Larry David Probably Won’t Get Invited to Eat Roadkill with RFK Jr. After This

When he was a 14-year-old schoolboy, future U.S. president George Washington handwrote a list of 110 “Rules for Civility.” These were commonly used to teach honor, virtue, and dignity to students of the era. Among them was number four, “In the Presence of Others, Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with your Fingers or Feet.”

Other rules in the list included a warning not to lean on a desk while someone else is using it to write (number 14), not to overdo it with compliments and flattery (number 25), and of course to “Take no Salt or cut Bread with your Knife Greasy” (number 92). Looking at them now, not only are they helpful 18th-century suggestions for polite manners, but they could easily serve as plot points for explosive confrontations on any given episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Larry David’s brand-new HBO series—Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness—is sort of a hybrid of the two: George Costanza–level griping fused with historic tales from America’s past.

The sketch-comedy show, which debuts tonight, sends various versions of David’s fussy, abrasive comedic persona back in time to moments like the invention of the telephone, the trenches of World War I, and the bread lines of the Great Depression. It overflows with cameos and is produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground company. The former president even appears in the first episode’s introduction as a straight man who provokes David into rising levels of agitation.

At the red-carpet premiere this week, which took place at Hollywood’s appropriately patriotic American Legion theatre, David introduced the screening by saying he was happy to finally do something productive with his college degree. “This came about when my agent called me and said that Higher Ground, the Obamas’ company, wanted to do a show with me about the celebration of the 250th anniversary of America,” David told the crowd. “I liked the idea. I was a history major … because you never know when you’re going to get into a discussion about the Franco-Prussian War.”

He then invoked the naysayers who mocked his history degree. “Everybody said to me, ‘What are you gonna do with that? You can’t do anything with that!’ And 55 years later...” He spread his arms in surrender: “They were right! Until now. Now I’ve done something with it.”

There seemed to be some sincerity behind the joke. David had the swagger of someone who was happy to throw the gloves off. He recalled his mother complaining that, as a child, he was never excited about anything. “Twelve-year-old Larry was not that different from the 78-year-old Larry,” he said. “But I have to say, tonight ... I’m a little excited. Dare I say—enthusiastic.”

Viewers might feel the same way about Unhappiness. If you are dispirited by the news, or if you feel that something grave has besieged American society over the past decade, Unhappiness is for you. Its irreverence actually underscores the honor and nobility of what our nation was, what it has traditionally tried to be, and what it might one day become again. The decency and respect that these historical figures strive toward serves as a contrast for David’s comical pettiness.

The show kicks off with a 1776 debate over potential new clauses for the Declaration of Independence, with David’s lawmaker character insisting that it should also include a number of his personal grievances, such as bans on trying to get someone to help analyze your dream, asking to share an umbrella in a rainstorm, and taking loud, deep breaths in a crowd (shades of Washington’s Civility Rule number five—“If You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately”).

America desperately needs this show. We need David’s battery-acid satire to scour the corrosion that has crusted over us in recent years. Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness is not just delivering clapter, that phenomenon where comedians make virtue statements aimed at getting applause instead of laughs. This show is a genuine scream.

It manages to be both scathing and funny by perfectly harnessing David’s signature absurdist opprobrium. But instead of dwelling on the small-scale slights and disses that became the hallmarks of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, this show applies his caustic brashness to revered moments from the American experience.

Essentially, what you’re seeing in Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness is the answer to a hypothetical: What if, in the midst of all of these crucial turning points in American history … there was some loud asshole fucking everything up?

We know what that looks like today. All too well.

Other times, Larry is the one who happens to be right. Annoying but right. On Curb, one could argue that his fictional alter ego is actually not wrong a lot of the time. He just gets himself mired in screaming matches because he simply can’t let things go. But some things are worth screaming about.

Ethan Lewis, the executive producer of the series, told me the trick is calling out what others are still hesitant to say. “I think what Larry does so well is he’s always saying the quiet part out loud,” said Lewis, who is also the head of nonfiction and sports at Higher Ground.

Lewis was on set for virtually every sketch and said they always tried to include a dose of real history (that’s where the nonfiction part of his job comes in) as setup for the insanity that follows. “It just allows us to look at ourselves in an honest way and have fun with it. It holds a mirror and you interpret it as you will,” he says.

At the premiere this week, the audience interpreted it as a gasp of relief. In one of the episodes screened by HBO, David played 1876 presidential hopeful Samuel Tilden, who won the nation’s popular vote but lost due to the Electoral College. (This has happened five times in the nation’s history.) As David’s cigar-chomping Tilden unleashes a red-faced tirade, hurling glassware at the wall and bellowing at the heavens over the bewildering unfairness of the Electoral College, my wife turned to me and whispered: “This is so cathartic.”

The premiere also screened a sketch in which David plays the boastful mother of polio-vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk. This is drawn from a routine that David developed long ago for his stand-up act, and he even used it for an onstage sequence early in Curb Your Enthusiasm’s run.

That old bit gets new life in Unhappiness as the one-upmanship between mothers hanging laundry in their backyards is interrupted by the neighbor on the other side—a gravel-voiced, leather-hided, iron-crew-cut man in a white T-shirt who rages against her son’s lifesaving vaccine, brags about his robust health from eating roadkill, and spouts a litany of madman conspiracy theories. As Larry David breathes fire on neighbor “Bobby” and dismisses him over the “worms in his brain,” the premiere audience bristled with oh-no-he-didn’t energy.

It couldn’t be more clear who this “Bobby” is supposed to be. David was once friends with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current and, let’s say, science-dubious head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. David even introduced Kennedy to his Curb costar Cheryl Hines, who eventually married him. (Not that RFK Jr. hasn’t deployed his zombie allure to romance some ethically compromised paramours in the meantime.)

But David pulls no punches here for his former pal. If anything, he brutalizes his “Bobby” stand-in with not-very-subtle right hooks into the real guy’s deranged, backward, and potentially deadly beliefs. Larry David is not to blame for inflicting RFK Jr. on the country. He did not appoint him to be our most demented secretary of health and human services. But this feels like some form of self-inflicted penance nonetheless.

Amid the roar of laughter in the American Legion theater as “Bobby” was mercilessly shouted into oblivion during this sequence, I turned to my wife: “This really is cathartic.” The show might not be genteel enough to fit within George Washington’s “Rules for Civility,” but sharp satire like this can cut through the overwhelming bullshit when we need it most.