The Bishop on Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Bishop would be doing little more than observing the obvious if he were to note that Larry David can’t act. And yet the very idea of Larry David acting, or not acting, is at the heart your humble heuristicator’s gentle enjoyment of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Bishop says David can’t act, which is not the same as saying he is not the right actor for this show. Acting (an overrated art in any case) would, in this case, simply allow our man the freedom to trek beyond his natural territories of piqued, bemused and nonplussed. But Curb Your Enthusiasm knows what it is and is what it is; and, like Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s The Office, is not so much interested in freedom as restraint. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Samuel Beckett that he showed us how much drama could afford to leave it out; David, if the comparison does not seem a conceit, is—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—doing much the same thing. Beckett’s problem was that his actors didn’t—and still don’t—know how to handle him. And, while one struggles to imagine the likes of David finding his way onto the serious stage, the Bishop can’t help feeling that in David’s reticent style—he never quite seems to be in the same scene with his fellow performers, never quite shedding the persona of the harried writer wandering, unwanted script advice in hand, onto the set—a suitable partner in crime. At least, one suspects, Beckett would have enjoyed David’s inability to get through most of his funnier scenes without breaking into a self-conscious smile.
It’s no overstatement to say that David has taken the dictum to write (and perform) what you know about as far as it will go. Apart from a not terribly successful stint on Saturday Night Live, David has written about almost no-one and nothing that isn’t, literally, himself (Seinfeld fans will notice elements not just of its four main characters, but even minor roles and walk-on parts in David’s various moods). Even more specifically, with Curb Your Enthusiasm we have, almost literally, a show about what David would do if he were making a show about what he would do if he were making a show about himself. The Bishop would hardly be surprised to see David’s next project open on David, sitting at his desk writing the opening scene of a series which opens on David, sitting at his desk . . .
In any case, David knows his subject matter backwards; the viewer’s amusement, then, rests solely in whether that viewer finds David a matter worthy of being subjected to. The Bishop does. And while the series’ other recurring characters are not so much—as written—characters as they are shticks, the series’ improvisational format (David writes a seven-odd page outline and the cast ad libs from there) allows them to find comic pathologies writers rarely do. In particular, the Bishop has been impressed by Cheryl Hines as Cheryl David, providing a foil not just for David-the-character’s quasi-misanthropic antics but David-the-actor’s rudimentary range; always grounding the couple in reality. With a face that would not have been out of place in Knots Landing (invitingly attractive, even pert, despite a certain duckishness), she seems neither naturally funny nor psycho-veristic; and that, perhaps—paradoxically—is why she works so well here.
A comment must also be made about the direction, which goes some way to showing that writing is not the only craft in which the cinema has been eclipsed by the TV. In episode two of season two, ‘Trick or Treat’, Larry Charles, who has worked previously on Seinfeld, makes a virtue of movement, duelling with David’s face and finding the nervous energy in his laconic physicality. In fact this episode is a treat all ’round, David human rather than obliquely acerbic (as he is for far too much of that season)—and reminding us—or the Bishop, anyway—that, outside the laborious, declamatory world of Arthur Miller, what we like to see is the loser win every now and again.
The Bishop says David can’t act, which is not the same as saying he is not the right actor for this show. Acting (an overrated art in any case) would, in this case, simply allow our man the freedom to trek beyond his natural territories of piqued, bemused and nonplussed. But Curb Your Enthusiasm knows what it is and is what it is; and, like Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s The Office, is not so much interested in freedom as restraint. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Samuel Beckett that he showed us how much drama could afford to leave it out; David, if the comparison does not seem a conceit, is—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—doing much the same thing. Beckett’s problem was that his actors didn’t—and still don’t—know how to handle him. And, while one struggles to imagine the likes of David finding his way onto the serious stage, the Bishop can’t help feeling that in David’s reticent style—he never quite seems to be in the same scene with his fellow performers, never quite shedding the persona of the harried writer wandering, unwanted script advice in hand, onto the set—a suitable partner in crime. At least, one suspects, Beckett would have enjoyed David’s inability to get through most of his funnier scenes without breaking into a self-conscious smile.
It’s no overstatement to say that David has taken the dictum to write (and perform) what you know about as far as it will go. Apart from a not terribly successful stint on Saturday Night Live, David has written about almost no-one and nothing that isn’t, literally, himself (Seinfeld fans will notice elements not just of its four main characters, but even minor roles and walk-on parts in David’s various moods). Even more specifically, with Curb Your Enthusiasm we have, almost literally, a show about what David would do if he were making a show about what he would do if he were making a show about himself. The Bishop would hardly be surprised to see David’s next project open on David, sitting at his desk writing the opening scene of a series which opens on David, sitting at his desk . . .
In any case, David knows his subject matter backwards; the viewer’s amusement, then, rests solely in whether that viewer finds David a matter worthy of being subjected to. The Bishop does. And while the series’ other recurring characters are not so much—as written—characters as they are shticks, the series’ improvisational format (David writes a seven-odd page outline and the cast ad libs from there) allows them to find comic pathologies writers rarely do. In particular, the Bishop has been impressed by Cheryl Hines as Cheryl David, providing a foil not just for David-the-character’s quasi-misanthropic antics but David-the-actor’s rudimentary range; always grounding the couple in reality. With a face that would not have been out of place in Knots Landing (invitingly attractive, even pert, despite a certain duckishness), she seems neither naturally funny nor psycho-veristic; and that, perhaps—paradoxically—is why she works so well here.
A comment must also be made about the direction, which goes some way to showing that writing is not the only craft in which the cinema has been eclipsed by the TV. In episode two of season two, ‘Trick or Treat’, Larry Charles, who has worked previously on Seinfeld, makes a virtue of movement, duelling with David’s face and finding the nervous energy in his laconic physicality. In fact this episode is a treat all ’round, David human rather than obliquely acerbic (as he is for far too much of that season)—and reminding us—or the Bishop, anyway—that, outside the laborious, declamatory world of Arthur Miller, what we like to see is the loser win every now and again.
posted by Salisbury at 1:36 pm
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