Larry David and Bernie Sanders together again in season premiere of ‘Finding Your Roots’
In the fourth season premiere of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. delves into the backgrounds of two men who learn they have more in common than just a funny “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Airing Tuesday, Oct. 3 (check local listings), the episode titled “The Impression” finds the Harvard University professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research investigating the genealogies of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David and former presidential candidate and current Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The similarities between the two men are striking. Both are Jewish, grew up in Brooklyn and can trace their lineage back to Eastern Europe. There is also a strong physical resemblance and of course, David’s hilarious “SNL” impression of Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Getting them together, says Gates, was a no-brainer.
“We picked them because Larry’s a good friend from (Martha’s) Vineyard,” Gates says in reference to the Massachusetts resort island. “I’ve never met Bernie Sanders before, but I admired him. So I would see Larry at (celebrity lawyer) Alan Dershowitz’s house in the summers, and I’ve been on him for several years, ‘Come on. Let us trace your ancestry.’ He would say, ‘Yeah, no.’ Then finally, one day out of the blue, he said he was in.
“Then we asked Bernie Sanders, and he said yes,” Gates continues. “So it was obvious to put them together in an episode because of Larry’s fabulous imitation. But you don’t know. We never group people in advance. We just ask people to be in and they’re in. And then we follow wherever their family stories lead. Then we get to the DNA. They share identical DNA on chromosome 7, 9, and 11. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of matches. That means that they have we don’t know what, third cousin, fourth cousin, we don’t know what it is. But that’s a lot of DNA to share in common.”
In subsequent episodes of “Finding Your Roots,” Gates traces the ancestries of Ted Danson, wife Mary Steenburgen and William H. Macy (Oct. 17); Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd and John Turturro (Oct. 31); Bryant Gumbel, writer/producer Tonya Lewis-Lee and CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux (Nov. 7); and Garrison Keillor, Amy Schumer and Aziz Ansari (Dec. 19).