No Good?
Dom Rottman
11 Apr 2024
Larry David has produced unparalleled comedy for over thirty years. Despite some low points, no one else writes such compelling stories of the excruciating minutiae of everyday life. And this year, with the last season of Curb your Enthusiasm, these stories might finally come to an end.
And good riddance.
Don’t get me wrong–I am a huge fan of both Curb and Seinfeld. I can quote episodes a sentence ahead without looking at the television. But as time goes on, I am troubled by how much I enjoy it. The easygoing lifestyles of the Seinfeld cast are becoming further out of reach; Kramer’s life is no more implausible than the others. And with regards to Curb, who could be more out of touch than affluent residents of West Los Angeles? Sure, that doesn’t have anything to do with the zanier bits. An eccentric soup chef. A bra-sniffing dog. A puffy shirt. And penis graffiti is a time-honored tradition. But Larry David is above all a social assassin critic, and his critique presents a puzzle: how is this critique so poignant when both he and his characters live in contexts so extraordinarily different than most people? It transcends social barriers, especially class. And that is why his farewell is due.
What separates David from most social critics is that he is keenly aware of his place in the world; not just that he’s fabulously wealthy, but that he lives in it in at all. The cast of Seinfeld almost always faces the unfortunate consequences of their selfish actions and never seem to change for the better–hence the infamous “no hugging, no learning” mantra. David’s portrayal of himself in Curb makes no bones about the fact that he knows better than anyone else and is willing to act accordingly selfish (“There is a certain authenticity in caring about oneself!"/I did the best I can for someone who hates people but is forced to live among them”), right, wrong, or indifferent–but he’s usually right. What results is a character who is constantly groveling and apologizing despite being largely correct about his gripes. Sample abuse. Tipping a “table captain.” Trite moralistic text chains. Adult jokes at adult dinner parties. Bathroom attendants.
But the most perceptive part of Curb is the world it constructs. It makes no attempt to represent the world in its completeness, with full authenticity, but rather represents the world as Larry David the writer sees it–accomplished through the selfish perspective of Larry David the character. The result is a TV world which, while comically absurd, is a fair approximation and subtle indictment of the bourgeois perspective. Curb is a critique which necessarily limits itself.
To explain what I mean, let us consider the most “political” episode of Curb–“Palestinian Chicken.” A Palestinian-owned chicken restaurant has become the talk of the town not only because it’s quite delicious, but because it is opening a branch next to a Kosher deli. Larry’s upper-class social group has all of a sudden become politically motivated to stop the heinous deed of opening a restaurant. “How on earth can they put up a Palestinian chicken restaurant next to the sacred land of that deli?!”–exclaims one of Larry’s friends, Marty Funkhauser, who has–all of a sudden–recommitted to Judaism, donning a Yarmulke and praying over the lavish dinner party meal.
Larry, however, is compelled more by a good meal than his Jewish heritage. His continued patronage pays selfish dividends. He seduces one of the restaurant’s managers, and has no problem being berated for the crimes of the state of Israel during intercourse (“I’m an occupier!”). He uses the chicken as a bargaining chip to gain Marty exemption from observing the Sabbath so that he can win a team golf tournament. And so committed is Larry to this victory that he is willing to keep mum about an affair between one of his other teammates and another teammate’s wife.
The point is that Larry is acting unabashedly selfish. He has no problem trampling over religious or basic virtue for his mean and boorish gratification. Yet, somehow, the behavior of his socially upstanding peers smacks more offensive. Their lifestylist activism is inauthentic and of weak principle. It arises from a Judaism worn as a fashion accessory, to which Larry’s animal instinct and Marty’s sudden (and ultimately temporary) orthodoxy are foils. There is simply no depth in Larry’s bourgeois world, only petty grievances and trivial pursuits; yet he is attacked for owning this perspective and pursuing the most meaningful life possible–“living his best life,” to use a bourgeois truism. This selfish, vain, and out-of-touch character is our tragic hero of sorts, one who must act immoral in order to be authentic.
It is typical of the products of the culture industry to resolve problems on the screen in ways that they can never be resolved in real life. But in Curb, as in Seinfeld, nothing is ever resolved. Despite Larry’s best efforts, social customs, however absurd, continue to exist; his base desires are rarely fulfilled, and he never changes his behavior nor expresses a desire to do so. Likewise, “Palestinian Chicken” advances a critique of the Israel-Palestine conflict no more than the characters of the episode. For it to attempt to do so would be disingenuous, not just because it would come off so but because it would make an exaggerated fictional world utterly fantastical by robbing it of its metaphorical weight. In other words, while the world of Curb is obviously fictional, it is nevertheless a representation of reality according to Larry David. To offer a genuine position, even if critical, on geopolitics would shatter this whole image and spoil any claim it has to truth or authenticity by extending beyond the scope of the world it portrays. A social critique which transcends material barriers cannot attempt to go beyond them.
There is a certain poetry in the fact that the arc of Curb’s final season–Larry’s violation of Georgia’s infamous election integrity act–takes place in the realm of law, catalyzed by such a contemporary issue. Other comics might very well have taken such a situation in a different direction, to enter a critique of contemporary material conditions. But like the old man in Kafka’s parable, Larry stands before the gate of the law and does not enter. Instead, this legal ordeal is used as a social indictment of Larry’s character, and, ultimately, his role as critic. No lessons are learned for him, the world in which he lives, nor the viewers. The finale sees Larry found guilty. Ted Danson is “arrested” in a media-fellated photo-op. An absurd law remains standing. A mistrial is declared– Larry goes free, and his life will go on. He may very well continue to show us the world as he sees it in his dying days. But the gate of the law is now closed.
There is discussion about whether quality of Curb’s more recent seasons, especially this final one, has declined. Some say that this view is just rose-tinted lenses and the hip, knee-jerk reaction to “hate new thing” (said as someone who constantly tends to “hate new thing”), while others say that even if the show’s quality has declined, it hasn’t significantly impacted their enjoyment. But over 30 years of success seems too long for an artist’s corpus to suddenly take a nosedive at the end; at the same time, it is a length which can fall short of timelessness. Since Larry David’s comedy is particularly modern, its resonance depends in part on the historical context in which people live. I would suggest instead, then, that the world is moving beyond Larry David. Inequality has become unquestionably more severe since the 1990s, and an audience cognizant of the wealth gap between them and David and his characters surely creates a distance of appreciation. But the larger phenomenon is simply that the taste of the audience has changed. Material conditions have so shifted, so fraught is modernity with crises, that we no longer appreciate the same things in the same way, if at all. Superhero films, for instance, have been bemoaned for their quality of late, with “wokeness” to blame. But such complaints are rather a longing for a fresh bite that can never be experienced again, of the same slop served for a course too long. Even finer and dynamic works may fail to keep up with a palate that shifts with the world in unforeseen ways. Today it is possible that we want–and might very well need–something particularly different from our artistic critics. It is not enough to transcend class and social barriers. Today they must be shattered.