Season 8 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" premieres July 10 at 10PM (EDT) on HBO. Another season for Susie Greene (Susie Essman), the wife of Larry David's agent — Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin), to make obscenity into an art form when she tears into Jeff and Larry for their classically lame-male-behavior. Nothing is sacred on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Nothing. If this is a (fair & balanced) show about nothing2, so be it.
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[x The Atlantic]
The Joy Of Vex
By James Parker
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In my dream, a long-fingered witch was zapping me with heart attacks (“Feel that? Feel it coming?”), and then, disconnectedly, I was in a car with Larry David, driving through Brooklyn. As we entered an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Larry said, “Oy gevalt! It’s Passover!” and piously bowed his head. “Larry,” I said, surprised, “I didn’t know you cared about this stuff.” And in my dream Larry David replied, with great solemnity: “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Jews.”
Not a bad line, right? Pret-tay, pret-tay good, as Larry himself might say. The unconscious—mine, anyway—is rarely so aphoristic. Even better, it’s a line that happens to be true: Larry David, culturally speaking, is indeed both a figure of pioneering godlessness and a loyal celebrant of the traditions, religious and comic, of his people. I say godlessness because atheism won’t do here: too programmatic, too broomstick-up-the-ass. From the post-moral peevishness of Seinfeld (which he co-created) to the flying yarmulkes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (which he created and stars in), Larry has been in a class of his own, spinning a kind of hilarious materialist fairy tale that depends for many of its effects upon the vacuum left by a just-departed divinity—a God who has bolted from the room like Groucho Marx, cigar smell and a hanging one-liner the tokens of His absence.
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" begins its eighth season on HBO in July, and once again Larry faces his old adversary: the universe. Which is to say, a field of omnipresent, inhuman intelligence that conspires impishly against him. Does he generate this field himself, out of his own crazy, bald, Van de Graaff head? Hard to say. Whatever its origin, it is comically ruthless, assaulting him with unlucky coincidences, coarse puns, karmic blowbacks, and punctual hoistings by his own petard. In one of the new episodes, a man breaks a vow of silence to shout out a terrible secret about Larry; in another, he is on the verge of winning—winning!—a golf tournament when his team and a crowd of onlookers suddenly collapse into violent disputation. While Larry’s world has always been Judaically infused—bat mitzvahs, mezuzahs, trips to the synagogue, counsel from the rabbi, etc.—religion cannot comprehend it. Another new episode finds Larry’s enigmatic friend, the stone-faced Marty Funkhouser, hoarsely “rededicating [his] life to Judaism.” Staring at Funkhouser’s yarmulke, Larry asks, “When are you gonna come back to Earth?”
Eight seasons: not a bad run for a show that seemed, at first look, little more than a weirdly detached riff on the success of "Seinfeld." Barely a year after that show ended, here was Larry David, gangly and not especially telegenic, playing “Larry David”—a man in a kind of showbiz afterlife, freewheeling in the wake of his blockbuster sitcom. Crucially, we had shifted coasts. The Seinfeldians were New Yorkers, deep in the city’s hive, burrowing along their lines of obsession; they rode the subway, they took yellow cabs; they had jobs to go to (George and Elaine did, at least) and rents to pay. But Larry was in electric Larryland—affluent without limit, bowling along the horizontals of L.A. in his Prius. He played a lot of golf and went to a lot of restaurants. At his side was a gleaming, gorgeous, assertively banal wife. Like he’d made "Seinfeld" and gone to heaven.
And still—this was the show’s hook—he burned. Still he grated. In so frictionless an environment, Larry was obliged to make his own friction—to become a one-man friction factory. Parts of him, or parts of his condition, we recognized from "Seinfeld": his barking Costanzan indignation, his Krameroid manners. Dry cleaners were argued with. Waiters were made to feel awkward. Customs and conventions were submitted to a nonstop Seinfeldian interrogation: What is the cutoff time for late-night calls? How long must you stand at a graveside? Let me ask you a question … Let me ask you something … Let me ask you this.... As dogs to lampposts, so Larry to any kind of socially proscribed speech: jabbering away, asking his questions, he insulted gays, black people, incest survivors, Christians, parents, women, the disabled. Tipping, that elementary act of economic lubrication, was relentlessly balked at. Life itself, to be felt at all, had to be something like a rash. (Skin irritation has been a vigorous motif over the seasons of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"—itches, redness, chafed penis-ends, ticklings in the anus, garments that rub maddeningly.) Larry was thrown out of houses. He was cursed. But he kept going, unabashed—even achieving, at moments, a sort of hectic equanimity. (I think of him at the wheel of his Prius, cheerfully bellowing the lyrics to Stephen Sondheim’s “Gee, Officer Krupke.”)
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" is full of disasters and crudities, and swearing too, but the irony is that Seinfeld—three-wall, laugh-track, sitcom-happy "Seinfeld"—was actually the darker show. The Seinfeldians lived their lives in triumphant immunity to the transcendent: nothing, not love, not prison, not sex, not death, could break the spell of triviality that bound them all together. Buried in the jazzy bass-clicks and synth-parps of the "Seinfeld" theme was the authentic snickering of dead souls. “You know, I could have killed you,” Elaine tells a telephone engineer who has been working in her apartment, in an episode called “The Maid,” “and no one would have known.” “I could have killed you and no one would have known,” he retorts.
The puffings of buffonic tuba that announce "Curb Your Enthusiasm," on the other hand, tell us that we are entering the big top. Larry the clown will go down, get up, go down again, in a species of affective slapstick. His wife will put up with him (at least until she leaves him in Season Six); his friend Richard Lewis (played, of course, by his real-life friend Richard Lewis) will roll his eyes, wring his hands; his manager, Jeff Greene (played by Jeff Garlin), will puff and shrug. And round and round we go. Is nothing sacred? Of course it isn’t.
Larry has had his brushes with Meaning—notably in Season Five, when a near-drowning produced the brief sensation of a purpose-driven life—but they never quite take. Serenely preoperative on a hospital gurney, in a quiet rapture of virtue as he prepares to donate a kidney to Richard Lewis, he is complimented on his calmness by a male nurse. “God will watch over me,” says Larry. Mutters the nurse: “He didn’t watch over the last guy.”
"Curb Your Enthusiasm" could run for another eight seasons, because the opportunities afforded by this character are basically endless. He moves in fits and set pieces, and if they repeat, so much the better. In Season Eight, you will see Larry rail at a man whose car is taking up two spaces, calling him a “pig parker.” You will hear Larry declare that it would take $3,000 to make him see "Eat, Pray, Love." And you will watch Larry and Jeff further develop their thin/fat double act by driving around New York, shouting, in a small car fitted with a prototype periscope.
“Let me ask you this question,” Larry says, taking his terrible ease in a restaurant, to the veterinarian sitting opposite him. “In veterinary school, do you tend to focus more on the dog, let’s say, than the cow?” Panic flashes humidly in the young man’s eyes, the familiar panic of one about to be caught in Larry’s swath of social disaster: At what point should he take umbrage? An insult is coming, something awful, but will he know it when he hears it? He braces himself. We all brace ourselves. Ω
[James Parker is an Atlantic contributing editor.]
Copyright © 2011 The Atlantic Monthly Group
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