Early in Larry Charles’s juicy showbiz memoir “Comedy Samurai,” he describes a formative moment writing for the television sketch show “Fridays.” Andy Kaufman was doing a bit with a masked magician swallowing a sword, only to spit up blood. “These were the laughs, the comedy, that I would try to pursue all my life,” Charles writes. “The deeper codes of comedy.”
His book, a must-read for comedy nerds, is an account of nearly half of a century attempting to crack those codes, mostly as a director and writer, working with the most famous funny people in show business (Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld) and some of its most notorious bullies (Scott Rudin, the Weinstein brothers).
Charles, 68, describes them all with entertaining candor, while also illuminating the creation of several of the greatest comedies of the modern era, including “Seinfeld” (he wrote for the first five seasons), “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (he directed episodes for two decades) and “Borat,” which he directed.
His career, which began by selling a joke to Jay Leno, is a pocket history of modern comedy, anchored by surprisingly melancholy portraits of his two most fertile artistic relationships — with Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. In a recent interview over Zoom, he reflected on the path from Coney Island to Hollywood.
You grew up in Trump Village, a then new housing complex in Coney Island built by the President’s father, Fred. You meet him?
Fred and Donald came by when they opened a Little League field. His father looked like Satan. I found it hilarious.
You barely mention your childhood in the book.
All these kids moved into Trump Village at the same time and it became a “Lord of the Flies” situation. A lot of violence, sadism, cruelty. The bully to victim ratio was one to one. A lot of my humor grew out of surviving this. It’s for my next book.
The importance of class is a theme of your story. You say “Seinfeld” changed when the writers became more well-off.
When I first met Larry David, he was looking to pay the rent. At some point, he was playing golf with Obama. That’s going to change you. The writers whose parents were doctors and lawyers are going to have different problems than me, whose father was basically a drifter. I think this absolutely had an impact not only on “Seinfeld,” but on all popular entertainment. You don’t see working class humor much anymore, except in standup.
It struck me as a triumph of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that Larry David made being an incredibly rich guy seem like an outsider, if not an underdog.
He had that conflict, that dichotomy. That was real to him. To be from the lower classes and to become that successful, the absurdity of that never left him. I see a bizarro version of that in Trump. Ostentatiously wealthy but also, the Queens accent.
I had heard that you replaced Todd Phillips (“Joker”) as the director of “Borat,” but I didn’t know, as you write, that he was originally a star of it.
That was the main weakness. Todd was in it, and he wasn’t funny. That was my first note: Edit Todd out and Borat must drive it.
What appealed to you about the concept?
I’ve always been attracted to the transgressive. I tried to bring as much transgression to “Seinfeld” and “Curb” as I could, but there were still rules. With “Borat,” I was encouraged to break rules, to offend, to not worry about the results. I found that to be liberating.
Can you do great comedy without transgression?
There are gentle comedians who can be very successful. But if you want to cut through, if you want people to lose it, to lose control, then I think you need to go to the forbidden places.
You write that “Borat” was about love and your next movie with Sacha Baron Cohen, “Bruno,” was about hate.
Borat is an antisemite, a rapist. He’s incestuous. But the fact he’s straight and seemingly innocent made him much more of an acceptable character [when interacting with strangers]. The fact Bruno was gay made him a subject of derision and hostility. That was a revelation that none of us were prepared for. No matter what Bruno did, the fact he was flamboyantly gay was enough to make people not accept him. That’s why “Bruno” is a darker movie.
You made the documentary “Religulous” with Bill Maher, who, you write, “timidly demurred” to film in Palestine. Why?
In his mind, Palestine was a place where something out of control could happen.
He’s been an outspoken defender of Israel.
He feels very differently than I do.
You went to the West Bank for your 2019 series “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy.” If Bill Maher did too, do you think his mind would change?
I do. I felt like anyone walking through those towns and meeting those people and seeing those children, you couldn’t think they are our enemy. I’m sure they are crazy people there. I’m sure there are people who did terrible things. But overall, my experience was these are gentle people who want peace. Who are under siege.
You worked closely with Bob Dylan writing the movie “Masked and Anonymous” and describe him, along with Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen, as one of your “teachers.” Is he also funny?
Yes. Very dry. He would come in with lines like ‘I’m not a pig without a wig.” I was like: ‘What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything, Bob.’ I was able to say to that to him, which freaked me out. ‘No one is going to understand that line.’ And he said: ‘What’s so bad about being misunderstood?’
Was that Dylan’s idea of a joke?
If you thought it was a joke, fine. If you didn’t, fine too. He’s not concerned with what you or the audience thought. This is the correlation with Larry David. They’re both savants. If they didn’t do this, they would still be doing it on a bench somewhere.
You say Cohen changed after “Borat.”
He became more insecure and more uncertain and found that quantifying laughs from an audience gave him a certain confidence. When you try to figure out on a laugh-by-laugh basis, you can lose sight of the big picture.
You did a long interview with Larry David that was supposed to be a two-part HBO documentary, but it was never released. What was in it?
You see the Larry David behind the persona. The one I’ve known for 40 years. Very well-rounded, very deep, surprisingly spiritual. Not the Larry of the show. That’s one part of him. He cries in the documentary. He talked about death. And he was funny. I think people would have been enlightened by it.
Why didn’t it come out?
I think Larry got frightened by exposing himself. He didn’t like the way he looked. He wanted to be funnier once he saw the footage, even though he told me this was the best interview he’d ever done.
You haven’t talked to him since. Do you hope for a reconciliation?
He’s the most influential person in my adult life. He made me a writer and director. He taught me how to be a man. I am grateful to him. But I think there’s an inevitable ending to everything. Life is temporary. I do feel sad and at the same time: Life goes on. We’re both fine. You lose friends sometimes. Things do have a finite quality and that feeling is very acute to me. I don’t regret anything.
In your book, you describe these great partnerships with Cohen and David that don’t end well. Do you ever think it’s your fault?
I know my own self-destructive qualities. I didn’t want to make Sacha or Larry seem like villains. I have my failings. Yes, it’s something about me. I grew up in a neighborhood of failure. I’m more comfortable on some level with failure than success. It’s something I’ve tried to reconcile.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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