The tagline for Curb Your Enthusiasm is: ‘Deep inside you know you’re him’, and let’s face it, we all carry part of Larry David with us. And I know a bunch of people who will definitely recognize bits of themselves in him (and no, I will not give names). I loved Seinfeld, then when Curb aired in 2000, I was thrilled to see Larry David’s so uncommon sens of humor was back. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitched Seinfeld as a “show about nothing” and the truth is Curb chronicles the apparently banal world of Larry David. His wife Cheryl, his friend Jeff… Here is an excerpt from the ‘About this show’ page on HBO website: ‘… this series proves how seemingly trivial details of one’s day-to-day life–a trip to the movies, a phone call, a visit from some trick-or-treaters–can precipitate a “Murphy’s Law” chain of misfortune to hilarious effect…‘. Yes, Murphy’s Law (didn’t I mention it on my last post?).
Larry David and many other characters play themselves and the show is shot without a script. The Larry David of the show doesn’t care about social conventions and his banal life is hampered by his poor social skills and obsessions, to say the least. So what could some of us have in common with this… jerk? I thought it was Larry’s sometimes naive and candid attitude, and the way his brutally honest approach manages to unintentionally offend people he cares about so often. But last month I received an email from a friend (I have some friends sending me emails too, and not only from this tenacious company promising me everyday an amazing penis enlargement…) about an article published on The New Yorker website. David Roberts, a second-year clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, considers Larry David to be ‘the perfect proxy for a schizophrenic person’. This is getting bad, isn’t it? Do some of us, CYE fans, have to enter into a therapeutic program? But then I read the title of the article and it was a relief: ‘We are all Larry David’. Now it is getting better.
Seriously, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show and it is aimed to make us laugh and it definitely does for the sixth Season. And it does because David character is often crossing the line we do our best not to, because of social conventions and conformism. He is the one we know we shouldn’t be but also the one we sometimes would like to be.
Some would say LD is mashugga (crazy), but I’m very… enthusiastic about it ^_^
