CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
(Created by Larry David; HBO Cable Television Network)
The Cringe Factor
In his Poetics, Aristotle famously argued that tragedy induces a cathartic experience of pity, terror, and awe through witnessing the arrogant hero's inexorable precipitation of his doom. Aristotle had nothing to say about the visceral wince induced by an utterly clueless character's un-socialized behavior, and its hilarious or horrific consequences. A colleague wittily calls this peculiar frisson of edgy embarrassment "negative empathy". As Larry David might put it, the cringe factor here is huge.
David was co-creator, executive producer, and eminence grise of the Seinfeld show during its decade-long run. He not only wrote a great deal of Seinfeld material. It's common knowledge that he wrote himself into the series as feckless, craven George Costanza. After leaving Seinfeld, David returned to stand-up work; directed his first film, Sour Grapes, to generally sour critical reception. In 1999 he alighted at the HBO Cable Network. A well received introductory comedy special, Curb Your Enthusiasm, led to the current series.
Now in its third season, the show comprises David's hilarious, at time eerily verite riff on what may or may not be his current life in Hollywood, as well as what passes for real life in LaLaland. My 1998 Seinfeld review characterized George as socially inept; depressively grandiose; lacking any vestige of personal dignity, yet endlessly preoccupied with real or -- more often -- imagined narcissistic injuries. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry has exuberantly liberated his inner Costanza. He (or his fabricated persona) is infinitely more self-preoccupied, anhedonic, and maladroit than George; more prone to quibble over straws; more addicted to stirring whatever pot is available towards mortifying ends.
Each episode of the new series is improvised from a David storyline. The central characters are his ever bemused wife, Cheryl (the delightful Cheryl Hines, not the real Mrs. David); his raffish, porky agent Jeff (comedian Jeff Garlin, one of the show's co-producers) and an antic, freshly detoxed Richard Lewis (the real Richard Lewis, madcap as David/Larry). Many other participants are celebrities like Ted Dansen, Michael York, Seinfeld survivors Julia Dreyfuss and Jason Alexander. They play themselves -- or David's reinventions -- in an ever dizzier hall-of-mirrors narrative.
As in Seinfeld, the self-reflexive influence of Jack Benny's radio and TV work upon Curb Your Enthusiasm is substantial. A typical Benny episode took place before or after, but never during his show, with the same characters noodling around at Benny's digs while they took potshots at their boss' egregious pretentions. Seinfeld openly declared it was about 'nothing': four single glib Gotham narcissists noodled around Jerry's apartment, took acerb potshots at each other's hangups, or quested feebly after romance, gainful employment and petty self-justification.
Curb Your Enthusiasm distills Seinfeld's "nothingness" down to a splendid Benny-esque essence. Its protagonists are Dostoyevskian underground men (and women) in Santa Monica sunlight, embroiled in even more paltry (if to them momentous) trivial pursuits.
Larry is discovered ensconced in his lavish Beverly Hills mansion. His Seinfeld riches leave him unlimited time for navel-gazing, nit-picking, and futzing around with projects which have yet to materialize. He often obsesses about the minutiae of social discourse, thereby weirdly defamiliarizing the quotidian (e.g: what's the "dispensation" period past 10 PM when you can call someone with good news? If you shave your head when you still have your hair, can you claim membership in "the bald club"?). Mostly he indulges his hankering after for taking great offense on slight or imaginary provocation.
For instance: HBO's production chief, to whom Larry has been pitching a new show, mistakenly receives Larry's Chinese food order. When it's returned, Larry is sure the honcho has purloined a couple of kung-pao shrimp. Just when one thought they've buried the hatched over the take-out mix-up, Larry commences kvetching about shrimp boosting at an HBO planning session, demolishing any chances for his pitch.
In another episode, a pair of wiseass late teenagers show up at Larry's door on Halloween in spiffy designer duds. He tasks them for not wearing costumes, then declares they're past the "cut-off age" for getting candy anyway. He awakens next morning to find house and gardens profanely trashed.
My Seinfeld piece argued that George Costanza is permanently fixated at a primitive "cookie-jar" stage of super-ego development. Much Seinfeld humor devolved around George's obscure guilt over uncommitted offenses, conflated with a propensity for getting caught with his hand in the cookie-jar when he thinks he can get away with it.
Larry is even more worried about being pilloried for his dubious impulses than George. When Jeff asks Larry to get a pornography stash out of his house lest it be discovered by Jeff's quarrelsome wife discover while he's having bypass surgery, Larry boasts about the restraints he imposes upon his erotic repertoire, so that Cheryl or anyone else will never be able to "get something on me".) In fact, David's freedom from network censorship constraints permits him to parse the perverse, sadistic or otherwise ignoble thrusts strenuously disavowed by the series' Larry -- which routinely wind up being pinned on him.
In Larry's universe, no good deed or indeed any deed at all goes unpunished. As a result of bizarre karmic chains the lid is perennially being blown off Larry's id. He's been publicly labeled a wife-beater, tushy fetishist and child molester. I won't even begin to trace out the labyrinthine plot which places Larry at a party, in a bathroom with a bottle in his crotch, where he's embraced by Jeff's daughter for getting her favorite doll's head back, with predictable exposure to friends and colleagues as a dirty old man.
With all Larry's noisy protests of innocence, it's clear he's compelled to scratch an irrepressible itch to address the impermissible, the unspeakable, or at least subjects usually excluded from polite conversation. At a poolside bash thrown by a fellow investor in his new restaurant venture, Larry remarks on the outsized penis of the host's child; then enrages the father by praising the kid's lavish endowment, labeling himself a sicko yet again, and putting the kibosh on yet another project.
Seinfeld's David-driven absurdist wordsmithing is a staple of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry, on seeing his therapist at the beach wearing a thong: "His boys are hanging out all over the place!" Other gems from the David lexicon: "a lingerer": someone who won't leave a party when its officially declared over; "a tip profiler": someone who checks up the size of your gratuity; "The dreaded double good-bye": what becomes necessary while retrieving an umbrella you left at a party thrown by people you never wanted to hang out with in the first place.
Beyond its dazzling verbal byplay and its scathing send-up of the ultra-shallow Tinseltown scene, Curb Your Enthusiasm's quirky appeal stems from the complex, intense welter of feelings elicited by Larry's regular forays into self-destruction. I doubt that Schadenfreude -- that uncompassionate delight at the slip-on-a-banana-peel disaster of others is much in play here. If Larry's no Oedipus to stir profound empathy for his suffering, one does experience a distant pity, a deal of discomfort, and a strange awe at his amazing capacity for bringing retribution down on his head.
I submit that Larry's humiliations compel identification by proxy with excruciating personal embarrassments we all have known, particularly when such horrid moments involved less than noble motives. David also evokes a complex meld of pain and pleasure by exquisitely suspending the viewer between hope that his fictive self will finally 'get it' this time around each time around; and the inevitable recognition he won't (the failure of Asperberg patients and certain alixythymics to "get it" can spur similar countertransferential discomfort in their therapists).
I particularly cherish that pregnant instant when Larry pauses a beat before plunging into one of his outrageous provocations. I find myself employing a weird psychological 'english'-- the psychic equivalent of those strange physical contortions performed after a bowling ball has left one's hand to help it on its way into into the strike zone. I mentally insert myself into Larry's frame as if I could somehow shake him, scream in his ear -- "DON'T DO IT!!!" But -- nahh -- he's in the soup again, an eternal polymorphous perverse child savoring mess, chaos for its own sweet sakes, the lid hopelessly off the id.
When a perplexed Cheryl asks Larry how he could ever let slip the big penis remark, Larry helplessly replies: "I had to take the risk..." David's mortifying self-exhibition perennially taking that risk; his persistent amazement at his disgrace while remaining absolutely unwitting of its cause; his ever standing willing and able to renew his flagrant boundary violations, all constitute the stuff of highest comedy perched on the precipice of tragedy. Larry is up there with other great unknowing fools, present and past Basil Fawlty; Moliere's Miser; Shakespeare's Malvolio. One laughs so that one may not weep.
Addendum: Many of the psychological issues touched upon but briefly in my review have been elegantly elucidated by psychoanalyst Dr. Benjamin Kilborne, in Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). I'm indebted to Dr. Kilborne for sharing his thoughts with me.