Hey Wisecrack, Michael here. Today, we’re talking about the human embodiment of the
awkward pause the king of cringe himself, Larry David.
Hey, edible underwear!
Between Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, our culture has spent more than thirty years
laughing at Larry David’s characters and the uncomfortable situations they find themselves
in. Whether it’s Elaine calling a baby ugly in front of its parents.
Some ugly baby huh? What did you say?
Or Larry returning to a dinner party that he ruined in order to retrieve his watch.
Well… bye.
We just can’t get enough of this brand of emotional masochism.
But here’s the question: does the pain of watching Jerry steal an old woman’s rye
bread reveal some greater truth about how we exist in the world? What unspoken mechanics
of human interaction does Larry teach us when a hug goes on just a little too long. Let’s
find out in this Wisecrack Edition on the philosophy of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Spoilers
ahead for a show with more golf than plot. And some Seinfeld?
Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show about social interaction or, rather, when social interaction
fails spectacularly. The show follows a fictionalized version of Larry David as he wanders around
LA annoying and or infuriating his friends and family by ignoring social conventions
that most of us intuitively understand.
“You can’t be sincere about apologizing and then snack on pistachio nuts!” “What?
I can eat and apologize.”
Very little actually happens on Curb. Larry and his friends will incessantly bicker over
trivial questions of social propriety,
“You don’t want to be next to me when you’re dead? I can assume you don’t want
to be next to me when you’re alive.”
But they rarely make decisions of any real consequence, Much like Seinfeld before it,
“It’s about nothing!”
But aside from giving us cautionary tales about eating junior mints in an operating
theater, The Larry David Televised Universe gives us some deep truths about how we exist
with our fellow humans. That is, in breaking the rules, or at least arguing about them,
David gets at the truth of why social norms exist in the first place.
To understand how - we need to turn to sociologist Erving Goffman. In his book The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argues that social interaction is a kind of performance
that we are all putting on for each other, every minute of every day. Like actors in
a play, we spend most of our time hiding our true selves behind constructed identities
made up of certain expected costumes, behaviors, and lines of dialogue. Goffman contends that,
not only are we performers, but highly adaptable ones, able to switch roles in seconds, and
quickly study up on new ones as needed.
In a single day, for instance, one person might take on the roles of mother, wife, doctor,
Reddit shitposter and more. In the process said person makes profound, rapid changes
in their manner, speech patterns, etc., without even having to think about it. Or, if you’re
George Costanza, you might vacillate between unemployed curmudgeon, screenwriter, pretend
marine biologist, corporate sycophant, and man who would like to be lathered in oil
According to Goffman, when we encounter others, we refer back to previous experiences to quickly
decide what sort of scene we will act out together: waiter/patron, salesperson/customer,
host/guest, etc. In a given interaction, the person with less at stake will tend to offer
the other a bit of leeway in setting the scene, with the expectation that the same kindness
will be extended back their way in the future. In this way, “Together the participants
contribute to a single overall definition of the situation... a ’working consensus’.”
In other words, a big part of being human is working with other humans to select and
act out social scripts appropriate to a given moment. Sometimes these patterns of interaction
are so well established that they become almost unconscious. Most of us have internalized
that you don’t talk in theaters ,double-dip at parties
Did you just double dip that chip? Excuse me? You double dipped the chip!
Or break the social contract implied in picking someone up from the airport. Most people also
understand what an appropriate hug duration is.. On the other hand, sometimes people run
into completely new situations—or hit snags in more conventional ones—and have to work
together to define that situation and react accordingly. Or, you know, they try to do
that and fail completely: Like when Larry becomes accidentally aroused after a hug goes
on for longer than expected. You know, she went over the appropriate amount of time that
I can have human contact without getting aroused.I only have five seconds. After that, it's out
of my control]. Larry accordingly has to deal with the fallout from his friends. You hug
my auntie, man, you stab her in the stomach? - Oh well - What the fuck was that? She hugged
me and she held that hug for over five seconds.] What th- I have no control after five seconds!
Larry finds himself in another script-breaking situation, in “Kamikaze Bingo,” when his
pharmacist offers a negative opinion of a drug prescribed to Larry’s father.
You know there is another drug out on the market that I personally like a lot better.
Most of us might assume, incorrectly, that the job of a pharmacist is to just shut up,
listen to a doctor, and give us our Klonopin. But in this case, our guy bucks the assumed
protocol for pharmacist/customer interaction--and forces Larry to choose whose performance to
trust:
I’m a doctor Larry well he’s a pharmacist. Yes and I’m a doctor. He’s a pharmacist.
In all these cases, the participants are constantly making choices, for better or for worse,about
how to perform, and how to respond to the performance of others.
In a smooth social interaction, all the various definitions of the situation will quickly
line up, and “working consensus” will be achieved. Just as many of us have internalized
“normal” behavior, we have also been heavily socialized to tolerate the behaviors of others,
even when it’s obviously fake. Goffman contends that this willingness to be flexible with
other people —to take their performances at face value—is what allows societies of
all sizes to function. Everything from your dinner party to the economy depends on all
of us cutting each other a certain amount of slack.
Enter Larry, whose entire schtick revolves around his inability--or his outright refusal--to
reach a working consensus with anyone.
While it’s impossible to reduce Curb Your Enthusiasm to a formula, one of the show’s
most-used gags is simply to put Larry in a social situation and have him vehemently disagree
with someone else’s definition of it. Again in “Kamikaze Bingo,” for instance, when
Larry learns that his friend Yoshi’s father survived his tour of duty as a WWII kamikaze
pilot, he insists that
kamikaze pilot kind of implies that, you know a kamikaze pilot is a pilot who crashed and
died, right?”
He refuses to drop the point and find a working consensus with his wife and friend, even though
his questions make Yoshi visibly uncomfortable. Even when it becomes clear that his prodding
eventually led Yoshi to attempt suicide, Larry still refuses to concede:
“There’s a lot of kamikaze pilots that are still alive.” “You say that. And I
say to you that they are not kamikaze pilots!” Larry is completely inflexible, rejecting
anyone else’s definition of a situation. He derails social gatherings by obsessing
over minor annoyances that most adults would ignore for the sake of a quiet meal with friends.
You’re really the only person who has a problem with the water. Yeah it’s just water,
what are you so sensitive about? I want you to go. I'm getting kicked out?
When family friend Cliff Cobb tells an anecdote about his grandfather inventing the Cobb salad,
Larry thinks he’s lying.
It’s my grandfather’s salad.
Rather than letting it go like a sane person, he commissions his secretary to do a research
project on the origins of the Cobb salad,
Here’s what I want you to do. Ok. I want you to go on the internet and get some information
for me on the Cobb salad. Later confronting Cliff with the new information:
“The Cobb salad, my friend, was invented in 1937, by Bob Cobb, at the Brown Derby!”
When Larry is in the room, it is almost impossible to come to a single definition of the situation
that will allow the group to continue talking in a productive way.
The way Larry constantly sabotages any working consensus is the key to the show’s famous
cringiness. As Goffman points out, “When these disruptive events occur... the participants
find themselves lodged in an interaction for which the situation has been wrongly defined
and is now no longer defined. All the participants may come to feel ill at ease.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm offers viewers the social equivalent of the physical humor found in
Tom and Jerry, The Three Stooges, and Jackass --that is, a chance to laugh at people in
pain. While Mo and Larry might smack Curley in the head or grab his nose with a pair of
scissors, our Larry subjects his wife, manager, and other acquaintances to that awful, prickly
emotional discomfort we feel when a social encounter is spiraling out of control.
When you walk through my door you play by my rules! You take off your fucking shoes!
You and your little soccer shoes in my house! My feet have a tendency to get a little chilly
when I take my- Gil get the coats! The coats are probably a good idea
Larry’s refusal to adapt to any working consensus outside his narrow worldview causes
plenty of chaos and the occasional screaming meltdown. --
Now I’m saying thank you for helping me, I’m going to have some cake. No no but you
can’t change it that’s why you say no matter what this is, this is the what, that’s
why you ask me and not these other people because you knew I wouldn’t let you. Larry!
You told me not to let her have it! She said no matter what…
We see this play out in “Trick or Treat,” the season 2 episode that confronts Larry
with two teenagers pretending to be little kids on Halloween. Where most adults would
roll their eyes and toss the girls a few Hershey bars to make them go away, Larry decides that
this is the time to make a stand:
Are you kidding? It’s halloween?
“Yeah it doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to go around to people’s homes and bilk
them out of candy.”
When he calls the cops to report the resultant vandalism of his house, the officer claims
that Larry started the whole mess by refusing to give the teens any candy:
[“There’s kind of a social contract that you enter when you open that door. They say
‘Trick or Treat,’ I would advise you, give the treat.”
Larry’s wife Cheryl points directly to the big gap between Larry’s definition of the
situation and the working consensus that gets the rest of us through Halloween without getting
the words “Bald Asshole” spray-painted on our houses.
In later seasons, Larry is even called upon to use his unique capacity for tactlessness
to solve his friends’ problems. When an attempt to get a mutual friend’s wife to
stop saying “LOL” backfires, Larry’s manager, Jeff, finally puts a label on his
unwillingness to bend to social norms: You know what you are? You’re a social assassin.
Jesus.
When the social assassin makes a “hit,” he is killing a working consensus that is
disagreeable to another member of the group—one who is too afraid to put forward their own
alternate definition of a situation. Because Larry would rather be right than be part of
a functioning social group, he will call out any aspect of a performance that he doesn’t
like.
But how, specifically, do people create these performances for each other? And how does
Larry disrupt them?
One way is by ridiculing and playing around with what Goffman referred to as the individual’s
‘front,’ or “the items that we most intimately identify with the performer...like
insignia of office or rank; clothing; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures;
and the like.”
In Larry work, characters routinely fixate on one or more items in another character’s
personal front. Pieces of clothing--and what they supposedly reveal about the people that
wear them--are key story elements in multiple Seinfeld episodes. Consider Jerry’s horror
at the thought of having his front tarnished by the pirate shirt.
But I don’t want to be a pirate!
Or Jerry and Elaine fixating on how to interpret the meaning of a cape,
Is he wearing a cape? I believe he is wearing a cape.
Or Jerry’s dismay over the cowboy boots he’s forced to wear:
I don’t want to be a cowboy!
These characters spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about other people’s fronts,
and trying to preserve their own You know the message you’re sending out with those
sweatpants? You’re telling the world, I give up, I can’t compete in a normal society,
I’m miserable so I might as well be comfortable]. This carries over into Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Larry is often preoccupied with the minutiae of other peoples’ “fronts.” Someone’s
choice in headgear, for instance, will affect whether he decides to help them pick up a
dropped golf ball:
“Same hat, no string, no question I pick it up. I I don’t kn- I see certain items
and I recoil.”
Or whether he’ll take a friend into a restaurant:
Proud Jews wear yarmulkes. Yeah, be proud here in the parking lot. Don’t be proud
in there.
At one point, Larry even picks a fight with Ted Danson--at the man’s own birthday party--for
having his catering service wear bow ties:
It looks elegant. I feel like you are putting on airs or something.
But the show’s obsession with front comes through most clearly in one of the subplots
to “Trick or Treat,” in which Larry starts wearing golf clothes on days when he isn’t
actually playing golf. This confuses his friends, who don’t see the point of adopting a front
that communicates “golf” if one has no intention of hitting the links:
Larry simply likes the way he looks in a tucked-in polo shirt and slacks
I like the outfit, I like the way it looks. According to his definition of the situation,
wearing golf clothes does not necessarily imply that one is going to or coming from
a game.
Larry, no one would wear a shirt like that unless they were going to golf.
Despite his preoccupation with the front of others, he decides that he can add these items
to his own front without making a statement about what he’s doing for the afternoon.
But for the other characters, Larry’s front is so tied up with the practice of golfing
that they refuse to believe him when he explains he doesn’t have a round scheduled that day:
You aid you weren't golfing! Why the hell are you wearing those clothes! Because I like
the way they look!
All of that notwithstanding, Larry isn’t always on the outside looking in when it comes
to deciding what’s appropriate and what isn’t. On rare occasions, he is temporarily
able to win others over to his side, in ways that line up with Goffman’s description
of group, or “team,” performances.
According to Goffman, a group of people defining a situation together operates a little differently
from an individual trying to do the same. An individual can create a complex definition
of situation for themself. In contrast, a team working together to define a situation
will often have to boil things down to a “thin party line” --the lowest common denominator
that everyone involved can agree on. Groups, in other words, tend to define situations
in broad strokes—rather than developing nuanced interpretations to events, they will
judge things as simply “good” or “bad,” “acceptable” or “unacceptable,” etc.
The members of the team may feel compelled to defend the party line, even if it is simplistic.
We see this play out on a micro level in “Kamikaze Bingo.” When the host’s brother in law’s
suicide attempt interrupts poker night, those remaining around the card table aren’t sure
what to do next--there is no ready definition for their situation. Larry is the first to
begin making one up:
“Well, you know. We’re here.” That’s true cause ya know I had to really finagle
to get out tonight I’m kind of happy to be anywhere. Ya know we can’t leave the
house, ya know it’s, they’re gone. We don’t have keys. We don’t know the alarm
code or anything. And a pizza is coming. And a pizza coming. Ya we got a pizza coming.
Not wanting to miss out on a night of poker, the boys work together to develop the transparently
stupid party line of “a pizza is coming.” They fall back on it when the host returns
from the hospital and calls them out on their inconsiderate behavior:
You know pizza was coming, it would’ve been rude to leave a pizza coming. It would have
been rude to stop and pick it up on your way home too. We didn’t know your alarm code
But Curb Your Enthusiasm also explores this dynamic on a much larger scale. One of the
show’s recurring themes is Larry’s relationship to Judaism--or, rather, his lack thereof.
Curb portrays segments of the American Jewish community as a Goffman-style team: a collection
of individuals working overtime to establish what counts as “correct” behavior for
the group, and condemning anything that doesn’t fall within those boundaries. As always, Larry
has a tough time achieving working consensus with the group, which results in him being
labelled as not good enough in his performance of the faith:
You’re a lousy Jew!
Larry takes on this mantle with glee--nothing seems to make him happier than being yelled
at by someone who is trying to shame him for disagreeing with their definition of the situation,
i.e. what it means to be Jewish.
In “Trick or Treat,” Larry gets into a feud with a man who hears him humming a Wagner
tune to his wife Cheryl:
I want to know what a Jew is whistling Wagner for when he was one of the great anti-Semites
of the world. You know what you are? You are a self-loathing Jew. Am I? Yes yes. LEt me
tell you, I do hate myself but it has nothing to do with being Jewish!
Of course, the man’s claim that good Jewish people should not enjoy Wagner fails to make
an impact on Larry, who rejects the consensus he represents:
And in the season 8 episode “Palestinian Chicken,” Larry’s love for a new Palestinian
restaurant puts him in conflict with his Jewish acquaintances.
Larry causes friction early on by violating Marty Funkhauser’s proud-Jewish-man front
near the entrance to Al-Abbas:
Don’t you reach for that. Don’t you ever touch that.
When Marty later tries to shame Larry for starting a fling with the Palestinian restaurant
owner, Larry fires back by attacking his front once
again, making fun of him for taking his religion and culture so seriously
You’re not even a man anymore! Mommy rabbi says don’t play, little boy!
The episode ends with Larry literally caught between a crowd of Palestinian protestors
on one side of him and a crowd of Jewish protesters on the other. He’s caught between the situation
he wants, to eat delicious chicken, and the one he’s saddled with--a working consensus
that labels him a religious traitor.
“I have a sister! You, me, and Yasmeen. The three of us. That’s enough, just get
the fuck over here, just get the fuck over here. Stop being an idiot. Larry come over
here. Larry! Don’t be a dick.
Like many comic figures, Larry gets laughs by flaunting social norms--but few characters
are so single-minded in their devotion to causing friction:
I will not be intimidated. Even on Halloween.
While Curb Your Enthusiasm may make some people cringe rather than laugh, it would be hard
to find a human being who can watch the show and be completely unaffected. By directly
attacking the system that allows us to interact with our fellow humans, Larry toys with some
of our deepest fears around social failure, shame, and flat-out awkwardness. Depending
on your tastes, this is either hilarious--or terrible.
It’s cute, right? No. Not really.
What Larry moments have you survived in your own life? Have a favorite episode that we
missed? Let us know in the comments, and as always, be sure to subscribe and ring that
bell. Thanks to our amazing patrons for supporting the channel and our podcasts. Tap that subscribe
button and as always, thanks for watching. Later guys.