Who is this guy with two first names? What a weirdo. Larry David is the man who brought you Seinfeld, the most popular cringe comedy series ever (George is the cringe character). The primetime comedy show reached the mainstream by dialing back the cringe factor a lot compared to the Simpsons (its cartoon peer).
The Soup Nazi
The ‘master of your domain’ contest
The fastest way to JFK?
The hand model (whose hand is attached to a fat, unattractive bald man)
Festivus - the Festivus for the rest-of-us
and on and on
Seinfeld is ’a show about nothing.’ And everything. Everything that would fascinate any cultural anthropologist worth their PhD (and many are NOT worth their PhD).
Seinfeld is a PG-13 satirical look at the annoying oddities of everyday life in urban America. If a cultural anthropologist did a generalist study of urban middle-class life, this is the stuff that might come up in their book. Absolutely nothing covered in Seinfeld matters, except for the fact that we all can relate to most of the topics.
Hmmm. Maybe all of it matters, then? Argh!
When the show ended in 1998, Larry was adrift briefly but soon hatched a plan to take Seinfeld’s premise to a whole ‘nother NC-17 level. Cover your ears, kids! The unlocked content restraints would allow him to amplify better how he behaves in everyday life. The latter is my inference. As far as I know, he has never admitted to this publicly.
NC-17 content required a switch to HBO and total control over the scripts. Except, Curb Your Enthusiasm’s greatest innovation is that it does not use scripts.1 This is a pure improv show, staffed by guest comedians and actors/actresses ready for the improv challenge. Each episode has a basic set of plot points but no canned ‘jokes.’ The scenes you see result from multiple improvisational takes with some light editing. Wow. So. Much. Fun.
[cue sound of car screeching]
My wife can NOT stand Curb Your Enthusiasm. She leaves the room if I have it streaming. She never even completed viewing one episode. Ever. He’s so abrasive! I believe that Leon’s nonstop, anti-romantic, sexual gutter talk does not help here. Most women I know hate Larry David, the character. So rude. So annoying. So sexist. So cringe. Ugh!
When people call it ‘cringe comedy,’ I want to wring their neck…I never dreamed in a million years that it would have that kind of effect on people. After the second or third show I hear, ‘Oh, it’s cringey. I’m cringing. I had to leave the room.’ Why did you leave the room? I have no idea.2
I LOVE Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry is a lightning rod of cultural insight through deeply satirical inversion on the show. In every scene, he performs uncomfortable, awkward, painful-to-watch inversions of social norms. He obliterates middle-class social norms and their irrational nature. He also demonstrates precisely how NOT to behave if you want to gel in urban American social networks, especially professional ones. These are social networks greased by enormous quantities of petty, ‘small talk’ and B.S. Urban existence is sustained by hundreds of weak ties with thousands of shallow, weak interactions per year. If you’re in the business world, you call it ‘networking.’ For you, It is instinctive. There’s a guy who wrote a book for consultants called - How We Buy. Answer? From trusted sources in our networks. I hate business networking, even for my business. So, I do none. F*ck it. I do marketing instead.
Larry exemplifies an old fieldwork technique in cultural anthropology - don’t talk to the official leaders to understand the real norms in a local community. Instead, speak to the outcasts, the marginalized, and even the banished. At the very least, these marginal folks have very clear, conscious things to say about the normative center. And so, Larry David is our neurodivergent guide to American social norms. He reveals the rules by offending them…constantly.
In the show, Larry plays up the awkward potential everywhere in our modern lives: our impatience at the slightest inconvenience and our disingenuous pretenses (e.g., pretense to excellent customer service or righteous environmentalism and sustainability). And Larry gets angry in public, unlike the rest of us. He loses it constantly, precisely when you are supposed to filter as an American adult. What is oddly un-American is that the people he’s upsetting fight back and volley at full strength (not my experience in real life in much of America).
“Don’t make a fuss” or “Don’t make a scene” is a pretty common, majoritarian ethos in American public life in most regions of the country. Voluble anger is for the home, for the family. I know this because I’ve lived and worked all over the country (Seattle, Madison, Boston, Chicago, Tucson, New Hampshire, and rural Maine) and sensed the differing tolerances for public conflict. Most Americans are chill. Very chill.
In Boston, you can absolutely make a fuss and get angry in public with strangers. Swear. Yell. It’s part of the game. And in the boroughs of New York. In Brooklyn, they’ll yell right back, and fun ensues (if like this kind of stranger conflict). You can also light up a confrontation very quickly as a man in Tamil Nadu, where I lived for three years. Boston, New York, and urban India are high-conflict social worlds tolerant of abrasive people in public spaces. These are also worlds where the urban stranger is generally considered a threat until proven otherwise.
But try yelling and screaming at strangers who piss you off in Madison, Wisconsin. Or Tucson. Or Northern New England (where I grew up). Nope. You will get Amish looks of horror or passive-aggressive smiles concealing a burning Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon rage. In much of America, public anger does not trigger a fight; it triggers a defusing smile, indifference, or a look of shock.
I once caught a young man berating a driver who almost hit him for about ten minutes in downtown Madison. He kept finding a new way to eviscerate this man’s carelessness for what seemed like forever. Everyone on the sidewalks had stopped and was gasping at the unhinged rage of this person. Why yell? The driver was in shock and sat there in his car with the window rolled down and took it, waiting for his turn to respond. LOL. What? I mean, what? Everyone else would keep walking in New York, and the driver would flip him the bird and drive on. I saw this very thing twice in 48 hours on a recent trip to Hell’s Kitchen. I laughed to myself both times.
In India, I often saw men start verbal fights in public on the street, and then the onlookers would join right in (!), pick sides, and turn it into a spectator sport, trying to out-adjudicate each other. What? I mean, what?
I grew up in northern New England, which aligns with the broad American norm of a calm public demeanor. You don’t yell because it will backfire. This was how I was raised by my two reticent New Hampshire native parents. To some extent, this approach to not making a scene is a cultural inheritance for those Americans tied to specific Northern European lineages prone to a very early, pre-Enlightenment adoption of individualistic orientations to urban life. You won’t find aversion to public anger as valid in Spain, Italy, Greece, or India. I realize these are huge, clunky generalizations, but there is research with replicable methodologies to support cross-cultural variation in the public expression of anger (and extreme irritation).3
When I came home after living for three years in southern India, my Dad had to pull me aside and re-calibrate me like a spastic, backfiring used car - ‘James… you’ve got to dial it back with the yelling. We’re not in India. Come on!’
“It seems like you have a history of doing the wrong things over and over again,” says the judge in the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm last week. Yes. Yes, Larry does.
And so do I. More on that in a bit.
My two favorite behavioral anecdotes from the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm tell you all you need to know about Larry David, the Character.
#1 - Siri fails to understand a restaurant name, and Larry has a mantrum - (warning: very misogynist language used in this clip)
Granted, this is NOT a public display of anger. More on Larry’s obvious neurodivergence later, but I have done this ‘thing’ alone in a car hundreds of times during my life, often unable to stop. I did it once with a girlfriend on the phone, and she ended it. I was not surprised.
Here’s another Davidism…
#2 - Larry is Horrified by a Friend’s Choice of Baby Name, and Just Won’t Let It Go
Indeed. Larry tends to ‘hear’ everything that annoys him as a joke, even when it’s not at all funny. In the show, he speaks totally unfiltered and drives every debate deep into the OMG zone. I’m sure he goes much farther than he would in real life. But I don’t hang out with him. Who knows?
I can relate to Mr. David. I am also this way. And it used to be much, much worse (ask my wife). Therapy and meds can help without exorcising your ‘true essence.’ Like Larry’s character, I find the world irritating, amusing, and befuddling. I get irritated with people unbelievably easily. One of my top business clients described me to a peer like this - “He has an extremely low tolerance for bullshit.” I find urban social life, with its extreme desire to be stranger-friendly, chasing every bit of social and economic upside possible, to be infuriatingly exhausting. So, I make fun of it to let off steam. I socialize as little as possible. And I make inappropriate comments reliably when I do socialize. I crack jokes about something someone just did right at the party, and they take it personally because, let’s face it, no one knows most people at a social gathering anymore. I start arguments for no reason and keep going. I swear too much for most people. Way too much. Not as badly as Leon, though.
I’m utterly convinced that my deep affection for Mr. David is that we share similar neurodivergence and its primary symptom - little ability to publicly control anger and irritation in a stranger-loving society like ours.
People like Larry and I violate the basic rule around public anger in individualistic societies. Don’t show any. Wear a plastic smile as much as possible (which I now do in a forced way after some intervention). I really do it on my business webinars! Who knows any of these people? You better be smiley and approachable. F*ck me, when can I retire?
In the Middle Ages, I would have been a Viking redheaded seer, living alone with a mangy cat. Or maybe the Court Jester? I’m near-sighted to -8 diopters, so I would have had little else to do. What else does a blind curmudgeon do in the year 893? No one is going to marry him. Seriously. Yet, I would be given a role, for sure. In community-based societies, there’s a role for everyone but the sociopath and the violent A-hole. Perfect self-development is not the point. Just a functional role, even a sad and humiliating one.
But Larry David is living somewhere else.
Listen to how Larry describes himself recently in his P.R. interview with Chris Wallace (where he also told him angrily to shut up for asking repeatedly about his net worth) -
Chris Wallace: How do you live with yourself? (with the defusing American smile)
LD: It is not easy. I don’t know. I try to get into a routine… I have to have a very regimented life. I don’t like traveling. I don’t like going anywhere. I like going to the office [starts laughing uncontrollably and awkwardly]. I like playing golf. I like being in the house [now we realize he’s laughing at himself]. I’m so dull and uninteresting. I really don’t enjoy being out and socialising and making small talk…[his comments] This is not a bit. Ask anyone who knows me. You know, I wish it was a bit. I long to be somebody else. I wish I could enjoy things that most people enjoy, but I can’t….Something went wrong, Chris (he chuckles).
You just read the confession of a high-functioning Aspie male who is self-aware in his old age and does not need a diagnosis to retool his life. Pick your source, but this is pretty much how any one of them describes the condition of high-functioning autism.
As a self-employed/contracted human worker for most of his adult life, Larry David, the comic, has had the luxury of controlling his daily schedule to allow him the kind of routine that most neurodivergent people, especially if they have a working spouse and kids, simply won’t have access to.
Larry David has never been on call. Larry David has never had his wife ring him up at work and ask him to pick up a sick kid from elementary school 20 miles from his office. Larry David has never had his boss imply that he may get fired if he doesn’t improve his communication patterns at the office. How?
One reason I became so enthralled with acting at a young age is that, like Larry, I am neurodivergent and have always longed to be someone else, more socially competent, fluent, and charming than I can be by default. But I’m good at pretending to be this. For short bursts. On a first date. In a business meeting or in a marketing webinar I’m hosting (with cams and mikes off).
Larry David and I are affluent white males who managed to make it through modern urban life as neurodivergent individualists, even though there is more pressure than ever, ironically, to conform to very high 21st-century standards of social decorum in urban spaces that I don’t even think my Midwestern raised grandfather (1902-1986) could adhere to today, were he alive to try.
As we have become so dependent on strangers for everything in America, we are also at their mercy. When strangers violate our trust, we more or less have to take it to function freely; neurodivergent people like Larry and I reel for days and weeks. We rant. We can’t let it go. Ask my wife.
We both secretly long for a rational, Spock-like social world that humans can not muster and will never muster. We aren’t superior about it, though. Hardly. We are just muddling along.
My own muddling inspired my next book on modern America with a heavy dose of satire to make it palatable.
My first book talk happened on April 8 at the University of Arizona Honors College with a packed house thanks to my sponsor - Professor Victor Braitberg.
Only one person left early! I take nothing personally in this brutal process of self-promotion.
If you’d like to help with the book launch, I have several ways you can do this! And I can send signed paperbacks to those who help.
Pre-order a Kindle copy now to spin the Amazon algorithm in Week 1! I need 40 more, so even one moves the needle here!
Sign up for my launch team, promise to buy a discounted copy in week one, and leave an Amazon review ASAP. Please e-mail me at james@socialawarenessinstitute.org to participate and get a free signed copy!
Interview me on your Substack and get a free copy! My Substack Book Tour lasts all summer. D.M. on Substack, if open to this!
https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/television/info-2024/curb-your-enthusiasm.html#:~:text=The%20magic%20of%20Curb%20Your,than%20write%20jokes%20or%20dialogue.
https://www.indiewire.com/awards/industry/larry-david-curb-your-enthusiasm-cringe-comedy-paleyfest-2024-1234975760/
In comparison to other individualistic cultures, European Americans in the U.S. tend to avoid negative affect (Koopmann-Holm and Tsai, 2014), which may explain their lower endorsement of anger expressions in comparison to Germans in particular (Koopmann-Holm and Matsumoto, 2011). Therefore, the motivation to shy away from negative affect can be the result of more individualistic concerns to distance from others. On the other hand, Greek participants with higher interdependence tend to show lower attention to negative emotions, including anger expressions, due to collectivism concerns and the keeping of harmony rules (Kafetsios and Hess, 2013).” Source: Hareli S, Kafetsios K, Hess U. A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning of social norms. Front Psychol. 2015 October 2;6:1501. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01501. PMID: 26483744; PMCID: PMC4591479. One reason Boston and New York are tough, abrasive towns is that the hyper-individualistic Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian/German Americans (who have forgotten their ancestry until recently) are a tiny minority of these cities.
There is a layer of politeness in Northern Europe that represses (some would say civilises) the natural expression of emotions (also disagreement or anger) which is more acceptable in Mediterranean countries.
I think the Mediterranean style allows for channeling anger at low levels, without reaching a more heated confrontation which is not really common or acceptable there. In Northern European countries, however, because those emotions are not expressed or discussed as openly, certain situations get suddenly ignited more often, if the boiling point is reached. In my personal experience.
Nevertheless, even in Mediterranean countries, the higher tolerance of low level public conflict comes with rules, and so Larry David’s behaviour would still be inappropriate.