The man who knows no curbs
As Curb Your Enthusiasm comes to an end, Richard Lewis talks to Jonathan Dean and reveals why his best friend Larry dares to make jokes about everyone — even Jews and Palestinians
Larry David was born in the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in New York on July 2, 1947. Just three days earlier, in the same hospital, his friend Richard Lewis tumbled into this world. Lewis, 76, is now the man who knows David best.
The pair met at summer camp when they were 12. “I disliked him intensely,” Lewis says. But in their 20s the duo bonded on the savage New York stand-up circuit and in 2000 David asked Lewis to co-star in his latest television sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now, 24 years on, the smartest, most shocking, boundarypushing comedy of the century is coming to a close.
Its premise is simple. David, who became wildly rich and celebrated after co-creating the hit sitcom Seinfeld, plays a heightened version of himself: a casually dressed bald man swanning around Los Angeles having expensive lunches and upsetting people. It is a comedy of awkwardness and David needed to work with people he trusted. Like the boss, Lewis plays himself — two men in each other’s orbit since birth, living out the sunset of their lives bickering on award-winning TV.
The great skill of Curb is that while David is a multi-millionaire, his qualms and irritations — the situations of his comedy — are plucked from everyday life. Naysayers label it misanthropic, but it is, instead, wincingly honest, and David’s heart is usually in the right place. That a man living so comfortably still finds time to be annoyed to the point of obsession by, say, the number of cashew nuts in a snack mix makes him an everyman. In the show David is an enthusiast who observes the world and is desperate for everything to be just right.
“That’s how I perceive Larry too, both on and off screen,” agrees Lewis, sitting at home in front of a wall of photographs of various stars. “He’s a very positive guy — he loves life. I’m not as optimistic, to put it mildly. The older I get, the more panicked I become. My negativity is reaching such a crescendo that I am afraid to hear what the last note will be. Larry doesn’t understand how I get so negative. He has far more selfesteem.”
Lewis is self-deprecating and neurotic, with a devilish wit, so the line between the Lewis of the sitcom and Lewis in real life feels blurred.
“I have been telling Larry that he has some nerve,” Lewis says about how his friend decided to finish the series. “How dare he ruin the lives of the children and families of his cast and crew? But I don’t think he cares.”
TO UNDERSTAND David and Curb it’s best to head back to the 1970s, when the 20-something was trying to make it in the comedy clubs of Manhattan. It was an exciting time, sharing the bill with firecracker counterculturalists like Richard Pryor and George Carlin.
Yet the Curb creator’s comedy flopped; with the heavyweights on first, David and Lewis often took to the stage after midnight, when audiences were, frankly, hammered.
“If Richie [Pryor] did an hour, blew the roof off and then you went on, it was murder,” Lewis recalls. “I’d spill my guts out and get laughs for pouring out my psychological problems, but Larry kept his distance as a stand-up. He loved storytelling and his comedy wasn’t in the first person. Instead he’d paint a picture or scene, but at 1am when everybody’s drunk those stories just won’t work. People don’t have the attention span.
“Also, Larry was picky about his audience. If they didn’t laugh as much as he thought he deserved he’d just leave. I love the guy, but that was a little crazy. If he didn’t feel the audience was up to his standards he’d storm off stage — he was such a purist and didn’t want to waste his time. But you cannot really make it as a stand-up that way, and that is why he went on to Seinfeld.”
Seinfeld, which David co-created with his fellow comedian Jerry Seinfeld, was a phenomenon. Five years ago Netflix bought the rights for US$500 million. The “show about nothing”, which ran from 1989 to 1998, often simply showed Seinfeld hanging out with his friends.
Curb is similar, with David bringing his famous pals (Ted Danson, David Schwimmer, Michael J Fox) in front of the camera, and it led to numerous copycats with the rich and famous sending themselves up in shows such as Ricky Gervais’s Extras and Matt Le Blanc’s Episodes.
Yet nothing has even come close to mimicking Curb’s unique selling point — David’s steadfast refusal to care what anybody thinks. His frequent use of heavy swear words (one episode revolves around a newspaper’s filthy misprint of “beloved aunt”) renders it very adult viewing.
His comedy relentlessly pushes the boundaries of taste (in another episode Larry addresses what it’s like to have sex with a disabled woman). From Hollywood liberals to the Ku Klux Klan, via incest survivors and chefs with Tourette’s, nobody is safe.
He skewers his Jewishness often, with a chutzpah that no other mainstream comic comes close to. Take the series eight episode Palestinian Chicken, in which David has a fling with a Palestinian woman. “You Zionist pig,” she yells during sex. “You occupying f ***. F*** me like Israel f ***s my country!” Lewis smiles. That episode aired in 2011, but he still thinks David would get away with writing it now, never mind the situation in Gaza.
“Larry pushes the envelope,” Lewis says. “If something is funny but horrifically tasteless, it will find its way in. He likes to get things out in the open that we know exist, and make comments on many different kinds of people. He’s not mean-spirited, he just thinks that everyone should be understood even if it’s provocative.
“If you cannot be fearless with what you do creatively, it seems pointless to me, and I know that he feels the same way.”
He mentions another flashpoint episode that sets up a joke around a Holocaust survivor. “I knew many people whose relatives were survivors,” says Lewis, who is also Jewish. “But they laugh because you can’t blame Larry for the Nazis.”
He cackles.
IN THE forthcoming final series Lewis has been given another outrageous plot “that I’m going to get some s*** for . . . but I don’t care”.
Nobody self-eviscerates like Lewis. About his wife, Joyce Lapinsky, coming to his shows, he says: “I say this revealing stuff and she knows she has to come home and hop into bed with me, poor thing.”
As fans of Curb would guess, he’s a complicated, emotional man.
“I didn’t have a positive childhood,” he says. “My father was never home and I was stuck with my mother, who had myriad problems. Like I guess I did. She was just a sad woman, and I really had no sense of who I was through my family. Then, in my early 20s, my father suddenly died. I’d started writing jokes for other comedians, but they rejected all the ones that were about me, so I went on stage and never looked back. Every time people laughed at my problems, I felt validated that, yes, I had had a raw deal.”
Lewis has stopped doing stand-up due to poor health. He has Parkinson’s and has undergone surgeries — catnip to David, whose scripts constantly refer to his friend’s ailments and alcoholism.
“Drinking, drugs, inappropriate sexual behaviour: there are a trillion addictions made easy in showbusiness and I fell victim to them all,” Lewis says with a sigh.
“It’s life, man, and it’s not pretty. Larry has mined my weaknesses and character flaws very well.
“He’s not rooting for me to have a breakdown, but knows that being unhappy is my comfort zone and I let him run wild.”
Was there anything he said no to? “No, because Larry would hold it over my head for the rest of my days. I’m grateful to be humiliated.” He smiles. He is in awe of his friend, marvelling about how David manages to write, cast, act in and edit the show. “Miraculous,” he says, and he means both Curb and its creator, who gave Lewis the job of a lifetime.
Larry has mined my weaknesses and character flaws very well. He’s not rooting for me to have a breakdown but knows that being unhappy is my comfort zone.
Richard Lewis