“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO comedy series created by and starring Larry David, debuted way back in 1999 and comedy, television and the world have all changed significantly since. Yet somehow “Curb,” which comes to an end tonight after 12 seasons, remains as relevant as ever. How can that be?
I’d propose that one reason is because Larry David stands as an underappreciated philosopher of our everyday lives. He has taught us important truths about both how we live our lives and how we should live our lives. Most important, he’s been our foremost critic of the social rules that govern the way we interact, offering an enticing vision of social freedom that we’d be foolish to ignore.
“Curb” is full of observations about societal strictures that might otherwise go unspoken. Rules such as: You tiptoe at night; you always accept your friend’s invitation to tour her new house; you never steal from roadside memorials or caskets; you don’t go over your caviar allotment at a dinner party; you ask to split the check when you eat out with friends.
Mr. David, in the guise of his semi-fictional alter ego, has introduced us to countless examples of what I like to call the “unknown knowns” — these rules and rituals that we understand and abide by without quite knowing how we learned them. For example, most of us have been victims of what he calls “the chat and cut,” a ploy that some people use to cut in line when they don’t want to wait. But it wasn’t until Mr. David pointed this act out and named it that we thought about it explicitly. Now that it has been named, it’s a lot easier to spot in our own lives.
One simple way of considering the character of Larry is as a vessel of our wish fulfillment. As Cheryl Hines, David’s co-star, has said, “I think we all live vicariously through Larry,” because “if somebody asks you to dinner, you’d like to just say, ‘No, I don’t really like you that much.’ But people don’t in real life, you know? Larry does.” Sigmund Freud argued in his 1905 book “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” that laughter gives us a sense of relief because it releases the energy we normally spend on repressing our drives. Freud would say that when Larry acts out on “Curb,” we laugh because Larry lets us indirectly satisfy repressed desires to do the same.
But there’s much more that we can learn and benefit from in Mr. David’s approach to the world. One lesson he teaches us is that we all have a lot of special social knowledge that we’ve never thought about before. In “Being and Time,” the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called this knowledge part of our preconceptual “understanding of Being.” Larry describes it as our “unwritten rules,” such as: Everyone knows that you should never blow your nose in a cloth napkin at a restaurant. As Larry’s frequent collaborator Jerry Seinfeld put it in an episode of “Curb”: “It’s just not done in polite society. It’s not done in impolite society. Even the impolite don’t do it.”
As the contemporary American philosopher John Searle wrote in “Making the Social World,” these “background practices” are crucial to the construction of our social reality. “Our whole mode of sensibility is shaped by forces and influences that are, for the most part, invisible to us — what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what is involved in being a citizen, what is involved in being a professor,” Searle wrote.
This understanding is acquired without thinking and it then determines our thinking. A great example of this is our “knowledge” of the appropriate distance to stand from a conversational partner. That distance varies according to the purpose of the conversation, its context and the identities of the people who are talking. This is not knowledge that we acquire from books or from a teacher in a classroom. We are socialized into it simply by living our lives.
What makes Mr. David’s comedic vision in “Curb” so special is that, in addition to teaching us so many of these unwritten rules, it shows us that we are free to reimagine our ways of living. There is no fundamental necessity to these practices; they are arbitrary and open to revision. In fact, if we look closely at these “unwritten rules,” as the contemporary American philosopher Noël Carroll has argued, what we find is that they don’t have any basis other than our emotional attachments to them. They may feel authoritative. We certainly let them control our behavior. But there is no necessity here, as the character of Larry constantly points out.
The British anthropologist Mary Douglas has called these kinds of jokes — in which communal norms are tested and questioned — “anti-rites,” because they show us the contingency of our social expectations. “A joke is a play upon form,” Ms. Douglas wrote, “that affords an opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity.” The English philosopher Simon Critchley, in the 2002 book “On Humour,” built on Ms. Douglas’s theory by suggesting that jokes do two related things. First, they return us to “the background meanings implicit in a culture.” Second, they “indicate how those practices might be transformed or perfected, how things might be otherwise.”
During the long run of “Curb,” Mr. David has consistently shown us how things might be otherwise. It’s been very funny but also revelatory. He has awakened us to the background practices in our culture, and revealed to us that they have no necessity, which offers us a kind of freedom we may not have recognized.
This is not trivial entertainment. As Friedrich Nietzsche might have said, Mr. David has gone to battle with the “spirit of gravity” in our time; the world of morals, religions and tragedy. In doing so, he has offered up an alternative vision of life, one of lightness and joyful wisdom.
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