wisdom about sitcoms in America. There is a moment in season four, perhaps the show’s zenith, in which George becomes convinced he’s going to die just as he’s found a degree of success. The following exchange takes place on a therapist’s couch:

George: God would never let me be successful; he'd kill me first. He'd never let me be happy.

Therapist: I thought you didn't believe in God?

George: I do for the bad things.

“I do for the bad things” is an astonishing line to include in a network sitcom struggling in the ratings against a CBS crime drama entitled Jake and the Fatman. As with so much of Seinfeld, the fact that the creators didn’t really know what they were doing proved entirely beneficial; the lack of a writers’ room meant that scripts weren’t gagged up by committee and, more often than not, have an idiosyncratic feel that supports the theory that the specific is universal. The more the show honed in on the minutiae of daily life (in a way one NBC honcho memorably described as “too New York, too Jewish” in a critical memo after the pilot aired), the more it found fans all over the globe.

For a long time, Larry David was little more than a name that popped up during the Seinfeld credits and occasionally had some uncredited, minor roles in the show. He walked away from the series at the end of season seven and the result was a change in direction that seemed slightly at odds with the naturalistic, slice of life plot lines that had come to define Seinfeld. He returned to write the finale, an episode that polarised fans and critics alike before writing and directing his first feature film, Sour Grapes. The latter was a critical and commercial disaster, although it’s far better than its reputation might have you believe, and was the subject of my very first film column for this publication.

What would Larry do next? This, after all, was the man who had been known to walk on stage during his years as a stand-up comic, assess the crowd with a withering look and say “Forget it” before storming off. How would he react to two failures in a row after years of unbridled success? Well, as he says to his wife in Curb when she asks why he told their friend that his son is well endowed, he “took a risk”.

The Curb Your Enthusiasm pilot aired in October 1999 and felt a little like Seinfeld with swearing. The hour-long special followed a fictionalised version of Larry as he attempted to make a return to stand-up. Filmed in a documentary style, clips of the comedian on stage were interspersed with awkward encounters with his wife, manager and friends. Crucially, the plots and subplots were established in a detailed written outline by the show’s creator and the dialogue was largely improvised. Even more crucially, despite being in his fifties and having virtually no experience in front of the camera, Larry could actually act.

What followed was a second televisual equivalent of the moon landing for Larry, reinventing the medium once more and dissecting topics that Seinfeld could only hint at. Eight seasons aired between 2000 and 2011 and that appeared to be that. Scarred by the negative reaction to the Seinfeld finale, Larry vowed never to consciously write a final episode again and simply to walk away once he’d had enough. Until the surprise announcement a year ago, most assumed that day had come.

That announcement came just a week before my wife’s waters broke 11 weeks early and we spent the summer’s duration in a hospital room. The first thing she did once things had calmed down a little was demand the Curb DVDs and it was an instinct I understood all too well. At just about every stressful moment in my life, from exam results days to the mornings of job interviews, I have chosen to alleviate the anxiety by comfort viewing the work of my hero. During that same dreadful period in hospital, I couldn’t focus on so much as a magazine article so I collated my favourite pictures of the great man. Something about seeing his face just calms me somehow. Incidentally, the baby is happy and healthy but I wasn’t allowed to name him Larry.

A year earlier, we had travelled to New York to see Fish in the Dark, a play written by and starring LD. I booked the tickets before we even had flights or accommodation sorted because this might be my only opportunity to be in a room with the man. At the end of an evening during which I grinned from ear to ear throughout, we waited by the stage door with a group of other unquestionably cool dudes.

The man emerged after a few minutes and apologised profusely, explaining that he was losing his voice and couldn’t really stop in the cold to pose for photographs as he ordinarily would or else he’d end up being unable to perform in the upcoming shows. The sorry seemed genuine but was this simply a classic Curb style lie from the master to extricate himself from an irritating social obligation? Apparently not – a few months later I spotted a signed copy of the programme on Twitter from a fan who’d attended a show a few weeks later. In the words of Sgt Bilko in The Phil Silvers Show, on record as Larry’s favourite sitcom, “The bigger they are, the nicer they are.”

Ultimately, hero worship comes down to a number of factors and this man’s work has had a more profound influence on my way of looking at the world than any other because of my age, background and interests.

While he may despise sentiment in comedy, there is one moment in an early Curb that speaks more profoundly to the reality of human relationships than any number of weepy dramas. Larry and Cheryl are leaving a disastrous dinner party hosted by a former porn star played by Bob Odenkirk. Larry asks his wife what her level of anger is and is informed she’s at an 8.7:

Larry: So how do I get to a 7?

Cheryl: I don't know.

Larry: I know I can't get a 6, that's out of the question. But we could have a very decent ride home with a 7.

Cheryl: You think so?

Larry: Yes, I do. I'll tell you what, if we ride home as a 7... as soon as we get home, you can go right back to an 8.

As with all of Larry’s best work, one senses this must have come from life. The specific is universal and nobody has written as well about the specific as Lawrence Gene David. Here’s to the next 70 years.