An all-time favorite line from the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is Larry David’s confession that he’s been expecting more from himself his whole life but has come to realize, “It’s just not there.”
Now apply that mote of satori to the whole nation and voilà: we have “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” David’s seven-episode contribution to America’s 250th anniversary. His America, as filtered through the lens of former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, is a land of well-meaning people. Some of us, anyway. Sadly, the circumstances of our birth also sentenced us to put up with picayune, ornery, solipsistic types like him.
The limited series doesn’t explicitly make that argument, mind you. It opens by promoting the opposing view, declaring America a grand experiment in self-government.
“Our founding fathers drafted a charter to guarantee the rule of law and the rights of man,” says Obama in an introductory monologue. “Together, they established a new nation, one where power resided not with the monarch but with ordinary citizens.”
But see, that’s also the problem, right? Not the part about severing ties to the British crown; that was a fine idea. I mean the bit about relying on the collective nobility of our compatriots. With “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” David suggests that the problem is us and has been since the nation’s beginning.
Time and again, David has mined laughs from the common understanding that humans tend to be egocentric and that the truth most Americans hold to be self-evident is that it’s every man and woman (but mostly men) for themselves.
Yes, there is a certain predictability to David’s routine. When he shows up in a Depression-era soup line, you just know he’s going to complain about the seasoning. When he appears next to a Civil Rights icon, you can surmise that person will quickly meet the limits of their tolerance.
As we stand on the cusp of a landmark Independence Day, a sizable portion of us feel that way about our fellow Americans, many of whom voted for the guy who ran in 2024 on a platform of punishing his enemies and expelling immigrants. But he also vowed to lower the price of eggs.
“Yes, fascism is pretty, pretty bad,” you can almost hear a few say in David’s voice, “but I do enjoy a morning omelet, so…eh! Meh!”
In most of the sketches in “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” the comic plays some version of that person – the guy who, say, crashes key events where he isn’t wanted and can’t take the hint to leave, or generally behaves like a pest.
As in “Curb,” though, he just as frequently positions himself as the logician surrounded by dupes fixated on useless details or idealists high on hopium.
HBO has asked journalists to refrain from spoiling specific jokes, revealing certain gags, or mentioning guest stars that haven’t been announced or confirmed in photos. Yes, that’s Jerry Seinfeld wearing buckskins. Since he’s there, you may assume, correctly, that J.B. Smoove will pop up at some point to rehash Leon and Larry’s dynamic in, shall we say, an ancestral context.
This and other sketches hang heavily on guest star power as opposed to mordancy, but the best contend that maybe it was inevitable that we would end up where we are now.
In a Wednesday Bluesky post, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie shared he was reading petitions and editorials written by Revolutionary-era Black Americans, “and it is so striking (and frankly inspiring) to see how the ink wasn’t even dry on the declaration before [they] were demanding that the patriots live up to their stated ideals,” he said.
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” in its way, backs up that finding.
(Photograph by Courtesy of Art Streiber/HBO) Larry David and Barack Obama in “Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness”
There’s an upcoming scene that, again, I can’t describe in detail other than to say that David appears as an early American contradicting a long-gone leader’s belief in the populace’s moral sensibility and government’s supposedly unbreakable guardrails.
When his colonial Everyman poses a series of doomsday scenarios that, in 2026, have already come to pass, that politician brushes away all concerns that, say, any potential leader running for office would be anything less than gracious in defeat.
“Anyone who wouldn’t accept the results of a free and fair election is a sociopath,” cries David’s concerned citizen. “A man like that can even foment an insurrection rather than just admit that he lost! He could use the presidency to enrich himself and his family!
He goes on to add, “I’m just spitballing here.”
The American brand is at a real low point. We’re all feeling it. A series of recent Pew Research Center surveys reveal that 59% of us feel the country’s best days are behind us, and that only 34% believe most people can be trusted. And it’s not just us.
“Look how much Canadians hate the United States now,” brays a February Politico headline. First came shock, then resignation in the form of USA Today’s opinion piece declaring, “It’s OK to hate what America does. It’s not OK to hate America,” a glum March quaff that paired nicely with Charles P. Pierce’s Esquire piece announcing, “We Are Hated as a Nation. There’s One Man to Blame.”
David’s right there with us, pal. Over the years, he has liberally and frequently reminded us that he is the furthest thing possible from a Trump fan, most recently telling Variety that Trump’s 80th birthday fight night celebration held in front of the People’s House was a travesty. “I was embarrassed to be an American,” he added.
But he also excels at making others feel embarrassed, even the shameless ones.
When Kid Rock arranged a dinner with Trump and comedian Bill Maher last year . . . wait, just look at those words again. Let them sink in. That sentence reads like a set-up to a “Curb” bit, but it is not. It’s a part of actual history.
Anyway, when the “Real Time with Bill Maher” host emerged from that two-and-a-half-hour jaw-down with glowing reports that Trump was “gracious and measured” in his presence and that he is “much more self-aware than he lets on in public,” David responded by penning a New York Times guest essay titled, “My Dinner with Adolf.”
“He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard . . . I found the whole thing quite disarming,” David’s satirical persona observed. “. . . Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”
(Photograph by John Johnson/HBO) Larry David in “Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness”
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” never sharpens to that degree of pointedness, and nobody but HBO and the Obamas asked for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to take a roll in the hay with “Drunk History.” Still, if our nation’s star misanthrope has a purpose greater than saluting the nation’s 250th birthday with a weak tea party, perhaps it is to put forth that the commonfolk are more aligned in our irritation with our government than we might think.
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Remember, America was born out of griping. A bunch of rich white guys sat down in a room to spell out “a long train of abuses and usurpations” they accused King George III of committing against the colonies, and that became our nation’s founding document.
In his parody of that gathering, David imagines other proposals that didn’t make the cut, like a suggestion to establish a cut-off for wishing someone a Happy New Year, which isn’t quite a “War on Christmas” level of offense. But the fact that said reference is an actual cultural concern is, well, very American.
“What are we doing?” one of the drafters asks, frustratedly. “These are barely grievances. They are petty complaints, and they have nothing to do with a Declaration of Independence from England and tyranny!” Hearing that all these years later, it’s hard not to conclude that the petty complainers won.
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” premieres at 9 p.m. Friday, June 26 on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
