EMPEROR OF NOTHING: The Making of Larry David, by Blake J. Harris
How many reviews of “Emperor of Nothing,” the new biography of Larry David, are going to call it some version of “pretty, pret-tay, pret-taaaaay, pret-tay good?” I can’t. I won’t!
But listen, it ain’t bad.
For those unaware, David owned the neurotic ’90s by co-creating “Seinfeld,” the hit NBC sitcom about the minor inconveniences of a standup comic named Jerry Seinfeld and three friends in New York (the most neurotic of whom, George Costanza, was David’s alter ego).
He then skated through the anxious aughts and beyond with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO: a loosely improvised but tautly arranged version of his affluent but no less discomfited post-“Seinfeld” life in Los Angeles.
David will turn 80 next year, which, by the Mel Brooks–Dick Van Dyke–George Burns–Bob Hope indicator of comedic longevity, means he has settled into comfortable middle age. That he began to lose hair in his late 20s encourages a sense that, like the prematurely silver Steve Martin, he was then and always will be around 50.
Blake J. Harris, this biography’s author, has written books about business rivalries in video games and virtual reality, and au courantly acknowledges his two cats along with scores of David’s friends, family members and associates. He also had the full cooperation of his catlike subject, granted with the immortal words: “Oh Jesus. If we must.”
To call this hagiography would be a stretch because David is so constitutionally profane and self-derisive. But a hatchet job it’s not. More like a relay race of sources passing the baton of Larry-love to one another and occasionally flinging it joyously in the air. “God, he’s so talented. How annoying!” Harris further acknowledges. “Seriously, though, what an amazing guy!”
David has made a career of turning negatives into positives, starting with “Prognosis: Negative,” his early movie script about a commitment-averse man deciding to win back a fatally ill ex-girlfriend, which a production company tried to make over into “Short-Term Lover.” So even criticisms — for instance, that he refused to kill an opening standup bit about using the informal “tu” form that audiences rarely got; or that he used to pay for dates with two-for-one coupons — can read like cheerleading.
Still, there’s deep satisfaction in seeing a guy once considered “least likely to succeed” scuffle to the top of the Hollywood heap. He even mined the failure of “Prognosis: Negative” for story lines in both of his hit shows.
Still, the excess of the place sits with an itch. We hear of the fancy sports car Seinfeld pressured him to buy, which he sold at a $12,000 loss two weeks later after he saw himself reflected in a plate-glass window: “a sad bald man in a green Porsche.” (This experience, too, produced a TV story line.)
Lawrence Gene David was born on July 2, 1947, three days after his future friend and soulful colleague Richard Lewis was born at the same Brooklyn hospital. (Lewis was interviewed for this book before his death, a death the two of them anticipated and riffed about on late seasons of “Curb.”) His father, Morty, managed a clothing business with loose ties to organized crime; his mother, Rose, became a secretary in the child guidance department of the Board of Education; his older brother, Ken, skipped two grades.
Though he enjoyed the era’s picturesque customs — stickball in the streets, rides at Coney Island — Larry was a touch more troubled. He told his friends whoppers, claiming for instance to be the guy who whistled the theme to “The Andy Griffith Show,” and withdrew from a summer camp production of “Annie Get Your Gun” after a boy from Queens called him gay.
“My son seems to hate everyone. He’s morose and taciturn,” Rose supposedly wrote in a letter to a syndicated advice columnist. “And he doesn’t trick-or-treat!”
Majoring in history at the University of Maryland, Larry was nicknamed “Cubes” for his thick glasses, and backed into the presidency of his fraternity. He avoided Vietnam by joining the Army Reserve (he saw a formative screening of Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run” at Fort Bragg; talk about basic training!) and pantomiming mental illness for an appreciative psychiatrist.
Fired from a subsequent gig as a bra salesman, he happily collected unemployment insurance checks — Rose, at this point, was urging the civil-service test — and worked as a taxi and limo driver before enrolling in acting classes. This experience, too, was a bust. Then he wandered into the Improv and Catch a Rising Star.
Harris deftly resurrects the post-Catskills comedy club atmosphere that flourished in down-at-its-heels late ’70s and ’80s New York (a streaker caught in a revolving door “like he’s a creature in an aquarium without the water,” as the comic stalwart Bob Shaw remembers, about sums it up). David survived by bargaining for flounder at the Ninth Avenue fish market and paying $57 monthly rent at Manhattan Plaza, the artists’ enclave near Times Square where he met Kenny Kramer, the inspiration for the “Seinfeld” character played by Michael Richards.
“Emperor of Nothing” is dominated by the genesis of “Seinfeld,” which Harris treats like the coming-together of the Beatles. Larry is Lennon in this analogy: the acerbic wit who tempers the professionalism and productivity of the more McCartney-like Jerry, “Mr. Mainstream Comic” and an “unflappable technician,” as the writer Bill Scheft puts it. (Pete Best, the early Beatles drummer who was replaced by Ringo Starr, finds his parallel in a magnanimous Gary Gilbert, the experienced showrunner who sold his profit participation in “Seinfeld” before it soared.)
Over-thorough in parts, the book has some weird gaps. We hear lots about “Fridays,” ABC’s shameless 1980-82 rip-off of “Saturday Night Live,” and nothing about David’s impression of Bernie Sanders on “S.N.L.” Our hero’s first marriage, to the environmentalist Laurie David, cross-dissolves with his onscreen “marriage” to Cheryl Hines (now married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but never mind that).
You long for a Kramer type to burst into the brief scenes of David’s second marriage, to the decades-younger Ashley Underwood, and deliver a wry aperçu. We are led to understand that he loves his two daughters, one of whom he named for a Knicks guard, and is a fantastic dad who once even got them on “Hannah Montana.” Heavy situations, like the death of Rob Reiner, a longtime industry ally who also employed Hines as an assistant, are left unacknowledged.
The lackadaisical footnotes make it hard to pinpoint how much of Harris’s material is fresh. And he has a distracting entertainment-journalism tic of having people “explain” or “insist” quotes instead of just saying them.
Comedy and journalism share something, actually: a kicker, a final punchline. The pressure is too much in this situation, with all the humorists who might be reading this. So I’m going to make like David did when he wasn’t feeling it at the club back in the day, and just walk away from the keyboard.
EMPEROR OF NOTHING: The Making of Larry David | By Blake J. Harris | Dey Street Books | 576 pp. | $36
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