Molly Vozick-Levinson
Larry David's Amoral Morality:
A Look at Curb Your Enthusiasm
Some television shows seem to be made to serve as moral guides. Watch
any episode of a classic sitcom like Leave it to Beaver, Full House, or
Everybody Loves Raymond, and a moral punch is sure to be packed in amidst
the laugh track. Much of popular American television seems wrapped up in
the need to teach its audience something, in the need for an audience to
surface from a half-hour broadcast having learned some kind of lesson. Few
who have seen Larry David's HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm,
however, would accuse it of falling into this moral trope. Curb, which is a
pseudo-autobiographical improv show that follows Larry David as he rambles
through life as a former television writer and general schmuck, seems like
the furthest thing from a moral guide at quick glance. Larry, after all, is
characterized by his willful disregard for others' feelings and what's
"right" – ethically speaking, he appears to be the archetypal anti-hero.
But on further examination, it becomes clear that something more is going
on with Larry, morally, than the callousness which accosts the eye. By
common standards, he is certainly amoral, but his brand of amorality is so
carefully constructed and doggedly adhered to that it emerges as a kind of
warped moral code itself. Larry never follows collective moral compasses,
but he always follows his own. In tracking Larry David's twisted sense of
ethics through Curb's six seasons, we see that his is an amoral morality,
rooted in subjectivity and selfishness, but it is a code he abides by
dutifully. Larry makes us wish that we too had the crass courage to follow
his warped morals, or to invent and follow warped morals of our own,
suggesting that perhaps Curb Your Enthusiasm can teach the laughing masses
a moral thing or two after all.
Perhaps the most defining element of Larry David's moral code as seen
in Curb Your Enthusiasm is its highly subjective nature. Larry certainly
marches to the beat of his own moral drum, and a lot of the trouble he gets
into seems to stem from his determined rejection of common social
guidelines. In the very first episode of Curb, "The Pants Tent," we see
Larry's particular talent for angering people with his tactlessness. In the
course of the episode, he incurs the resentment of no fewer than six
people. Larry enrages the parents of Jeff, his manager and friend, when he
refers to his wife Cheryl as "Hitler" on speakerphone and they overhear. He
upsets Richard Lewis and his girlfriend Sofia when the pair think that
Larry was looking inappropriately at Sofia's low cut shirt. Cheryl's friend
is disgusted when she notices what she believes to be an indecent gathering
of material in the crotch of Larry's pants when the two are at the movies.
And Cheryl, having caught wind of several of these occurrences, has her
pick of what to get angry about.
It seems that Larry can do no right, and the trend in all of these
slights and offenses is Larry's self-removal from the normal sphere of
social discourse. When, after his parents have blown up at Larry, Jeff
unthinkingly leaves an apology message on Larry's home phone, the two men
scramble to construct a lie to tell Cheryl which would explain why Jeff
would be apologizing - without mentioning the Hitler remark. Most people
would not go through such trouble to avoid conflict; most people would know
not to stare in the direction of a friend's girlfriend's cleavage; most
people would not leave the house in pants that make tents. But Larry is not
most people, and his strange moral code is a direct result of that fact.
After all, he doesn't think twice about the properness of calling Cheryl
"Hitler" when he thinks it's just Jeff on the phone, but later when he
finds out the parents heard too, he berates Jeff for not telling him he was
on speakerphone. Jeff has violated Larry's ethical rule of always telling
someone if other people can hear them, a rule only necessary for people
like Larry who routinely say offensive things. In this we see how
subjective Larry's morality is – it bends and supports his own skewed views
and practices, and, what's more, he expects those around him to abide by
the resulting Larry-shaped code.
Somehow, though, they never do, and Larry usually ends up standing
alone in his principles. In episode five of season one, "Interior
Decorator," Larry politely holds an elevator door open for a woman on the
way to his doctor's office. Upon reaching the office, the woman then takes
the opportunity to sign in ahead of Larry, causing him to miss an important
meeting and ruin a potential new project. The act of holding the door open
for someone else, a common sign of good manners, is not typical of Larry,
and indeed he comes to regret it because of the trouble it leads to. "Let
me tell you something," Larry later says to Jeff, "my days of elevator
etiquette are over." Here again we see Larry shaping his principles to aid
in self-serving, and here again we see how it alienates him. A few days
later, his new no-elevator-etiquette clause in effect, Larry gets into a
physical brawl with a woman as he tries to force his way out of an elevator
first, as he had entered the elevator first and thus considers himself
entitled to leave first. He literally fights the woman all the way back to
the doctor's office, and, though she too knew that Larry had entered the
elevator first, Larry's behavior seems unacceptable to her. He is yet again
alone in his morals.
This isn't the only time a small good deed leads to major trouble for
Larry. What makes Larry such an interesting character is that he is not
evil, in fact his intentions are often good. Occasionally something nice he
does actually pays off – in "The Grand Opening," the finale of season
three, which follows Larry's involvement in opening a restaurant, Larry
emerges as a kind of hero when he shouts curses to the crowded restaurant
in order to minimize the effect of a cursing outburst from the chef, who
suffers from Tourette's Syndrome. Of course, Larry does this in order to
save face for himself and the other investors, in addition to making the
chef feel more comfortable, but whatever the murky motivation, it's an
ostensibly good thing that Larry does, even if it does involve the phrase
"shit, shit, shit-face, fuck, shit, cock-sucker." But moments like this are
rare in Curb: much more often, Larry's good deeds never go unpunished. In
the first episode of the same season, "Chet's Shirt," Larry buys Ted Danson
a shirt after he admires the one Larry is wearing. It's a nice thing that
Larry does, but as usual, it causes an unfortunate chain of events when
Danson discovers a small rip in the new shirt and demands that Larry get it
fixed. "I don't own this shirt anymore," says Larry, "If you give someone a
shirt, it's their responsibility." It's another of Larry's manifold
atypical beliefs, and a fight ensues, first verbal, and eventually physical
as Larry and Ted both lunge for a third, unspoiled shirt after both of
theirs are destroyed. As with the elevator incident, Larry's intentions
start off good, but when someone violates his sense of ethics, he is
determined to the end to win out.
A couple of years later, in season four's "The Surrogate," Larry is
still trying to figure out what's right, and his struggle is still
(sometimes at least) motivated by good intentions. "What's the surrogate
etiquette?" he asks Cheryl, when they are invited to the baby shower of a
woman who will give birth via a surrogate. Cheryl, so often the voice of
common sense and reason on Curb, advises Larry that there is no need to buy
a present for the surrogate mother as well, but Larry's unique
sensibilities tell him that it would be wrong to leave the surrogate out
and only buy a gift for their mother-to-be friend. Of course, no one else
at the shower agrees with Larry, in fact the mother seems to find it
offensive that Larry has bought a gift for the surrogate too. Things
unravel even further when, speaking with the surrogate mother after she
comes to thank Larry, he unintentionally causes her to think twice about
giving the baby up. Once again, Larry's morals ultimately have led him
astray.
A trend of his behavior, however, and of the fights that follow, is
Larry's seeming naïveté to "what's right." He has to ask Cheryl what the
"surrogate etiquette" is because he has no idea how people who are not him
see the world. This is true in almost every episode – Larry didn't mean to
make Cheryl's friend think he was making a sexual advance on her with his
pants tent; he didn't mean to start trouble between Jeff and his parents.
Larry rarely if ever means to cause harm at all, it's more a product of his
inability to coalesce with the outside world. In an interview for Curb Your
Enthusiasm: The Book (2006), Richard Lewis comments on this phenomenon.
[Larry] would always make faux pas, but they're really just
truthfulness. He could be at a funeral and be crying, and notice someone
wearing a great herringbone and say "Where'd you get that?" He was
sad, but he also really wanted to know where the guy got the jacket.
People don't always get that, but … Larry is just upfront and honest. [1]
Larry is constantly offending, constantly putting his foot in his mouth,
but it's not the result of any nefarious desires. There is a childlike
quality to Larry, as he la-di-dahs through convention and propriety,
largely unaware that he is causing affront. As Lewis suggests, Larry is
upfront and honest, but the sensibilities he is forever loyal to seem to
cause offense in and of themselves.
In season three, we see the dark side to Larry's well-meaning naïveté
in the episode "The Corpse-Sniffing Dog", when he tries to convince Jeff's
young daughter Sammy to get rid of her dog Oscar because Jeff is allergic.
Larry arrives at Jeff's house to find Sammy there alone, drinking grape
juice. He pours himself a glass of wine, and sets about trying to persuade
Sammy to choose Jeff over Oscar. Larry has all good intentions when he goes
over to the house, but somehow the glasses of wine and grape juice get
mixed up, somehow Larry doesn't notice, and somehow Sammy ends up agreeing
to get rid of Oscar, because she is drunk. Susie, Jeff's foul-mouthed wife,
chews into Larry later with her usual gusto, and for once, we have to side
completely against Larry. Getting Sammy drunk, even if it was by accident,
is a black smudge on Larry's moral gray area – it's a real, objectively bad
consequence of his ambling good intentions. It's one of the few times
Larry's innocent disregard for normalcy has an edge of danger.
It is by far, however, not the only time Larry engages in objectively
wrong behavior. For all the times bad results spring out of good
intentions, Larry has some bad intentions too, or at least questionable
ones. Most of them stem out of selfishness. In "The Special Section" of
season three, Larry uses the excuse of his mother dying to get favors from
people, postpone meetings he doesn't want to go to, and even finagle Cheryl
into having sex with him. The episode never really touches on whether Larry
feels real grief after his mother's death – he is angry that his father
didn't tell him, and upset that, following Jewish law, his mother was
buried in a section of the cemetery for "thieves and gentiles" due to her
having a secret tattoo. But the grief he broadcasts in order to get out of
things is wholly manufactured, and must be addressed by anyone tempted to
say that Larry David is any kind of moral guide. His behavior is overtly
wrong – it's wrong to take advantage of someone's death in order to make
trivial gains, but on the other hand, nobody is really getting hurt either.
By Larry's own rigid moral ruler, he is allowed to get out of meetings
because he has suffered a loss – whether the grief he feigns has real roots
does not factor in for him. Here we see Larry's moral code directly playing
off the wider world's: people expect those who have suffered losses to need
time to themselves, and once Larry discovers this, he takes advantage of
it. Here he tries a commonly accepted moral code on for size, wearing it as
long as it continues to serve him.
Larry's interaction with established sets of moral codes sheds a lot
of light on his own, and his dealings with religion are no exception. For
many, religious edicts dictate what's morally right and wrong. One might
assume that Larry would be firmly against any religious codes, given his
determination to follow only his own beliefs, but it seems that, as with
the common belief that those grieving need space, Larry accepts some
religious statutes as long as they support what he already wants. In season
four, Cheryl gives Larry permission to have sex with someone else as a one-
time gift for their 10th anniversary. At first, Larry is at a loss – he
doesn't expect Cheryl to allow him the transgression, as it actually does
not jibe with his set of principles. In the episode "The Survivor," Larry
and Cheryl renew their wedding vows, and in a meeting with the rabbi, Larry
takes the opportunity to ask him what the Torah would say about Cheryl's
offer. The rabbi cites the episode in the Bible when Sarah tells her
husband Abraham to "go into" his handmaiden Hagar in order to have another
son. If it's ok by the bible, then it's ok by the rabbi, and suddenly, it's
ok by Larry too. He uses religion here as an affirmation for a desire he
has which does not go along with his established code, and he's willing to
change his code on the rabbi's advice.
This is not the only time Larry uses religion as a manipulative tool.
In season five, Richard Lewis reveals that he needs a new kidney. In "The
Ski Lift," Larry - a match for donating but firmly against the idea -
attempts to woo the head of a kidney consortium into moving Richard Lewis
up on the transplant list by feigning shared orthodox Judaism. Larry dons a
yarmulke, tries to pass off his Yiddish-gibberish, and adopts an old-world
shtetl accent all in an effort to ingratiate himself with the actually
devout head of the consortium. What we see here, then, is how Larry uses
religion when it serves him. He follows Judaism when it means he can have
guiltless extra-marital sex, and takes advantage of it if it means he won't
have to give up his own kidney. Larry's is a bendable Judaism, and he
practices it opportunistically. Religion informs Larry's morals insofar as
religion supports his desires.
That said, there are a few occasions in which Larry's religion is put
to the test. In season two, Larry must attend Cheryl's sister's wedding,
which includes the Christian baptism of her currently Jewish fiancé. Larry
is not happy. "This guy's converting?" he demands of Cheryl, "Why's he
doing that? You guys come to our side. We don't go to your side. Jews don't
convert." Not one to suffer in silence, Larry ends up disrupting the
baptism and causing a mass Jews vs. Gentiles family fight. In this case,
it's his morality that supports his religion, though only when the religion
is under seeming attack. Interestingly, though a lot of Curb deals with
Judaism, Larry David himself does not consider the show's brand of humor to
be intrinsically Jewish. In an interview in the May 24, 2009, issue of New
York Magazine, Larry David and Woody Allen sit down to talk about their
upcoming movie Whatever Works, and the topic of Jewish humor comes up.
Allen says that he would "never think of [his humor] as Jewish in any
way."[2] David agrees with Allen, adding that "Jews want to be the only
ones who like it! They think it's for them. It's not just for them. And I
don't think that way either."[3] But for a show that is not "for" Jews,
Judaism plays a large role. More specifically, what plays a large role is
Larry's whole attitude which is wrapped up in religion: his insistence that
"Jews don't convert" reveals his belief that his perspective is unique and
superior due in some ways to his Judaism.
This is never clearer than in the finale of the fifth season, "The
End," during which, for a brief time, Larry thinks that he is actually
Christian, having been adopted. Upon this revelation ("Oh my god, I'm
Gentile"), Larry's whole attitude changes, and the moral system he has
spent four seasons building up and clarifying crashes around him in a mess
of newly discovered kindness and selflessness. The episode contains two
scenes of Larry traveling by plane, and both times he is seated next to the
emergency exit door. The first time, he still thinks he's Jewish, and he
demands a new seat, saying that he "cannot be of any help whatsoever in any
kind of non-traditional landing, or any traditional landing… I cannot do
it. I will panic. We will go down." Later on, after his supposed religious
revelation, Larry lets the flight attendant know that she can "count on
[him]." With the shedding of his Judaism came the shedding of a lot of his
moral hang-ups, and selfish tendencies. Suddenly, he wants to give Richard
Lewis his kidney, he wants to have kids with Cheryl. It's a whole new
Larry, all brought on by the change in religion. How much of his previous,
negative morality, then, is informed by Judaism, if not religiously
speaking, then in terms of general mindset? There would be no Curb without
Larry's resolve to do what he thinks is right and follow no other
guidelines, and that resolve seems to be wrapped up in Judaism to some
extent.
Another classic institution of morals that Larry has a somewhat
tortured relationship with is family. As with religion, Larry neither
rejects or embraces family as a moral guide outright, but rather picks and
chooses according to his own self-serving. That he does not have full
respect for elder members of families is clear in the first episode when he
is not all that remorseful with Jeff's parents after the Hitler-on-
speakerphone debacle, and things only get thornier when we regard his
interactions with Cheryl's family. Larry finds himself at odds with
Cheryl's family in season one's "Beloved Aunt" after a misprint in the
obituary he places in the newspaper for Cheryl's aunt reads "Beloved Cunt."
Cheryl kicks him out of the house, and things only get worse for Larry when
his advice to Cheryl's sister's boyfriend that he should not stay in the
relationship if he is not happy is immediately taken to heart by the
boyfriend. In the course of half an episode, Larry has caused immense
trouble in Cheryl's family, and he is less than contrite about both
offenses. His sense of morality, in this case, does not extend to the
family – he does not view himself as part of their sect, subject to their
rules and protection, but rather as a free agent. This mindset informs much
of Larry's moral outlook.
A large part of why Larry is not so repentant in that episode has to
do with his refusal to admit guilt simply to keep the peace. Larry has a
strange and intimate relationship with apologizing, which we will further
examine later, but one thing which is clear from the beginning is that
Larry will only take the fall if it's true he has committed the offense in
question – he is unwilling to feign anything for someone else's comfort or
benefit. His battle with truth plays a large role in Larry's moral scheme,
because someone lying and getting away with it is thoroughly unacceptable
to him. Time and time again we see Larry gaze into the eyes of a person he
doesn't quite believe, staring him or her down until an "ok…ok" marks the
end of his soul-searching. Truth is the great white whale that Larry so
often tries to chase – he is perennially surrounded by people he doesn't
quite believe, and a lot of his time is spent trying to suss out what
really is going on behind curtains that people are somehow always trying to
close on him. In "The Weatherman" of season four, Larry accuses a
weatherman of always predicting rain to clear the golf course for himself.
"I'm turning you in, weatherman," he pledges. The next time the weatherman
promise rain, Larry convinces Jeff to go to the golf course anyway to defy
what he believes is the weatherman's false prediction, and it pours.
A similar situation occurs in season five's "The Korean Bookie," in
which Larry becomes convinced that his bookie has stolen, cooked, and
served up Oscar the dog, who goes missing after the bookie shows strange
interest in him. The revelation comes to Larry during the wedding reception
at which the so-called Oscar meat has been served, but Larry doesn't think
twice about screaming "it's Oscar!" in reference to the meat, causing mass
panic and retching. A few minutes later, Oscar emerges uncooked. It's the
resolve that Larry has, which we see here and in "The Weatherman," that
makes his loose moral ideas into a real code. He believes that the
weatherman is lying, he believes that the bookie has cooked Oscar, he
believes that he has uncovered the truth, and so he plunges into subsequent
action wholeheartedly. In this sense, we see how Larry is fighting the
moral good fight: once he sniffs possible deception, he stops at nothing to
bring the truth out into the light.
In Larry David's moral code, people should be held accountable for
their actions, and this is a theme we see time and time again. In season
one's "Trick or Treat," Larry hunts down and calls to justice a girl who
has written "Bald Asshole" across his front door as a Halloween trick after
he denied her candy because she was too old ("That's a hate crime… No
treat? Trick. It's a threat. How far can you take these tricks?"). In
"Kamikaze Bingo" of season five, he tries to convince the doctor at his
father's old age home to help him find out if his father's girlfriend,
Ruthie, is cheating at bingo ("I think the bingo game is fixed. I think
Lenore is in cahoots with Ruth…Do you know anything about this game,
doctor, that you're not telling me?). And in season five's "The Ski Lift,"
Larry accuses Richard Lewis' nurse of stealing a signed baseball that
Richard had promised to give him ("I submit that you took that baseball,
stashed in it in your unusually large vagina and walked right out of
here"). These moments of confrontation don't always end up well for Larry,
but one has to admire his chutzpah, and his determination to see what he
believes is right through to the end. He has no fear when he's on his moral
high horse - he is completely dedicated to the moment and to the cause,
which is an ethically admirable trait.
This is true even in the face of personal embarrassment or
professional loss. In the finale of the most recent season, "The Bat
Mitzvah" of season six, Larry gets wind of a rumor involving himself and
the lewd use of gerbils, and he wants to put a stop to it. His intentions
here are mixed – he wants to reveal the truth, which is a positive
intention, but it also stems from the selfish desire to clear his good
name. Everyone is assembled at Sammy Green's bat mitzvah, and Jeff and
Susie ask if anyone would like to make a toast. Larry accepts immediately,
and uses the platform to dispel the "vicious lies" being spread about him.
The toast portion of Sammy's bat mitzvah is ruined, Larry has probably
embarrassed himself, but it's worth it for him if it means the truth is
revealed: "just for the sake of full disclosure, I do have a tickle in my
anus," he clarifies, to the shock and mild disgust of audience members at
Sammy's bat mitzvah, and of the show alike.
Similarly, in "The Shrimp Incident" of season two, Larry risks
professional damage in the name of truth. Convinced that the HBO executive
who's involved in the show he and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are working on has
stolen several of his shrimp after their orders got mixed up at a Chinese
restaurant, Larry confronts him at their next meeting about the show. "I
didn't say you touched the garlic noodles, they were your garlic noodles,
but you did touch the shrimp," Larry announces to the table at the meeting,
instead of describing the idea for the show. "When I got my order back from
him, about seven or eight shrimp were missing… mysteriously disappeared…I
would understand that you don't want to talk about it…" Larry storms out,
the deal is off, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus has to order Larry back into the
office to apologize. Left to his own devices, however, Larry would have
nothing to do with the executive any more, his having failed Larry's moral
test.
In the same episode, however, we see that Larry's beliefs about
truth, which hold so firm for other people, do not quite extend to himself
with the same strictness. Before the shrimp incident, Larry uses the excuse
of a non-existent sick stepfather to avoid the HBO executive, who then
suggests that Larry had been lying about his stepfather. Larry takes
umbrage:
LARRY: He insulted me. He implied that I was lying about my
stepfather.
JEFF: You don't have a stepfather.
LARRY: I know, but I didn't like the implication.
Larry's truth morality is complicated. He wants everyone else to speak
truth to him, and will let little stop him in his quest to uncover other
people's lies. But when he lies, which he does with some frequency, he
thinks that he should be believed, since he is a good person. This is also
clear in season two's "The Acupuncturist," in which Larry makes a bet with
an acupuncturist that he will not be able to heal his back, and is insulted
when the acupuncturist questions how he'll know if Larry is lying or not.
"I'm a man of honor," says Larry, which may be true in that episode, but it
certainly isn't so cut and dry in "The Shrimp Incident."
Here again, we see the intense subjectivity of Larry's morality. It's
impossible for Larry to break out of his own limited perspective, to the
point that he is shocked and insulted that someone doesn't believe what is
an obvious lie. It's not about a black and white truth, it's about the
truth as seen by Larry. In season six's "The Therapists," Larry sponsors
Marty Funkhouser in an Alzheimer's walkathon, and is outraged to find Marty
sitting on the sidelines.
LARRY: What are you doing? You're supposed to be walking.
MARTY: I raise money; I don't walk.
L: You didn't tell me you were sitting, I wouldn't have given you
money in the first place.
M: I didn't say I was walking.
L: Well, the walking is implied, is it not?
Marty has violated Larry's sense of what's right, and even though he did
not overtly lie, it's all the same to Larry because he has defied the truth
that Larry believed. In Larry's world, people should not be held
accountable for their false actions, they should be held responsible for
actions deemed false by him. This seems like a morally corrupt stance for
Larry to take, but in fact, it highlights the subjectivity not just of
Larry's moral code, but of truth itself. The HBO executive of "The Shrimp
Incident" either took Larry's shrimp or not. Ruthie either cheated at bingo
or she didn't. Larry's reactions to those situations, then, and the
altercations which then take place, are easy to judge ethically. But who's
right in the case of the walkathon? Should Marty be held accountable for
breaching Larry's personal picture of the truth?
To Larry's credit, even if the truth doesn't always apply to him, he
does hold himself accountable for actions which adversely affect others. In
season six's "The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial," Larry berates a woman
at an ice cream store whose multiple samplings hold up the line. The woman
in question turns out to be the head of admissions of the exclusive private
school that Sammy Green is trying to get into, as well as Loretta Black's
two children (who Larry and Cheryl have taken in after a Katrina-esque
hurricane). Understanding the consequences of his actions, Larry realizes
he must apologize, but eschews advice from Cheryl on how to do so. "You
don't need to tell me how to apologize to people," he says. "I've been
apologizing to people since I'm six years old on a daily basis. I pretty
much have it down." That Larry can and frequently does apologize shows a
maturity of moral character one might not expect from him. A lot of his
actions seem to imply that in his mind, he can do no wrong, but in this
episode we understand that Larry is not adverse to admitting guilt. This
fits into his general ideas about right and wrong – he is "a man of honor,"
after all, even if that honor is not typical.
Of course, even when apologizing, Larry has his own rules and lack
thereof. In "Kamikaze Bingo," after a friend's brother-in-law's botched
suicide attempt, Larry is persuaded that he may hold some responsibly for
the attempted deed. He calls Yoshi to apologize, while eating pistachio
nuts.
YOSHI: You're eating pistachio nuts while you're apologizing to me?
LARRY: Yeah, so?
YOSHI: You can't be sincere about apologizing and snack on pistachio
nuts.
L: Why? I can eat and apologize.
Y: There's no pistachio crunching in apologizing.
L: I respectfully disagree. I've snacked and apologized many time in
the past and everyone's always accepted it quite graciously.
Y: Well that might be the way you do things in your family, but we
don't snack and apologize.
L: Is that a Japanese thing?
Y: No, that's a human thing.
Larry has conceded the apology, which, despite his claim in "The Ida
Funkhouser Roadside Memorial," is not something he doles out too often, and
certainly never without real cause. For Yoshi to question the validity of
the apology is to question the very core of Larry's ethical code because a
false apology is not something Larry would suffer. Above all, Larry does
what Larry thinks is right, he doesn't ever do something simply because
that's what's expected of him.
Yoshi's remark that not snacking while apologizing is "a human thing"
is right on the money because the normal human rules and codes do not apply
to Larry. This is clear broadly throughout the series, and in specific
instances like in season three's "The Nanny From Hell," when Larry
convinces the nanny at a pool party to let him use the house bathroom
despite the rule that guests were only to use the one in the cabana. That's
not to say, however, that Larry considers himself above other people, he
just considers himself separate, and for him, nothing is written in stone
until he himself writes it. Having to follow conventional rules and moral
codes is what Larry hates, what he cannot accept. This is clear in season
two's finale. Larry steals a fork from a restaurant so that his limo driver
can eat his leftovers, and the owner of the restaurant takes the
opportunity to exact revenge on Larry for not stopping and talking to him
earlier. He calls the police, and at Larry's sentencing, the judge is at a
loss:
Mr. David, I need your help in this. Obviously a fine isn't going to
do anything. It just won't mean anything to you… So what do you expect
this court to do so that the public understands that I'm not according
you any special treatment? … I'm gonna give you a sentence that will
guarantee that you will never, ever do this again.
The sentence turns out to be wearing a sandwich board that says "I Steal
Forks From Restaurants," and the season closes with a shot of Larry's
mortified, unhappy face. He will surely not steal forks from restaurants
any more, but he did it not out of any thieving compulsion, but out of
kindness towards his driver. Larry is terminally misunderstood, forever
doomed to abide by rules which miss his entire moral point.
This ending, though, while absolutely hilarious, does not rally the
audience the way other scenes in Curb do. That's because what we really
want, what we really enjoy, is to see Larry emerge victorious. What's so
unique about Larry and his particular brand of complaining is that we all
have the thoughts Larry expresses, only we never express them. We all would
like to tackle the woman who cuts us off in the elevator to the ground. We
wish we had the guts and the gall to call people out the way Larry does.
Would most of us actually accuse a potential boss of stealing shrimp? No,
but we'd love to, which is exactly why we love to see Larry in action. That
he doesn't always end up the winner, though, is what makes the show morally
valid, even by our own boring morals. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a lesson in
what happens when people live by their own rulebooks, unswervingly, to the
end.
That Larry lives a fantasy, a life that real people could never live
and get away with, is a notion that many friends and actors echo in talking
about Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book, several
people who are close to Larry comment on whether real life Larry is
anything like the Larry of Curb. Ken David, his older brother, says that "a
lot is real, and lot of that stuff he wouldn't do in a hundred years. He
might think about it, but he wouldn't do it. I don't think he would ever be
as outrageous personally."[4] Jeff Garlin agrees that televised Larry is
the extension of real Larry's impulses: "In real life Larry's thinking
those things and doesn't say and do them, and on the show he says
everything he thinks."[5] In Curb there is a sense of it being Larry
against the world, all our inner neurotic voices finally let loose, and
that is what makes it so satisfying to watch. Larry embodies a version of
ourselves that could never live in the real world, indeed, he only barely
survives his fabricated television world. Larry is able to say the things
he says because he doesn't have a job, because he is rich, because he has
(for the first five seasons at least) a wife and a house and a score of
friends as morally special as him. In the show, Larry has little to do
besides comment on all the things that bother him, which is a luxury few if
any real humans can enjoy.
This is a fact real Larry David is well aware of. In response to the
question "Why do people like Curb?" Larry suggests that "it's because
people see elements in me that they see in themselves and that I'm saying a
lot of things they wish they could say."[6] Larry does just that – says
something we all wish we could say, in almost every episode. The
accusations, the revenge, the frankness about sex and religion and
friendship – Larry is the voice of every person who ever carried a chip on
his or her shoulder. What he taps into is life's inevitable and relentless
unfairness, but where most of us in real life can do nothing to combat
what's unfair, Larry is able to take issue with even the smallest
injustices.
And fake Larry David, on some level, is also aware that he's living
out a fantasy. He constantly indulges himself in saying what he wants to,
indeed, it seems that he knows no other way to act, but there are times
when the mask drops and he reveals that even he knows he's living as if
acting on a perpetual dare. As early as the third episode of season one,
"Porno Gil," Larry, who has dragged Cheryl to a party that turns out to be
an intimate dinner party at the home of a former porn star, reveals a meta
knowledge. "So what's my level of anger here?" he asks Cheryl as they
leave. "What am I dealing with?" He negotiates a temporary lowering of
Cheryl's anger level for the duration of the car ride. Here, we see that
Larry knows on some level that he is living constantly at odds with what's
considered acceptable. He knows that his actions have been a little too
outrageous, he knows when he has crossed the line, but he reconciles by
tiptoeing even further across. He's spent the episode pushing the envelope
a little further each scene, and then in the end he makes the biggest push
of all by admitting that that's what he's been doing all along. His
brashness is staggering, and enviable.
But is it morally persuasive? It's clear that Larry does adhere to a
perverse and unique set of morals which bloom fuller with every slight and
apology he makes. Should we be like Larry? If all the episodes throughout
the entire series make one thing clear, it's that Larry's way of life is
not an easy one. He is always stepping on toes, casting people off, losing
friends and money and face. But there is something so refreshing about
Larry's resolve to be Larry in spite of all of this that makes him worthy
of our moral attention. That said, we could never be like Larry. Larry can
barely pass as Larry – a large portion of the show deals with the negative
fallout Larry must navigate in order to be him. In this way, Curb Your
Enthusiasm embraces Larry's devotion to his singular truth in that it
doesn't serve a sugarcoated picture of what life is like when you only
follow your own rules. A world full of Larry Davids could never function
because Larry's guiding principle is, essentially, to do what he wants.
Being like Larry is a kind of moral paradox because it means rejecting all
models, including Larry's and simply following our own. That said, while
it would be nearly impossible to live wholly according to Larry's model, we
can certainly embrace elements of it. We don't have to fight every battle
as Larry does on Curb, but perhaps we would all benefit from summoning a
little Larry every now and again. For a show that seems to be about
amorality, Curb Your Enthusiasm packs a few ethical lessons of its own, the
biggest and most beautiful being the emphasis on sculpting out and sticking
to a set of morals which fits your own sense of right and wrong. Morals are
fluid, personal things, and in order to live an existence that is true, we
must not only acknowledge, but embrace this fact, as Larry does so
exhaustively. Larry isn't always right, even by his own skewed standards,
but one can rarely find him under the yoke of someone else's belief system,
which is a feat few of us can manage. Perhaps we should all take a page
from Larry's book and throw out all the pages of all the books that move to
steer us in directions besides our own. And if that doesn't work, a little
kvetching never hurt either.
Bibliography
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Harris, Mark. "Twilight of the Tummlers." New York Magazine, May 24th,
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14th, 2001.
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"The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial." Season 6, Episode 3. Original Air
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Leave it to Beaver, CBS 1957-1963
-----------------------
[1] Dolan, Deirdre. Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book. New York: Penguin
Group, 2006. P 105.
[2] Harris, Mark. "Twilight of the Tummlers." New York Magazine 24 May
2009. New York Media Holdings, LLC. 13 June 2009
.
[3] ibid
[4] Dolan, Deirdre. Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book. New York: Penguin
Group, 2006. P 103.
[5] Ibid, P 144.
[6] Ibid, P 148.
