Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm)

[nekokate]

I'm really pleased with the new series so far. It's everything I was hoping it would be, hehe

[Colston]

[faceless]

[faceless]

No ‘curbing’ comedian Richard Lewis
By ARLENE FINE
Cleveland Jewish News
October 30, 2009

Any comedian who writes a book called The Other Great Depression and is currently on his “Misery Loves Company Tour” can be counted on for angst-ridden wit and a deadpan delivery. That may be why author, actor and stand-up comic Richard Lewis is such a good fit for HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“My neurotic comedy comes from deep inside and reflects the pain I carry, stemming from my addictive and compulsive-obsessive personality,” says Lewis from his Los Angeles home. “Just ask my therapists and alcohol and drug abuse counselors. It also reflects my tormented Jewish soul and the persecution that our people have felt since Moses received the Ten Commandments.”

Lewis, 62, who has been clean and sober for 16 years, will perform at Hilarities on Nov. 5-7. “I’m looking forward to coming to Cleveland,” says The Ohio State University class of ’69 graduate. “I treat each show as though I were on stage at Carnegie Hall. I could perform next to a silo in Nebraska and still be trying my hardest to make people or the cows laugh.”

Dubbed “The Prince of Pain,” Lewis speaks freely about his “nightmarish road” to recovery. “I went through 15 years of trying to kill myself,” he says. “Whether you are addicted to drugs, alcohol or potato latkes, it’s very hard to clean up your act. That is why when my good friend, OSU president Gorden Gee, asks me to come to campus and speak out against binge drinking, I’m there. If my experience can help one kid stay away from alcohol, then I say, ‘dayanu.’”

The New Jersey-born comedian credits much of his recent serenity to his wife of three years, Joyce, as well as to his reconnection to Judaism. “I came from a Conservative home, but my Judaism got lost in the shuffle,” he says. “My wife has reintroduced me to Torah study, and I’m loving it. It’s also one more thing that is keeping me sober, because I know if that goes south, everything goes south.”

Like other great comedians, Lewis draws from his own experience for his stand-up routine. “My father was a very popular caterer in New Jersey; they called him the Elvis of caterers,” he recalls. “But at the end of the party, instead of bringing home extra baked Alaska or prime rib, he shlepped home 200 tons of melon balls. I would ask my mother, ‘What’s for dinner?’ and she’d say, ‘Melon balls.’”

Appearing on “Curb” with his buddy Larry David (the two have been friends since they were 12-year-old campers) has been a huge boost to Lewis’s stand-up career. “Despite all the bad things I’ve gone through, I feel very blessed,” he explains. “Spinoza said, ‘God is everywhere,’ and now that I have become much more spiritual, I know that’s true. But, I also believe if you want to move a mountain, bring a shovel. God might be everywhere, but you have to do your part, too. That’s why as a recovering alcoholic, I keep toting that shovel.”

[Colston]

I tried to read Richard Lewis' book but couldn't get through it... I've heard so many people's redemption stories in AA that they drive me mad now.

[faceless]

Photograph: Anna Schori for the Guardian
Larry David: 'I'm cranky'
Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm have been huge TV hits and made him millions. Now he's starring in the new Woody Allen film. So what has Larry David got to complain about? Quite a bit, actually
Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian,
Saturday 26 June 2010

In a corner suite on the 14th floor of an upmarket New York hotel, Larry David – in the west coast uniform of running shoes, baseball cap and impressive tan – is on the phone to room service, ordering oatmeal for breakfast. "I'll get it with the… yes, that's right, with the berries." He looks fleetingly suspicious. "How did you know I wanted the berries?"

The 62-year-old David isn't cranky or a curmudgeon – words often used to describe his alter ego, also called Larry David, in the hugely successful US sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm – but he is a fretter. Hotels seem to exacerbate this trait. The "Do Not Disturb" sign on his door, he explains, will remain in place for the duration of his stay ("I don't like people cleaning my room") and when he orders coffee for us, yet only one cup arrives, the oversight gnaws at him. I tell him I'm happy to go without, but several minutes later it's still bothering him, and he breaks off mid-conversation to reach for the phone, declaring only half-jokingly: "I'm sorry, this will not stand." Later, while having his picture taken, he frets about the elastic in his sweater sleeves and how easily it loses its basic elastical properties. "I hate that," he sighs. "You can't function with a floppy sleeve."

David's alertness to life's annoyances clearly provides a starting point for his comic persona (the sleeve observation makes an appearance in Curb Your Enthusiasm, too), but the similarities end there. David knows how to restrain himself, to conform to the little lies and surface civilities that allow society to function. Curb's Larry does not. As much naive child as grumpy old man, he possesses no editing mechanism between his thoughts and his words; he's deaf to social cues, enraging nearly everyone around him without really meaning to. A stickler for accuracy at the expense of sensitivity, he will argue with a friend who has recently lost his remaining parent over whether he's too old to call himself an orphan. Introduced to a black family whose name is Black, he will remark on the coincidence: "That's like if my last name was Jew – Larry Jew."

"I don't find the character to be cranky or rude," David says through mouthfuls of oatmeal. ("I'm sorry, I'm a terrible eater. Some people are good with food. I'm not.") "I find the character to be honest. And honesty comes off as cranky or rude, I suppose. But that character is way happier than I am. I'm cranky. He's not cranky. I'd be much happier if I were more like him."

Perhaps Larry's fundamentally happy outlook helps explain the mismatched feel of the new Woody Allen movie Whatever Works, in which David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a misanthropic, almost-Nobel-prizewinning New York physicist prone to outbursts of rage and panic attacks. ("I'm dying!" he tells his wife one night, shortly before divorcing her, and then, seeing the shock on her face: "No, not now… I mean, eventually!") Fans of both Allen and David anticipated the collaboration as a glorious melding of curmudgeonly comic minds, but it serves mainly to underscore their differences. The role of Yelnikoff was originally written in the 1970s, and intended for Zero Mostel; he's an archetypal Allen protagonist, eking humour from despair as he peers over the existential abyss. David's character – and, by his own admission, he can only really play one character – doesn't spend much time peering over abysses. He's far more troubled by people who put "no presents" on their party invitations while secretly expecting presents, and by the elastic in his sweater sleeves.

Woody Allen, Evan Rachel Wood and Larry David on the set of Whatever Works'. Photograph: Sony Pics/Everett/Rex Features

It will surprise no one even slightly familiar with Allen's films that Yelnikoff finds salvation in a relationship with a much younger woman, in this case a runaway from Mississippi played by Evan Rachel Wood, while her parents, Christian fundamentalists played for pantomime laughs by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr, find happiness by swapping God for New York. The title encapsulates Allen's stated philosophy of life: in this meaningless world, cling to whatever scraps of joy you can find. Yet the movie itself once again reveals this purportedly broad-minded attitude to be almost monomaniacally narrow: for Allen, happiness only really comes from sex with lithe young things, and from living in Manhattan (or perhaps, at a pinch, in London or Barcelona). Yes, Woody, it makes you want to say: we get it.

Not that there's any actual sex, or even kissing. "That was the only thing that entered my mind regarding that whole issue," says David, who was aware of the potential audience "ick factor". "I read the script carefully to make sure there wasn't anything physical. That I couldn't have done. I wouldn't have kissed her." He phoned Allen to warn him about his limitations as a performer: "I said, 'You know, I'm not really an actor! All you're pretty much going to get is what you've already seen. If you get an actor, they'll jazz it up, they'll do something to their appearance. They'll do tics and mannerisms.' But he said: 'I don't want that.'"

The biggest challenge was memorising Yelnikoff's long, bitter monologues. Curb is almost entirely improvised on the basis of a short synopsis. "I couldn't really put stuff into my own words, because the character didn't quite talk the way I talk – he was a lot smarter than I am." David smiles. "You know, I'm really not that bright."

That smile, which plays on David's lips with surprising frequency, hints at a certain happy bemusement that he should have ended up where he is today, as if to have done so strikes him as almost slightly fraudulent. He was raised in a tower block in Sheepshead Bay, in working-class Brooklyn, where he claims he "never saw grass" and opted not to spend time at the nearby beach because "I don't really get the beach". Was he happy? "Well, is anyone's childhood in Brooklyn really happy? You've got all these people piled on top of each other, screaming at each other all the time, but it was… ah, I think it was happy. I had problems, like everyone else. But I don't remember being an unhappy child."

He studied history at the University of Maryland, then drifted for several years, working briefly as a bra salesman, which sounds like a joke and has indeed provided David with material in the years since. By the 80s, he was a struggling stand-up comedian, with no big break in sight, and he wasn't young any more.

David had a reputation as a "comic's comic" which, he once told the New Yorker, "means I sucked". His stand-up days are mostly remembered now for the hostility he displayed towards his audiences, haranguing them if they dared to talk among themselves or order a drink. On one notorious occasion, he shuffled up to the microphone at a Manhattan club, looked out at the audience, said, "Ah, never mind", then shuffled off. "I was not for everyone," he told the New Yorker. "I was for very few."

It was a comedy-circuit friendship with the much more successful Jerry Seinfeld that changed things. NBC approached Seinfeld about developing a sitcom, and the two men's comic sensibilities merged to create the famous "show about nothing", in which the character of George Costanza is essentially an exaggeration of David's own. By the standards of the day, Seinfeld was dark simply because it wasn't saccharine: one of its directors, Larry Charles, described its guiding motto as "No Hugging, No Learning". This emptiness proved strangely exhilarating, and spectacularly popular: for much of the 90s, Seinfeld was consistently the first or second most watched show in America. David amassed a personal fortune reported at $200m. Back then, when asked about his sudden wealth, he seemed apologetic. These days, he says, "I've grown into it."

This is where the storyline of Curb begins, in 1999: Larry has made it big, moved to a sumptuous if bland LA mansion with his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines), and spends his days playing golf, visiting the doctor, eating at restaurants and offending people, often in the company of his friend and manager Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and Jeff's compulsively foul-mouthed wife Susie (Susie Essman). As the American critic Lee Siegel scoldingly noted, the show thus breaks a rule of comedy dating to ancient Greece, which is that it should identify with the little guy against the powerful one, thereby "set[ting] the spiritual order right by turning the social order upside down". It's a testament to the acuity with which David pinpoints the universal annoyances of life in the well-off west that it works anyway. One need be only wealthy enough to buy coffee from Starbucks, for example, to empathise with Larry's impatience over the chain's drink-naming conventions: "I'll have a vanilla… ah, one of those vanilla bullshit things. You know, whatever you want. Some vanilla bullshit latte cappa thing. Whatever you got."

Does David ever think of returning to stand-up, as Seinfeld has done? "I like how it sounds and feels on paper. But whether or not I have the wherewithal, I don't know. When I used to go on stage, I was coming from a place of having nothing, a place of resentment and anger and failure, really. And obviously there are many aspects of that person who I used to be that have changed." So does he worry that wealth and success might cause him to lose touch, no longer to encounter the frustrations, large and small, that fuel his comedy? "Nah, I don't think much gets past my screener," he says. Wherever he goes, he carries a notebook that he uses to record minor incidents that might be inflated into Curb storylines.

The show's influence is detectable in a number of more recent cringe-inducing comic characters – notably David Brent and Borat – yet David insists that painful embarrassment was never his goal. "I never thought for a second that anything I ever did was going to make someone cringe. That never occurred to me. When people started to tell me that sometimes they had to leave the room, I didn't even know what they were talking about. I thought people would want to stay and watch it. Because it's funny. Not that it's so painful to them that they have to leave." He ponders this for a moment. "But, you know, I don't mind that. I kinda like it."

David is in Manhattan to find locations for the next series of Curb, half of which will be set in New York. But he won't be drawn on how this will change the show's plot lines – just as he refuses to make TV previews for each new season or to record DVD commentaries. "I guess because I work so hard on the stories, to just give them away so cheaply… it seems wrong," he says.

Nor does watching the show or interrogating David in person provide much of a glimpse of the man behind the Everyman. He rarely gives interviews, and even then deflects most personal questions with generalised observations. Three years ago, he and his real-life wife, the environmental campaigner Laurie David, divorced; all he'll say about it is that he is "now a single man" and that this state of affairs is "working out pretty well". (A few days after we meet, David's ex-wife will categorically deny rumours in US tabloids that she had what would have been the ultimate environmental activist's affair – with Al Gore.) In Curb's most recent season, the character of Larry – also separated from his wife – goes to characteristically preposterous lengths to win her back. An armchair psychologist might be tempted to detect in this a comic projection of David's own feelings, but his guardedness precludes further probing.

The former couple have two teenage daughters, and David is marginally more forthcoming on the topic of fatherhood. "I think about this a lot – whether or not I'm a good father," he says. "Sometimes I think I'm a terrible father. I don't really have a spine. In my physical make-up – you won't find one in my x-ray. I have trouble saying no to people, so anything a kid would ask, I'll just say yes to." Not long ago, he made a guest appearance on the Disney series Hannah Montana, because his daughters were fans. Recalling it, he looks pained. "Do you think that was pleasant? No. OK?"

In his free, non-parenting time, he plays a very large amount of golf. "What else do you do on Saturday or Sunday? What do you do on Saturday or Sunday? There was a period when I was living in New York and I wasn't golfing, and on Saturdays and Sundays I was lost! That was awful."

In the US, reruns of Curb Your Enthusiasm are about to begin airing for the first time on a mainstream cable channel, requiring the cast to record new dialogue to be dubbed in over the show's copious swearing. ("You say 'freak' for 'fuck' and 'shoot' for 'shit' and 'baloney' for 'bullshit', or whatever fits the movement of your lips," David says.) Perhaps in an effort to convey the David world-view to a wider audience, each episode will be followed by a 10-minute panel discussion to contemplate the "issues" raised by the show.

The issues? That makes it all sound rather studious. "Just the issues," David says. "Like, finding out your doctor is gay and then going up to him and saying, 'I didn't know you were gay!' – is that a bad thing to do? Why is it bad? Is it OK to tell a blind person his girlfriend is unattractive, or should you pretend she's attractive?" For a moment, he looks almost entirely serious – deadpan bordering on dead earnest – as though we have finally penetrated through to the questions in life that really matter. "You know. Things like that."

• Whatever Works is on general release.

[faceless]

The serious side of making people laugh
Larry David, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Don Rickles are among those discussing the business of being funny for David Steinberg's 'Inside Comedy' series.
Martin Miller,
Los Angeles Times
January 26, 2012

Young comedy writers often ask Larry David for advice on how to make it in Hollywood. Here's what he tells them — don't have a family, don't get married, don't have any responsibilities.

When people rely on you — at least financially — your negotiating strength is diminished or completely eliminated, David said recently during a conversation about all things comedy with David Steinberg. The pair, friends since their early days as stand-ups in New York City, were together in David's comfortable Santa Monica office to promote Steinberg's 10-part Showtime series, "Inside Comedy," which begins Thursday.

The "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star is one of an all-star team of comedians — Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Ellen DeGeneres, Don Rickles and Mel Brooks, among others — that sit down with Steinberg to talk about their influences, their early days in the business and their journey in comedy. The interviews underscore the extraordinary cultural rise of comedy, especially stand-up, from small clubs in New York's Greenwich Village to dominating prime-time television and movies.

One insight into the entertainment business revealed during David's segment is, as Steinberg put it, the power of no — something much easier to exercise if you're solitary. It is a word David availed himself of at what turned out to be critical moments in his career. When NBC executives pressed for changes in the early days of "Seinfeld," to make it more palatable to a broadcast audience, David refused.

"It's easy for me to have said no," said David. "I didn't have a family or anything. I had a little apartment I could have gone back to and I didn't mind it. I had nothing to lose. But if you've got a family and kids and school and all that," the 64-year-old Brooklyn native continued, "you have to be like, 'Yeah, what do you want me to do?' You have to say yes. There's nothing else you can do."

Originally, the project was envisioned as a movie, said Steinberg, an executive producer of the series along with comedian Steve Carell. But after some initial interviews, they quickly realized they had way too much material for a film. "The half-hour I did with Larry would have been four minutes in a movie," said Steinberg, who spent a year editing the project. "I didn't want to lose the value of those interviews."

In the series, David and Rock have stand-alone episodes, while the other comedians are combined into single episodes in groups of two or three. The premiere pairs Seinfeld and Rickles, bouncing back and forth between Seinfeld's worries about what success does to a comedian's instincts and Rickles' road to becoming an insult king. Archival footage of performances is woven throughout the episodes.

The series shines a light on the formative experiences of the developing comic mind — an up-and-coming Billy Crystal is crestfallen after telling Orson Welles that he was a fan, only to have the legendary actor dismiss him with an expletive; Frank Sinatra seemed never to remember the name of his warm-up act, Brad Garrett, usually calling him "Greg Barrett"; and David bragged as a kid that it was his whistling that opened "The Andy Griffith Show."

"That was a great lie," said Steinberg. "Who would challenge you?" "Yes, when I lie today my lies have an unusual quality that you have to believe," said David. "They have a quality that's like 'Why would he think of that?' So, I'm a step ahead of people on my lying."

Steinberg is well acquainted with David's behavioral quirks — the two met on the set of "Fridays," an early '80s comedy sketch show patterned after "Saturday Night Live." But Steinberg was already someone David knew and admired.

"Whenever he was hosting 'The Tonight Show,' I would always watch it," said David. "He was really this bright, sharp, funny guy who wasn't doing jokes for the sake of jokes. He was just talking and being funny." "Yeah, I was hard to book because of my act at that time," added Steinberg, whose long list of directing credits for television includes "Curb Your Enthusiasm." "I ended up opening for jazz groups."

Steinberg points to his interview with Rock, where he talks about the importance of finding a place to fail — for him, in a small club in Florida. Comedians cannot go from the page to the big stage and expect to do well.

"The audience will tell you where it's working and where it's not," said Steinberg. "It's the same as when you start out as when you're famous. The one thing about stand-up is that when you're looking at that comedian, he's got the microphone and the audience, it's a cool thing to do," added David. "When it's really working, there is no better feeling."

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, stand-up comedians, with few exceptions, were considered a lower form of entertainment life, they said. It was not something to aspire to, and it didn't pay much.

"Today, comedy has become corporate and a huge business," said Steinberg, 69, a native of Canada. "But back then, if you were dating someone and they brought you home and said, 'Oh yeah, he's a comedian,' the mother wouldn't have been happy about that. There's another reason for the mother not to be so happy," added David. "We weren't the handsomest lot in the world either."