Better call Sahl
Mort Sahl knew the score. So does Larry David. Donal O’donoghue tries and fails to curb his enthusiasm for the return of David’s great sitcom
“Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming” was once written of the late, great comedian, trumpeted as the man who invented stand-up. Sahl, who died on October 26 at the age of 94, took no prisoners, prowling the stage armed with a folded-up newspaper as he asked of his audience: ‘Is there any group I haven’t offended ?’ Famously described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily”, his comedy was sharp as a tack and just as painful. “I’m for capital punishment,” he declared in one routine. “You’ve got to execute people – how else are they going to learn?”
Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming. But he saw how others were going. And he was not a fan of most modern comics. But he appreciated the satirical shtick of Larry David, having once upon a time retweeted a post by Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B Weide that “the only guy who was more misunderstood than Larry David was Jesus Christ.” David, the man who co-created Seinfeld and the star and creator of Curb, called Sahl as well as Phil Silver, Groucho Marx and others into play for his own comedy, and 21 years ago gave us the finest comic creation of this century. Now Larry, creator and character, is back for an 11th season with the tag line: ‘The world has changed. He hasn’t.’
And if episode one is any indication, David is back to his best, 42 minutes that open with a dead body face down in his swimming pool (surely a nod to Sunset Boulevard) and closes with an orchestra playing the show’s jaunty signature tune (Frolic by Luciano Michelini if you’re wondering). In between, we get Larry successfully pitching his new show, ‘Young Larry’ to a bunch of Netflix execs (“Don’t give me notes”), Larry walking into a glass door (“It looks like air”), Larry spilling red wine on a couch (“I was plopped!”) and Larry harassing a colleague for the six grand he is owed. “I heard he has early onset dementia,” says Larry’s agent, Jeff (Jeff Garlin). “Oh”, says Larry with a worried expression. “I’d better ask him for it before he forgets.”
If the picture has got small, Larry David just seems to get ever bigger. “I’m not the bad guy,” he wails when he fails to get his money. “I’m the good guy!” Albert Brooks is in there too, together with Jon Hamm and Lucy Liu, all playing characters with those exact names as is Larry, who asks at one point: “What’s so difficult about acting? You say the words and make a face. There’s nothing to it.” And that’s it. In the early ’60s, Mort Sahl changed the face of comedy. Since the beginning of this century, Larry David has been the face of that comedy.