Chapter Five
Larry*8
For those who have been under a rock for the last twenty-five years, Larry is the genius behind Seinfeld, which if he did nothing else in his life it would have been enough to raise him to legend status. As Pricilla Pressley said, "You don't mess with perfection."
Seinfeld provided Larry and its star, Jerry Seinfeld, more money than you could donate to the United Jewish Appeal in a lifetime. He followed up with the HBO vunderseries, Curb Your Enthusiasm, for which he both wrote and starred.
Years before he became one of Hollywood's greatest business and romantic catches (his off-screen trysts are the stuff of small screen legend), Larry stalked the comedy club stages of Manhattan Island. Early in his career, many of his peers thought that his song parodies and jaunty prop humor would make him the next Gallagher (though Larry always saw himself as the next Bobo Brazil, a Shakespearian thespian in the 50s). Alas, unbeknownst to Larry, a deal with Satan had already been negotiated by twelve-year-old Scott Thompson who years later would turn the comedy world upside down with his brilliant satirical stylings under the nom deplume, Carrot Top.
Larry was known as a comedian's comedian.*9 That meant that audiences had no idea what he was talking about and wondered aloud, mostly during his set, "how did this guy have the balls to think he was a comedian." In the old days they would say, "The guys in the band love him." Back then Larry would get reefer or a little Mary Jane from the band. If he ended up with reefer and Mary Jane, even better. Sometimes one of the older guys might invite Larry back to his place where he would ask Larry to, as they used to say, blow their flugelhorn. But in the comedy club world being a comedian's comedian comedian meant management usually put you on stage last. Still, Larry remained fairly optimistic, in a way that said, "suicide is an option, but not today."
To be sure there was no quit in Larry David. Oh sure, there were a lot of faking stomach aches and going home before his set, but never quit. He always felt that there was no place else to go but up. That was until rapid-fire, Boston-bred comic, Steven Wright, started working the club and was slotted next to last, making Larry even laster. Yes, Larry had been knocked down a notch, but nothing, not even the boos from his classic Mother catching him masturbating during Shabbat bit would stop him.
With that sense of vapid confidence, he packed his bags and was about to join a loose band of generic, gentile comics who were about to tour the Deep South comedy clubs, when at the last moment he was rescued by fellow Hebraic funny man, the cocksure Richard Lewis.
Known for his addiction to slimming, dark clothes, Lewis was another in a line of neurotic Jews who stalked the comedy club stage choosing not to waste their social anxiety on expensive therapists but instead cultivating them into material that would become a career path. He spoke in great detail of the comedy folklore, of a road to riches and manic-depressive Hollywood dreams fashioned by comics like Woody Allen, Robert Klein, and Albert Brooks (aka Albert Einstein, or whatever name Albert was using at the time so that people wouldn't know he was real smart or Jewish).
Larry was ready to follow Lewis westward.
Once landing on the L.A. scene, Larry's talent was immediately recognized, and was selected as a writer and featured performer on a sketch show I believe was called Thursdays that aired every Friday night. It was a sketch show's sketch show. Larry's performances would soon have Thursdays' audiences mention Larry in the me breath with the immortal half man, half chicken, half moyle, Lenny Schultz.
But New York continued to beckon for his return, the way a city beckons: silently, like a mime who refuses to be blown by the wind. Pizza in L.A., where Dominoes was considered a terrific neighborhood pizza joint, was inedible to Larry. He packed his material and a single portion of Ramon Noodles into a manila folder and returned to the Big Apple. SNL, the big boy on the block, discovered Larry was on his way back to New York and offered him a writing job.
The move did not exactly spell success. It barely spelled suc. Larry spent that season cultivating the one sketch of his that got onto the air. The inability of SNL producer, Lorne Michaels, to grasp the genius of Larry's wit was too much for Larry to bear. He wanted desperately to leave the show. Being that there was no quit in Larry and he would rather die than admit he had failed, he decided to fake a suicide by holding his breath during one of SNL's fifteen minute, one-joke sketches. With five minutes still remaining in the sketch, Larry passed out in one of John Belushi's dried up puke stains. Michaels replaced the frothing-from-the-mouth Larry with another Jew satisfying the mandatory ninety-two-Jewish-writers-per-sketch staff, Writers Guild minimum.
You know the one door closes and another opens thing? Well, it couldn't have been truer for Larry as his departure from SNL set the stage for his breakthrough film role as "Saul's friend" at the café in the Hank Jagger classic, Rectum? I Nearly Killed Him. I never saw the film but if you go to IMDB.com, the fine film reviewer from the blog, "Hi, I'm Troy and This Is My Blog," the inimitable troy-32, who had over 194 IMDB comments attributed to him, called Rectum. "unique."
For most of America though, Larry's story really began in 1989 when he and comedian Jerry Seinfeld co-created the show Seinfeld on NBC. People referred to it as "a show about lot of stuff but nothing you could put your finger on" which, in reality, was about vague indifference. But to this day, Larry refuses to specifically identify what that indifference was. Curiously, Larry is a leader in the struggle to get Carly Simon to reveal who was so vain.
With a cast including Julia Dreyfus (Elaine), Jason Alexander (George) and Michael Richards (Kramer), the show was not an immediate success. Speculation from those in the know was that this was due to audience's unfamiliarity with clever writing. Cultural researchers likened it to the shock a digestive system, accustomed to eating a daily ration of McDonald's burgers, feels the moment it is introduced to filet mignon. In the least there is some nausea and stomach discomfort associated with certain programming.
When the audience and their inflamed colons became accustomed to the smart writing along with the unique story lines, Seinfeld became the hit it deserved to be.*10
The series provided Larry and Jerry with more money than needed to choke a horse, similar to the horse Kramer stuffed with flatulent-inducing kale, before kale was healthy. The type of success that Seinfeld begot is one or two of those exceptional feats that seem to slip by network programmers every ten years. In the '80s it was The Simpsons and Cheers. In the '70s, All In The Family and M*A*S*H*. Before that, television was still in its infancy, its informative years, so everything was a risk and that in itself set up the conditions necessary to create some pretty special shows, sometimes twice in the same year.
1952: I Love Lucy and Amos & Andy gave screen time to a Latino and a bunch of coloreds before they could even use the same bathrooms as the white TV show characters.
1953: George Burns (breaking the 4th wall) and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason and Milton Berle brought radio and vaudeville genius to the small screen.
1954: Topper and Life of Riley. Notso frightening ghosts and a regular fat guy.
1955: Red Skelton and Phil Silvers proved that variety wasn't dead.
Then again, TMZ (Too Much Zen) wasn't even a twinkle to Harvey Levin's eyes, so negative press was essentially nonexistent in the 50's: Liberace wasn't gay and Gale Storm was sober. On and on the early sitcoms made the funny. Mayberry and Dobie Gillis begat sidekick stars (Barney Fife and Maynard G). Car 54, Where Are You, McHale's Navy and Hogan's Heroes offered the obvious, but still funny side of uniformed work, World War II and the POW camps of the Third Reich.
The Dick Van Dyke Show should have shut down the sitcom industry forever due to the "You Can't Do Any Better So Why Try" rule, that has since been proven true some several hundred thousand times.
The last thirty or forty years, depending on the year you're reading this, the rule has been: one great sitcom every decade was acceptable, and for the stars and producers, no more than one great show a lifetime. Post-Seinfeld, Alexander and Richards adhered to the credo by refusing to risk a role that strayed even slightly from their Seinfeld characters or their shows themselves were more feeble than the characters they played. Only the adorable Dreyfus, achieved a success with the aid of her...
