Curb Your Enthusiasm spanned multiple decades, filtering a rapidly changing world through Larry’s prescription lenses. From George W. Bush to Joe Biden, water-cooler talk to social media chatter, iPods to AI, the series mined humor from news events, fleeting trends, politics, pop culture, and even the personal lives of those on the show.
“We weren’t truth seekers,” says director and writer Bob Weide. “That was never the intent. You just look at the world around you, observe it, then put it through the comedy meat grinder and something funny comes out the other side.”
By the time 2020 rolled around, Larry—like many politicians—had found a way to leverage the polarization to his advantage. As the team approached Season 10, they knew their arc: Larry’s Spite Store was going to carry through all 10 episodes. They also knew that in episode one Larry was going to have a donnybrook with Mocha Joe, and Larry was going to sleep with Cheryl (who was dating Ted—a story that had almost made it onto the previous season). Then it was time to consider: what else?
A writer named Teddy Bressman had the MAGA hat idea. “We thought that was a perfect Larry story,” says writer, executive producer, and director Jeff Schaffer, who worked with David on Seinfeld before joining Curb in its fifth season. “What better way to avoid people on the West Side of Los Angeles? Back then it was so weird to see anyone in L.A. in a MAGA hat. It was a rarity—like spotting a double rainbow of intolerance.”
Wearing a red MAGA cap around liberal L.A. made Larry a pariah, fulfilling his antisocial dream to have everyone leave him alone.
The episode finished filming in November 2018. It was ready to air in October 2019 but because the episode featured a debate on when it’s too late to wish someone a “Happy New Year” (according to Larry: the statute of limitations is three days), the episode was held until January 2020.
The episode also featured a scene in which Jeff was confused with Harvey Weinstein. “It was great for that story but we were really sweating it out worrying that the Harvey story and the MAGA hat story were going to get done by someone else,” says Schaffer. “In retrospect, I don’t know what we were worried about. No other comedy on TV was going to have their lead character get MeToo’d.”
Larry David dislikes a great many things, but he hates spoilers. “He wants the show to come out like acne,” says Schaffer. “You wake up one morning and you’ve got a pimple. That’s how he wants the show to appear. So when we were shooting the MAGA hat scenes, we were very concerned that the story was going to leak. Good on all our extras for keeping quiet like we asked. But we were shooting on San Vicente in Brentwood, on Pico in LA. And somehow it never got out. And people, knowing what we were doing on the show, would have spoiled the surprise. It would be like seeing Trump getting inducted into MENSA. Even though you know it’s fake, it’s still unsettling.”
The MAGA accessory was all the funnier since Larry’s politics on the show leaned left, yet the real David’s lampooning of America’s partisanship cut both ways.
“He’s wearing it as a repellent,” says Susie Essman. “It’s clearly a comment on MAGA, but he’s also commenting on the liberals who are repelled by it. It’s an example of the depth of Larry’s equal-opportunity takedowns.”
“Seeing Larry in a MAGA hat was so jarring, it would be like seeing Trump in a NAACP hat,” adds Schaffer.
“Generations from now, people will look back on Curb as a kind of reflection of its time, in the same way that All in the Family was reflecting the country in the 1970s, or Saturday Night Live through different eras,” says Weide. “Curb shows where we were at in the first two decades of the 21st century.”
If something became a cultural fixation, it would eventually make its way onto Curb. The world refracted through Larry always made us laugh, and it also told us a little something about ourselves.
Includes material excerpted from No Lessons Learned: The Making of Curb Your Enthusiasm as Told by Larry David and the Cast and Crew by HBO and Lorraine Ali (Black Dog & Leventhal). Copyright © 2025.
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