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  Larry shared a room with his older brother, Ken, who would later move to Oregon and give advice on computers and investments. Larry went to P.S. 52 and then Sheepshead Bay High School where his report card was filled with average marks because he didn’t much care. (Later an obnoxious comic in a Seinfeld episode would come from Sheepshead Bay. “We were right on the water. The whole atmosphere stank of fish.”) There was always a lot of yelling — between his aunts and uncles, the families of his friends, and in the apartments next to their own. In just the same way, yelling would be a major form of communication on Curb. Larry liked sports and was considered a good athlete by other kids. His parents also forced him to go to Hebrew school, which he detested. He didn’t much hide his feelings and got kicked out for laughing at the rabbi who was telling him off for some infraction. (Even now, when someone is yelling at Larry on Curb he can barely keep himself from laughing.) But his parents, horrified that he wouldn’t be able to have a bar mitzvah, talked him back in.

  “We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn,” said Larry Charles, who would become a producer, writer, and director on both Seinfeld and Curb. “You know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks. We both understand that sort of Lord of the Flies sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways a very cruel and sadistic environment.”

  He was never known as funny, not by his family and not by his friends. But he liked to laugh, and he was a fan of Abbott and Costello, Bob and Ray, and especially the Jewish comic actor Phil Silvers. The Phil Silvers Show ran from 1955 through 1959. Later called Sergeant Bilko in reruns, it was also known as You’ll Never Get Rich. It featured Silvers — the bald, glasses-wearing actor from Brooklyn — as Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko, head of the motor pool at a U.S. military base in Kansas. In episode after episode, Bilko worked to attain more creature comforts for himself and make life in the army easier. Often as not he would end up making things harder, not unlike the future star of Curb. The dialogue was sharp, and the multiple plots, though wild and fanciful, were always plausible and carefully worked out to resolve in the end, in a manner similar to Seinfeld and Curb. There was also a good dose of physical comedy. It had a quiet, strong presence behind it in the creator, producer, writer, and director Nat Hiken. It would make a lasting impression on Larry. “I just thought that it was head and shoulders above any other show I had seen,” Larry said later. “You know, in analyzing it now, you could see that Bilko was a manipulative character who did a lot of unlikeable, despicable things. But because he was so funny doing it, it all just worked.”

  With no sense of direction, Larry enrolled at the University of Maryland for a degree in history. “You never know when you might run into a discussion of the Franco-Prussian War,” he joked, indicating what he thought of its usefulness. The late sixties were in full swing but Larry hated the hippie era and felt alienated by it. He eyed the long hair, beads, and Grateful Dead T-shirts skeptically, believing them to make up another kind of conformity. He looked clean-cut and decent, a model young man in a suit and tie for his college portrait. Drug-taking scared him. He didn’t even manage to get any of that supposed free love available for the asking. (Later he would wear his hair long, in what is now called a Jewfro.)

  But it was at university that Larry made a discovery: he could be funny. He began entertaining his friends with humor, recounting his disastrous dates in humiliating detail to heighten the comic effect. Very early on he learned to sacrifice his dignity for a laugh.

  After graduation, Larry headed back to Brooklyn. He got a two-bedroom apartment, which he shared with a couple of others, and hit the pavement looking for work. Employment agencies found him several jobs, none of which lasted long. He worked for a bra wholesaler called E.D. Grandmont, selling “defective bras” as he put it. He claimed that he never sold one. (In the 1993–1994 season George sells bras on Seinfeld.) Then he worked in a law office. After that he was a cab driver and finally a private chauffeur. For the latter job he had to wear a uniform and he would be highly embarrassed to be seen by someone he knew, waiting by the car for some rich woman to come out of a store on Fifth Avenue. But he claimed to like this job, especially when he worked for an elderly woman with poor vision who couldn’t tell when he didn’t wear the uniform. Later, he used it as the basis for a screenplay that went unproduced. Between jobs he collected unemployment insurance. He even joined the army reserves, a fact the fictional Larry would tell to his rather surprised manager in Curb.

  It was back in New York that Larry got the idea to take an acting class in the city. He participated in class but never found himself particularly comfortable acting. Then one session the instructor gave the students the assignment of acting a monologue, but doing it in their own words — really a kind of improvisation based on specified material. Larry found this a lot more enjoyable than reciting lines and, even better, he managed to make the rest of the class laugh. “And I thought, hey, that’s for me. That’s what I want. I want a laugh,” Larry has said.

  Once when he was in a play his parents came to see him. His father kept his opinion to himself; he didn’t think his son had a chance of success.

  It was shortly after returning to New York in 1970 that Larry went to a comedy club. As he watched the comics onstage, it came to him that he could do it too. But he didn’t try it until four years later. He knew someone from college who was doing stand-up and asked him to have lunch in exchange for some advice on how to start. That’s where he heard about the open mike nights at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. More famous for being the site of Bob Dylan’s first professional gig and for other music acts, the club on West Third Street (which closed in 1987) can also claim to be the spot where Larry David first got in front of a mike. At this time, he was tall and thin, ill kempt, and wore very big glasses. He had rather wild curly hair, already substantially thinning up top. He had written some material that included an imitation of Rod Steiger, an actor whose best films were several years behind him, and although the reception wasn’t particularly warm the experience made Larry want to try again.

  Larry’s second try was a large step downward — to a lounge stage in the Gil Hodges Lanes, a bowling alley in Brooklyn where he tried some new material. But the third time was an even bigger step up, to Catch a Rising Star, the place where television scouts went looking for talent. Not that Larry was discovered that night. The place was glamorous and popular; people lined up to get in. It was rather intimidating for someone who still had no idea what he was doing. Again, he tried out new material, including a routine about a telethon to raise money for people out of work. Management asked him to come back the next week, and this time he felt the pressure to write new stuff — a pressure he would later come to know and dislike while writing for television. He came up with a routine about a kid masturbating who is caught by his mother (a topic he would return to many times). A trial is held, the kid is put on the stand, and so is his mother, who is accused of not supporting Israel. Larry was still not really connecting with the audience, or even being fully aware of their presence, but he got some real laughs, an experience that he found exhilarating. The club gave him a regular spot.

  And so Larry began working the clubs, usually in late-night weekday slots. Eventually he got to work the more crowded weekends. From the beginning he wanted to tell the audience the truth about how he felt about things, especially what he couldn’t say in regular life. Over time he worked up an act that, in his words, “I could do, and enjoy, and kill with on a Saturday night. But it still was difficult going on. Because I was taking my life in my hands.”

  He also played the Improv and the Comic Strip. He began to make friends with other comics and to hang around with them in the clubs even when he wasn’t performing. Richard Belzer, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Carol Leifer (later a writer for Seinfeld and the model for Elaine), Gilbert Gottfried — all were struggling to make names for themsel
ves and move up the comedy food chain. What Larry loved about hanging with them was that he didn’t need to censor himself. He could say whatever he wanted. He even played on a comedians’ softball team.

  The David family had already started to worry about Larry, whose working life didn’t seem to be going anywhere. They were, to say the least, surprised by this new career move, and dismayed. But Larry never asked for money. He scraped by on what he could make.

  Larry often wore an old army jacket while performing. His hair, as Richard Lewis reported, looked like a combination of “Bozo” and “Einstein.” The person in the audience he aimed for was “the lonely guy, the frustrated guy, the guy with no money — this is the guy who needs to laugh.” But Larry David didn’t try to win the audience’s affection by acting as confidant, or best friend, or by making them feel good about themselves. His style was “willfully uningratiating” in the words of a later New Yorker writer. Some of his routines were obscure. For example, he might open by thanking God that he wasn’t born a Spanish landowner. Because if he had been, he wouldn’t know whether to use the formal or informal “you” when talking to people. “I don’t want them to feel so familiar that they can just help themselves to anything in the refrigerator.”

  He might address his Jewishness in an unconventional manner, for example by saying that he would have made friends with a Nazi if the man had complimented his hair. “You know, if he’d given me a compliment, Josef Mengele and I could have been friends.” (This was later refined as Jerry’s remark on Seinfeld that he would have been friends with Himmler if the man had owned a ping-pong table.) Or Larry would say, “You know what I really admire about Hitler? He didn’t take any shit from magicians.” Then he dramatized how Hitler would have forced a magician to reveal the secret of his trick. And of course there were masturbation jokes. He imagined being a professional masturbator. People would ask his advice and he would say, “You must practice!”

  Larry would make fun of his poor skills with women. “They say that if you’re over forty and haven’t gotten married, you’re either gay or there’s something wrong. And I’m here to tell people tonight that there’s something wrong.” But his favorite opening, the one he came to use most often, was: “I’ll tell you something about good-looking people. We’re not well liked.”

  Not only did the audiences often not get Larry, they simply didn’t like him. “I was in fear every night of going onstage in front of these audiences,” he said. “I knew I had to go on, but I really didn’t want to. It was bad. There were some bad nights.” And despite his unwillingness to compromise his material, he had no plan of how to make it work. “I was hoping that somehow I could get some kind of cult following, and get by with that. And you know what? That would have been fine with me. I just wanted laughs — that’s what I was after. I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.”

  But what Larry found night after night was that audiences wanted the sort of easy, mainstream comedy that they saw on television. One incident during his time as a stand-up would become a famous and often-told story; he once got up onstage, looked out at the audience, decided that they were not going to appreciate him, and simply walked off again. Yet while the audiences weren’t taking to him, other comics thought Larry was great, a rare, unique voice. One of them was Jerry Seinfeld. The two comedians met in 1976, when Larry David had been doing stand-up for a couple of years. Seven years younger, Seinfeld was just starting out. There was no sign yet of the sensation that he was going to become. They weren’t exactly close friends, but they admired each other’s work and that was enough to bring them together.

  “Our brains had a comedic connection,” Jerry said. “Larry was a guy open to discussing virtually any human dilemma, as long as it was something that not a lot of other people were interested in. I was exactly the same way. We weren’t interested in what was on the front page of the newspaper.” They began to help each other develop material. They would walk through Central Park or sit in coffee shops working on their stuff.

  At this time, Seinfeld too was struggling, and he would continue to struggle until at least 1981, when he had his first appearance on The Tonight Show. He sold lightbulbs, waited tables, and even sold jewelry from a cart outside Bloomingdale’s. Eventually he moved to Los Angeles hoping to do better, only to land a role on the sitcom Benson where his character was dropped after three episodes. But Jerry didn’t suffer the feelings of frustration and anger that Larry did when he went onstage. Larry got angry when the audience wasn’t listening. Comedy club-goers were usually young, noisy, and often semi-inebriated. Seinfeld has said, “A night club is a place where drinks and food are served; a comedian is not automatically the audience’s focal point. You have to fight for their attention. And that’s not easy to get. Larry had the material, but he never had what you would call the temperament for stand-up.” Another time he remembered, “I was a huge fan. Most of the comedians were. [But] it wasn’t easy in those days. It was just a matter of how much you could take, and he could take less than most.”

  A lot of people without the right temperament would have quit. Most did. But Larry persisted, a kind of self-torture but the only outlet he had for his form of comedy.

  And then came television.

  CHAPTER 3

  Larry’s Corner

  One of the factors that kept Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld friends was that they both moved to Los Angeles at about the same time. Larry moved for the most basic of migratory reasons: a job. He’d been offered a writing and performing role on the ABC sketch-comedy series Fridays.

  A live late-night show, Fridays (1980–1982) was an unabashed rip-off of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which, now several years old, was beginning a period of low creativity and falling ratings. Fridays too had musical acts and, starting in its second season, guest hosts. It had a fake news show and commercial spoofs. But it was also different from SNL, darker and edgier. Some of the sketches were not even intended to be funny. It took greater risks, such as a sketch with comic Andy Kaufman and Michael Richards during which a fight broke out. The incident was later revealed to be one of Kaufman’s hoaxes.

  It was on the show that Larry David first met Michael Richards, whom he would later think of for the role of Kramer on Seinfeld. Richards’s own comic talent was still in its early stages, although he already had the habit of scratching the nest of hair on his head and looking confused. Larry David also met Larry Charles, who would come to write for Seinfeld and be a significant force on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as Bryan Gordon, a future Curb director. Larry would also use several cast members — Melanie Chartoff, Bruce Mahler, and Maryedith Burrell — to fill guest roles on Seinfeld.

  Besides writing, Larry made his first television appearances in various skits that he no doubt had a hand in writing. The Fridays show being live, none of the actors looked extraordinarily comfortable (certainly not as at ease as SNL veterans would become), and Larry was no exception. He tended to keep his head slightly down, and with his bush of hair — a bald strip clearly visible down the middle — and his enormous glasses he did not always make the clearest impression. In one sketch, two couples spend the night comparing childhood games they know, giving each other “Indian sunburns,” “noogies,” “Uncle Wigglys,” and other painful pinches and knocks. It’s a rather good idea poorly executed. In another, Larry comes on during a news program to telephone his old friend “Moe Gaddafi.” As he starts shouting, he sounds like the Larry who will one day be seen on Curb. A third skit prefigures the episode “Mary, Joseph & Larry” from season three of Curb in which Larry hires a group of performers to act out the nativity scene on his front lawn. In the Fridays skit, Larry plays one of the three wise men on their way to see the baby Jesus. “Gold makes a nice gift,” Larry says, complimenting one of the other wise men.

  For the first time in his life, Larry was making a good living. He even bought his first car; unlike many New
Yorkers, he has a fondness for cars that would later make his permanent transition to California a lot easier. But despite this relative success, Larry decided to return to New York. The reason he gave was that, in the stand-up appearances that he made in the L.A. comedy clubs, he could not understand the audiences. Leaving Fridays obviously had something to do with it as well.

  In New York, things didn’t exactly take off for him. He returned to working in the clubs and picking up any writing jobs he could. Meanwhile, Jerry Seinfeld’s career was starting to get hot. A talent scout spotted him in a Los Angeles club and booked him on the one television show famous for being able to make a comic’s career, The Tonight Show. The higher profile turned Seinfeld into a headliner at the clubs, and he began touring regularly as well as making more appearances on The Tonight Show, along with Late Night with David Letterman and The Merv Griffin Show. He was starting to get recognized on the street, he was making good money, he was becoming a star. It wasn’t long before he was pulling in $25,000 for a week’s run at a club. The critics, including Time magazine, were hailing him as one of the best of the current comics, a master of “observational” comedy.

  As for Larry, he had far more modest ambitions. “It would be to be able to live in an apartment, no matter how small it was, so I could pay the rent, go to the movies once or twice a week, play golf once in a while, be able to take a cab. . . . That’s all I wanted.” Modest though the goal was, he was having trouble reaching it. Instead of a cab, he would have to walk all the way from First Avenue to the West Side after a show because he had no money. He ate Chef Boyardee. He saved his change in a glass jar and took it to the store to buy groceries.

  But he did have one better year — financially if not creatively — when he got a spot as a writer on Saturday Night Live for the 1984–1985 season. Presumably his time on Fridays gave him the qualifications, but Larry found himself far more frustrated. The workload wasn’t onerous — he had to produce one sketch and one piece for the news each week, and he had no performing duties. The problem was, despite his skits going over well in the cast read-throughs, they never made it onto the show. In the entire season only one skit got picked. A writer/performer on the show, Gary Kroeger had his office next to Larry’s. Kroeger saw Larry as someone with more than his share of demons. He couldn’t imagine what would become of Larry. (He certainly couldn’t have imagined that Larry would cast him in the role of the weatherman in season four, episode four of Curb.)