Curb Your Enthusiasm

CREATED BY Larry David
STARRING Larry David, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Garlin, Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus
HBO Home Video


Before co-creating Seinfeld, Larry David spent a spectacularly unsuccessful — and, according to him, spectacularly unpleasant — spell writing for Saturday Night Live. “Nobody talked to me,” he recalled. “It was the only place I ever worked where I really, truly did not make a friend.”

Watching this first season of David’s post-Seinfeld sitcom, it becomes clear that the miracle is that he has ever made any friends. Seamlessly combining Seinfeld’s razor-sharp plotting with Larry Sanders–esque improvisation and celebrity cameos, Curb Your Enthusiasm finds the actor-writer portraying himself in large part as a complaining, sarcastic, self-obsessed prick.

How true to life is his “performance”? Well, in this DVD’s interview sequence, conducted by Bob Costas, David claims that the onscreen “Larry David” is actually more like him than the “real” one being reluctantly grilled by Costas. This is a terrifying admission, at least for his friends and family, given that the TV Larry is seemingly incapable of accomplishing the simplest task without matters spiraling out of control and into hilarious — if almost unwatchably embarrassing — disaster.

Asked to write an obituary for one of his wife’s relatives, for example, David fumbles the mission so that it reads, “Devoted sister, beloved cunt” (“I meant aunt!”). In other episodes, he tags his own uncle as a child molester, greets a black dermatologist with a “joke” about positive discrimination and is walked in on by his manager’s elderly parents while watching hardcore porn.

True, the Larry David of these early episodes is not quite the monster who would later use the death of his mother to blackmail his (much) better half into having sex. But this DVD reveals a show that hit the ground at a sprint. Die-hard fans, meanwhile, will be delighted by the inclusion of the hour-long special/pilot and a commentary track — even if, as David predictably notes, it was made “under duress.”