Let’s begin with a personal, hitherto unpublished and possibly contentious theory. There is a strong, if coincidental, kinship between English humour and American Jewish humour. Both have the same details and vectors: irony, cringe, self-consciousness, romantic mishap, dissection of failure, lionisation of losers. And there is a similar backdrop: status anxiety, neurosis, emotional repression. Above all, there’s a historical need to smuggle meaning around and beneath social superiors, the English to evade a class-based code of manners, the American Jews to evade a more comprehensive and menacing social threat. We needed to be able to say what we really think of the local baronet; they of the local goyim.
This kinship has been a cultural blessing. A fruitful cross-fertilisation between two 20th-century literary cultures is one consequence. The deep appreciation of Woody Allen films in England, and the emergence of an Anglo-romantic comedy genre that orbits Annie Hall like a sun, is surely another. (One thinks of the hero of David Nicholls’s Starter for Ten, arriving at university and listing all of his Jewish heroes to the first Jewish girl he meets: “Woody Allen, Marx, Einstein, Dustin Hoffman…”)
Another legacy of the parallel: the affection in England for Larry David, perhaps the greatest living comic mind from any continent or culture. Seinfeld (which David conceived and mostly wrote) and then Curb Your Enthusiasm (which David created and starred in) are two works of genius which also, to English eyes, seem free of the corn and mush that mar American comedy. Curb ended in 2024, and now we have David’s first follow-up, a sketch series about American history to mark the United States’ 250th birthday. And, for a nation that must now symbolise itself with algae pools, orange skin and hideous triumphal arches, this is a cultural export for Americans to be proud of. Never quite attaining the heights of Curb or Seinfeld, it remains a respectable addition to the David extended universe.
Each sketch inspects an “iconic” American episode: the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Rosa Parks. Most of them, though, have the same trajectory as any classic Larry David sketch: piqued and jabbed by the people around him, David’s apoplexy trickles up before it bursts its banks, flooding out as one hoarse, foul-mouthed stream. As Alexander Graham Bell demonstrating the telephone, he is infuriated by the inanity of the conversation, and smashes the set on the floor; as Rutherford B Hayes’s 1876 presidential rival, he is outraged to discover that American elections can be won by the candidate with fewer votes, and smashes his glasses and decanters on the office walls; queueing at a soup kitchen during the Great Depression, he barks at someone starting a conversation in order to push in line, a “chat and cut” as this unspeakably dirty move was termed in Curb. (This last should be proof of the transatlantic kinship: after a million Very British Problems, it was an American who made the best angry queueing joke.) David is not so much an actor as a raconteur, if not simply a ranter. But there’s a special twinkle in his eyes, one that can flick, in an instant, from righteous fury to social panic.
Throughout the more puritanical 2010s, Curb Your Enthusiasm continued to be politically mischievous, with David tolerated as liberal America’s licensed provocateur. And here it is good to see him still testing American shibboleths. In one sketch, David plays the bus-seat companion who eventually drives Rosa Parks to the back of the bus – not by racism but by his idling conversation. (“If you got robbed, would you prefer that it was a black man or a white man who robbed you? Good question, right?”) And in another, he takes the role of a host on the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves to freedom – but one who has “bad ratings” from previous guests, attacked for his “mildewy” living room and poor-quality breakfasts.
Some of the sketches are laboured. Several of the historical settings feel incidental, merely occasions for a Curb-esque explosion. But with Curb over, we have to get more Larry David from somewhere. And in this view, with him trapped in the panels of the American tapestry, it’s even easier to see David as an honorary Englishman abroad, forever stunned by his country’s pretension, pomposity and arrogance.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
HBO
[Further reading: Love Island’s decadent old age]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
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Subscribe here to commentIt’s great to read such an appreciation of the wonderful Larry David.
I’d love him to work on a series or film with Ricky Gervais although producing and directing them both would be some challenge.