No Lessons Learned, page 1
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This book was produced by Melcher Media, Inc. melcher.com
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Editorial Assistant: Sonia Menken
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Additional text contributions by Jackie Strause
Thanks also to Amélie Cherlin, Rebecca Karamehmedovic, Lynne Palazzi, Kayt Sukel, and Laura Wallis.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025935766
ISBNs: Hardcover 979-8-8941-4158-9; Ebook 979-8-8941-4159-6
E3-20250830-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
In the Beginning, There Was Larry
Curb Rising SUSIE’S EPIC TAKEDOWNS
Improv in the Age of Canned Laughter OUTLINE VS. SCENE
How Did They Do It? LARRY’S LOS ANGELES
SUSIE’S STYLE
Curb Imitating Life Imitating Curb VOCAB-U-LARRY
Jeff, Susie, Cheryl & Leon LEON’S GUIDE TO LOVE
Larry vs. Larry ON THE JOB WITH LARRY
How Far Is Too Far? WHERE THE SACRED AND PROFANE COLLIDE
LARRY VS. KIDS
Honey, We Have Guests LARRY’S RULES
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good REMEMBERING THREE COMEDY GREATS
DISCOVER MORE
EPISODE GUIDE
IMAGE CREDITS
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Larry at his bar mitzvah, age 13.
Young Larry and his older brother, Ken.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and for Larry David, that day was July 2, 1947, when he was born to Rose and Morty David of Brooklyn, New York. The eldest of two boys, Larry grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay with no plans of becoming a comedian.
“We weren’t a funny family,” recalls David. “It wasn’t like my parents joked a lot. What made me laugh was watching Abbott and Costello and The Phil Silvers Show where Silvers played Sergeant Bilko. Amos and Andy made me laugh, a lot. But I never thought of myself as being funny when I was a kid, so the thought of being a comedian never crossed my mind.”
David’s father was a clothing manufacturer. His mother was a housewife. Certainly they had high expectations for their son’s future…
“Not even close. I’m not exaggerating,” says David. “There was never talk of a successful future, of what I could be. No big plans. They begged me to take a civil service test to become a mailman. That was their best-case scenario.”
Their dreams of Larry going postal never materialized. Instead, he enrolled in college in 1965 at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he majored in history.
“I never felt funny until I got to college,” says David. “When I got away from Brooklyn into this new environment where people didn’t know me, my personality started to flourish. I was able to tell stories of going on a date and get laughs telling people how badly it went. And when I was asked what I was going to do with a history degree, my stock answer was, ‘Something will turn up.’ But I really had no idea.”
David’s BA in history wasn’t just useless in the job market, it was also a nonstarter on the dating scene.
“After graduating from college in 1970, I took an acting class because I needed a good thing to say to women when they asked me what I did. I needed something kind of cool because this [points to himself] didn’t suffice. My appearance, everything about it, was not going to work. I needed something besides myself. So I thought saying I was an actor could do the trick.”
“I NEVER FELT FUNNY UNTIL I GOT TO COLLEGE.”
—LARRY DAVID
Larry David’s college portrait, 1969.
“The future was bleak.”
—LARRY DAVID
As a child, shows like Abbott and Costello made Larry laugh.
“Acting also seemed easy. I mean, I grew up watching movies and it didn’t look all that hard. Somebody talks, you wait until they finish talking, then you say something. They’re just saying these lines. How hard could that be? You’re just standing there pretending. So I took a class and realized I didn’t really like it very much. I didn’t like waiting to talk or saying what somebody else wrote. I wanted to say what was going on in my head. In retrospect, you can see how Curb turned out to be the perfect vehicle for me.”
But Curb was a long way off when David, in his mid-twenties, was struggling to make the rent.
“I did odd jobs as a taxi driver, a private chauffeur, a limo-service driver, stuff like that,” recalls David. “But it was a very, very sad time in my life, this period from post college until the first time I did stand-up at age twenty-six. Those four years were awful. I just felt lost. My parents were beside themselves and sent me to a therapist. It was just a very difficult time for me. Bad jobs, no money, living in a dump. By all accounts, I was a failure and the future was bleak.”
“Then one day I was taking a break while waiting for the lady I was driving. I had my chauffeur uniform on and I was leaning against the car, and walking down the street was a guy I recognized from college, who was from a very wealthy family. He was dressed immaculately, had on a three-piece suit, and was carrying an attaché case. He spotted me and then quickly averted his eyes, unable to deal with his pity. And that had an impact on me—I thought, ‘I really have to do something with my life.’”
Larry’s cast portrait for Fridays, 1981.
Larry in Fridays.
“So I sought out somebody I knew who was getting into stand-up and I sat down with him to find out what it entailed,” says David. “So he filled me in: ‘You’ve got to write material. You can’t just walk up there.’ In retrospect, I think I would have been better off just walking up as opposed to doing material. To this day, I hate doing material. But I wrote some and went to a club in The Village called Gerde’s Folk City on what they called a Hootenanny night. I got up for the first time and I was beyond awful. The material was terrible. And then I did it again, like a week later at the Gil Hodges bowling alley in Brooklyn that had a room set up with a little stage. I was terrible, again. Then the third time, I wrote a bit that was kind of clever and auditioned at Catch a Rising Star. The MC liked it and invited me back, so I started going on late at night, sometimes for three people at one o’clock in the morning, when everybody had left except these stragglers. That’s what beginners do. From there, you build up your act. Trying to become a comedian really changed my life for the better. I didn’t feel lost anymore. And I began hanging out with the other comedians.”
One of the folks David began spending time with was a young upstart named Jerry Seinfeld.
“We really enjoyed each other’s company and on occasion would write together. We’d walk around Central Park and I’d have my ideas, and he’d have his, and we would help punch up each other’s stuff,” David says. “But my development as a comedian was fraught with problems. I had many run-ins with the audience. I was ill-tempered up there and if I wasn’t going over I did not react well. I would get in arguments with people. But I persevered because there was nothing else. There were no other possibilities.”
Finally in 1979, at the age of thirty-two, David got what he jokingly refers to as his “big break.”
“I auditioned for this new show that was a rip-off of Saturday Night Live, called Fridays. The producers came to New York looking for people to cast. It was a good audition and they hired me. I don’t remember feeling particularly elated, but I do remember feeling a lack of confidence. ‘How am I going to do this? I’m not an actor.’ That’s why I couldn’t get too excited about the whole thing. I was concerned I was going to embarra
Despite the fear of failure, David moved to Los Angeles for his first big TV job.
“I was on the show for two years,” says David, “and I don’t think I was very good but I also learned that I’m much more comfortable doing my own material as opposed to material written by someone else. When the show was canceled, I stayed in LA for another two years doing stand-up and writing a film script.”
“I just couldn’t stand the idea of being told what to do.”
—LARRY DAVID
Bob Weide was the director of development for a production and management company in 1982 when a script landed on his desk called Prognosis Negative. “It was one of the funniest things I had ever read,” says Weide. “Here’s a very brief synopsis: The lead character is named Leo Black. Leo has trouble with relationships. They always blow up. And he’s kind of a moaning, complaining guy. Basically, he’s Larry David in his thirties. So Leo gets some news, by accident, that a woman he liked and dated years earlier is now terminally ill, but she doesn’t know she’s ill. So he thinks this is the perfect situation, because he can date her again and really give himself over to the relationship but it won’t be a long-term commitment. It was very, very dark. In short, very Larry David. So we called him in for a meeting. I remember my colleague saying to Larry, ‘Look, we all think it’s a very funny script, but the lead character is not terribly likable. Is there anything you can think of to do to make him sympathetic or more likable?’ Larry thought about it, then he said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I like this guy.’ And that’s when we started to hang out.”
The two would end up working together nearly two decades later, when Weide would direct and executive produce Curb. But at the time, they were still making their way in the comedy world.
Weide recalls Larry’s early eighties comedy sets at the Improv in West Hollywood. “He would come out onstage and just stare out at the audience with this sour look on his face,” says Weide. “There was never any ‘Good evening’ or ‘How are you?’ None of that stuff. Then he would say, ‘Every morning, I wake up and thank God that I wasn’t born a wealthy Spanish landowner.’ So already people are looking at each other like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And then he’d say, ‘Because if I were, I would never know whether to address the help using the tú form or the usted form.’ Now people are walking out of the room. ‘If I use the usted form, I don’t want them to feel I’m being condescending. But if I use the tú form, I don’t want them to feel so familiar that they can just walk into my kitchen and help themselves to anything in my refrigerator.’”
“He would be heckled, ‘You’re not funny!’ There’d be arguments within the audience between pro-Larry factions and anti-Larry factions. But all the comics were lined up in the back of the room, because they loved him and loved watching this kind of ritual.”
Other folks outside of LA also had their eye on Larry David, and his second big break came in 1984, when he was hired by SNL.
“I was brought on as a writer, and there was no thought whatsoever about me acting or performing on the show. Although my sketches got good laughs at the read-through, I only ever got one on the air at the very end of the show when no one was watching, but I started to develop confidence that I could write. The SNL job ended in 1985, when Lorne [Michaels, the show’s creator, who had left in 1980] came back the next season and fired everybody.”
By the mid-eighties, David had become a master at curbing his expectations. Writing jobs weren’t exactly plentiful, and breaking ground as a stand-up was even harder. Still, he braved the comedy clubs once again, which led to a series of events that would change his life—and TV comedy—forever.
“After my stint on SNL ended, I did stand-up for the next three years when Jerry [Seinfeld] approached me in November of 1988 and told me that NBC was interested in doing something with him and asked if I wanted to work with him on it. In retrospect, it was a turning point in my life, but at the time, I thought, ‘Sure. OK.’ The thought was maybe I could make a little money doing this pilot. I didn’t think anything was going to happen. But of course, I never thought anything good was going to happen to me. I was conditioned to just get through another day and expect the worst. That way I was never disappointed.”
And it was from that sort of hopeful thinking that Seinfeld was born.
“I had no sitcom-writing experience. I didn’t even know the format,” says David. “And the pilot was the flimsiest of premises. It was about Jerry meeting this woman on the road, and she calls him up later to say that she’s coming to New York and asks if she can stay with him. Jerry wonders, ‘What does that mean, stay? What should he expect? How should he interpret that?’ That was pretty much it, but they picked it up for four shows and Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] was added to the cast as Elaine. The pilot aired in July of 1989.”
The show wasn’t a ratings juggernaut (at first), but it did garner positive reviews. NBC bought four more episodes—and made its first attempt to make the scrappy little sitcom palatable for the masses.
Larry poses with his parents and brother.
“Larry, you’re not funny.”
—ROSE DAVID, LARRY’S MOM
“They hired somebody to be the executive producer, and he called Jerry and me into his office to give us notes on the first few shows,” explains David. “When he finished, I looked at him and said, ‘No. I’m not doing one thing. Not one thing.’ And I left. Afterward, I said to Jerry, ‘Good luck. I can’t do this.’ I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t stand the idea of being told what to do. It wasn’t that guy’s show, it was our show. I don’t care how much experience he had. The idea that this person was going to tell us how to do this—I just couldn’t live with it. Jerry said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to the guys at Castle Rock,’ which he did. And that was the end of that guy. He never surfaced again.”
“And why did the network put up with me? That’s a good question. I think they tolerated me because they liked Jerry so much and they were stuck with me because Jerry made it clear to them that he wouldn’t do the show without me, and I wasn’t going to do it if we couldn’t do it the way we wanted to do it. And it was the first time something like that happened, but it certainly wasn’t the last.”
David’s insistence that they do things his way was a lasting theme that would give rise to two of television’s best comedies ever, and would afford him a very rare thing in the entertainment industry—a career built upon autonomy. But while David had a staunch belief in his own work, he was taken aback when other folks began to love it, too.
“I remember walking into Catch a Rising Star after the Seinfeld pilot aired, and having comedians come up to me going, ‘Oh, hey, I saw the show. It was really good. I really liked it.’ And I was kind of stunned. ‘What?! Are you serious? It was good?’ I couldn’t believe it. It was startling that someone told me that it was good. I just couldn’t fathom it. And it wasn’t false modesty.”
But not everyone was blown away.
“My mother didn’t think me going into comedy was a very good idea to start with,” recalls David. “She said to me, ‘Larry, you’re not funny. I’ve never heard you say anything funny.’ Then when Seinfeld was the number one show in the country, she would call me up and go, ‘Larry, do they like you? Are they going to keep you? Do they tell you you’re doing a good job?’”
“My dad was able to enjoy my success a little more. He also liked when I would buy him stuff, like a new car, [even though] he complained a lot about the air-conditioning and had to return it. When they came out to LA, I flew them first-class. I put them up in a nice hotel on Ocean Avenue, and I called my mother to say, ‘OK, I’m going to pick you up at six o’clock. We’ll go out to dinner.’ She said to me, ‘We’re not at the hotel.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘We’ve left the hotel. We’re at the Days Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard.’ I said, ‘What? Are you out of your mind?’ She said, ‘I don’t need you putting me up in fancy hotels, flying me out first-class.’ My father was perfectly happy in the nice hotel. Imagine that—she dragged that poor guy out of that beautiful hotel. They’d never stayed in a hotel like that in their lives, and she just couldn’t handle it.”
