Larry David

WRITER, ACTOR, AND TELEVISION PRODUCER

David created two innovative television programs, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which his misanthropic humor pokes fun at social conventions and petty injustices.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment

Early Life

Larry David, the younger of two sons of a clothing salesman and a housewife, was born and raised in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of Maryland, receiving a bachelor’s degree in history in 1970. After college, he moved back to his parents’ apartment in Brooklyn and worked as a bra salesman, paralegal, cabdriver, and private chauffeur. He disliked most of these jobs and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He eventually moved to Manhattan and attended acting classes. During a class exercise, he reinterpreted a monologue from a play, which caused his classmates to break into gales of laughter, and he realized that he wanted to make people laugh.

Life’s Work

David was twenty-seven years old when he began performing stand-up comedy routines in New York City comedy clubs. He told stories about his life, combining reality with fantasy and absurdity. His act was often poorly received by his audiences, who were accustomed to more conventional one-line gags. On some nights when the audience failed to connect with his performance, David would throw his microphone on the floor and storm off the stage. While many audiences failed to understand his humor, other comedians appreciated the originality of his act. One of these comedians was Jerry Seinfeld, who met David in 1976. The two spent time together, working on each other’s jokes and enjoying their conversations.

In addition to performing in comedy clubs, David worked in television. In 1980, he became a staff writer and performer on Fridays, a late-night television program that aired on American Broadcasting Company (ABC) for two seasons. He was a staff writer for another late-night comedy show on National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Saturday Night Live, during the 1984–1985 season, which was a miserable experience for David. Dick Ebersol, the show’s executive producer, disliked David’s brand of humor and allowed only one of David’s sketches to be performed on the program. David later created and wrote the pilot for Norman’s Corner, a failed situation comedy. He also had small parts in films.

By the late 1980s, however, David was barely making a living from his stand-up act, and his chances of attaining mainstream success seemed dim. Seinfeld was having better luck, and, in the fall of 1988, NBC asked him to create a situation comedy. Seinfeld told David about it, and the two devised a pilot that launched one of the most successful sitcoms in television history. Seinfeld told an interviewer that the two wanted the show "to sound like Larry and me talking." After the pilot, The Seinfeld Chronicles, was broadcast on July 5, 1989, NBC ordered four episodes for that summer and another thirteen to air the following spring.

The resulting show, simply called Seinfeld, followed the lives of four immature baby boomers who were easily irritated by life’s trivialities. David wrote about sixty episodes of the series. Several of the episodes were adaptations of the unperformed sketches he had written for Saturday Night Live, and many of the shows were based on incidents in his life. The character of George Costanza, a bald, bespectacled neurotic who lived with his parents and could not keep a job, was modeled on David himself. Another character, Cosmo Kramer, was based on a neighbor who lived across the hall from David and frequently made unannounced entries into his apartment.

Seinfeldbecame part of NBC’s regular programming in January 1991, and it eventually became the most popular program on network television. In 1993 David married Laurie Lennard, and the couple had two daughters before separating in 2007. David left Seinfeld in 1996 to write and direct a film, Sour Grapes, which was a critical and commercial flop when it was released in 1998. However, he returned to write and to produce the final episode of Seinfeld, which aired on May 14, 1998. More than seventy million viewers watched the final show, in which the four protagonists were imprisoned for breaking a "Good Samaritan" law.

According to some estimates, David earned more than $200 million from writing and producing Seinfeld. When the program ended, he returned to stand-up. Comedian Jeff Garlin offered to direct a Home Box Office (HBO) special for David. The two created Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, a "mockumentary" about the making of an HBO special, in which David played a version of himself—the enormously successful cocreator of Seinfeld, who was performing a nightclub comedy routine. The show featured Garlin as David’s manager, Jeff Greene, who continually gets David into trouble, and actor Cheryl Hines played his long-suffering wife.

The special, which was like nothing that had appeared on television before, aired in October 1999. All the dialogue was improvised to create what David described as "that cinema-verité thing," and the use of a handheld camera further contributed to its documentary style. The program was edgier and darker than Seinfeld, with David’s acerbic wit on full display. Curb Your Enthusiasm, a comedy series featuring the same characters that were in the special, broadcast its first episodes on HBO in 2000. It soon received critical acclaim, being nominated for many Emmy Awards and winning a Golden Globe Award for best musical or comedy television series in 2002, and grew steadily in popularity. In 2009, the show completed its seventh season, and the following year David agreed to write and to produce ten episodes for another season. The show would last for eighty episodes, concluding in 2011, though much speculation surrounded a potential ninth season.

For each episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, David carefully prepared plot outlines comprising about fifteen scenes. The actors received few details about the scenes or the characters they played and did not rehearse. Instead, they improvised the scenes on camera. In the seventh season, the show featured a much-publicized reunion of the four actors who starred in Seinfeld. According to the plot, David and Seinfeld worked together to write and to cast a Seinfeld reunion show, and portions of this show-within-a-show aired in the final episode.

Following the success of Curb Your Enthusiasm, David continued to pursue occasional projects in film. He starred in the comedy Whatever Works (2009), which was directed by Woody Allen to generally positive reviews. He also had a key role in the 2012 film The Three Stooges, a reboot of the classic comedic trio. David was a cowriter and star of the HBO film Clear History (2013). He also wrote and was featured in the Broadway play Fish in the Dark, which premiered in 2015. That same year, he made several appearances on Saturday Night Live as politician and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, while in February 2016 he hosted an episode the program.

In 2024, after 12 seasons and 120 episodes, David ended Curb Your Enthusiasm. The series finale recreated the famous ending of Seinfeld. In the episode, Larry is on trial and once again meets those he offended throughout the entire series.

Significance

After years of struggling to find an audience, David finally succeeded with the wildly popular Seinfeld and the cult favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm. These inventive programs broadened the subjects that could be covered in television sitcoms, and Curb Your Enthusiasm experimented with an improvisational style of comedy. David’s work continues to be admired by his fellow comedians and comedy writers. He has received two Emmy Awards, three Writers Guild of America Awards, and three Producers Guild of America Awards.

Bibliography

"Biography." The Larry David Story: A Parallel Universe Biography. Indiana, 2015. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

Canfield, David. "Larry David on Ending Curb Your Enthusiasm and Staying True to His Roots." Vanity Fair, 14 June 2024, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/larry-david-interview-curb-your-enthusiasm-finale-awards-insider. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Dolan, Deirdre. Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book. New York: Gotham, 2006. Print.

Kaplan, James "Angry Middle-Aged Man." New Yorker 19 Jan. 2004. Print.

Lindsay, Andrew. "How Larry David's Talents Generated Billions." Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 30 July 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

Mejia, Paula. "Larry David Learned Nothing, and Neither Did We." The Atlantic, 11 Apr. 2024, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/04/curb-your-enthusiasm-larry-david-finale/678025/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Noonan, David. "The Power of Self-Loathing." New York Times Magazine 12 Apr. 1998: 26. Print.

Shales, Tom, and James Andrew Miller. Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Print.