Is Larry David the First Sitcom Antihero?

Is Curb Your Enthusiasm the first sitcom about an asshole? Jeff Schaffer says no. 

In the academic sense, Curb Your Enthusiasm is about as textbook a comedy of manners as we’ve ever seen on television. For 12 seasons and 24 years, Larry David bristled against social norms and challenged conventions of polite society to the delight of cantankerous Curb fans everywhere, highlighting the absurdity of modern society as he sees it. However, according to entertainment journalist Joel Stein in his new essay for The Wrap titled “Bad Manners,” David and Curb Your Enthusiasm also carved out a new subgenre within the umbrella of the comedy of manners: the comedy of the asshole.

According to Stein, Curb Your Enthusiasm entered the zeitgeist during a unique period of TV history when the antihero main character was quickly becoming the most popular character archetype, just as crime dramas such as The Sopranos and The Wire were making morally murky kingpins compelling leads and shortly before Mad Men turned Don Draper into the TV period piece’s most complicated protagonist. In Stein’s opinion, Curb did the exact same thing for comedy.

However, if Curb Your Enthusiasm was the world’s first sitcom about an asshole, then what the hell was Seinfeld?

In Stein’s piece, he opens the argument by stating that his theory is wrong. He ran the “comedy of the asshole” idea past Curb Your Enthusiasm executive producer Jeff Schaffer, who said that Stein’s thesis “never entered his or Larry David’s mind” while they were making the show. Nonetheless, Stein argues that Curb’s Larry (as opposed to the real Larry, whom Stein has met and who is by all accounts a generous and lovely legend) was the first true asshole main character in sitcom history because, and as apparently opposed to the characters in Seinfeld, Larry’s selfishness is all-encompassing and irredeemable.

“Curb Larry brazenly commits horrifying acts of complete self-interest. When his wife, played by Cheryl Hines, calls from a seemingly doomed flight to tell him she loves him, he responds by putting her on hold so the cable guy can fix his TV,” Stein writes. “After stepping in dog poop, he steals a pair of shoes from an exhibit at the Holocaust Museum. Instead of comforting his friend Marty Funkhouser over his mother’s death, he steals flowers from her grave to give to a woman to try to get laid.”

According to Stein, this led to shows like Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Veep, You’re the Worst and Fleabag, featuring full-asshole leads, a sitcom staple in the current TV landscape but a breakthrough when Curb premiered in 2000. 

“It was different from Seinfeld, where the main characters were selfish and immature, but not assholes,” Stein argues. “When we saw Jerry break up with a woman because she had man hands, we wished Jerry were a bigger person, but we also stared at close-ups of those man hands an awful lot and felt for his dilemma. When Elaine pretended to trip in order to touch Teri Hatcher’s breasts to find out if they were real, we, too, wanted to find out if she had implants.”

Ignoring how, in the Seinfeld episode “The Implant,” Elaine’s trip into Teri Hatcher’s chest is explicitly accidental and not a planned assault, the crux of Stein’s argument for why Seinfeld wasn’t the first comedy of assholes is also his biggest misstep. “The last episode of Seinfeld was not really an episode of Seinfeld,” Stein writes of the much-maligned series finale. “For an hour, it reversed the perspective we had for 179 episodes. It turned on the audience by indicting characters we liked. ‘How did you not notice that these people are awful?’ it asked.”

Curb, Stein claims, closed with a completely fitting final note, despite the episode essentially being one big parody of the Seinfeld finale. “The last episode of Curb was fully an episode of Curb. Larry is on trial for finally doing something decent (giving a bottle of water to a person waiting to vote, in opposition to Georgia’s 2021 Election Integrity Act) and is unrepentant in the face of character witnesses he’d wronged,” he writes. “The jury convicts him, but he gets off on a technicality. Because in the 24 years since it premiered, Larry has won. The assholes have won. They make asshole laws. They allow asshole technicalities.” 

Critically, Stein claims, while Seinfeld appears to punish its characters’ selfishness by locking up in prison to spend their sentences putting on incarcerated open mics, Curb proves his hypothesis by setting Larry free in the final scene and encouraging his asshole-ness. 

However, when Jerry Seinfeld appears to spring his old friend from prison in the final scene of Curb, does Larry not remark to his partner, “This is how we should have ended ‘The Finale’”? Do both Larry and Jerry not throw up their hands in frustration that they’ve finally found a way to fix the oft-criticized Seinfeld episode so many years later? Does that not mean that, with one necessary tweak discovered decades post-mortem, Seinfeld could have similarly stuck the landing and let the assholes win?

Whether or not Stein and the many Seinfeld fans are willing to admit it, “The Finale” is absolutely a faithful episode of Seinfeld. It might not be a good episode of Seinfeld, but it is, philosophically speaking, the apotheosis of the show’s mantra, “No hugging, no learning.” Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer are assholes. Charming assholes, indeed, whose individual crimes we can forgive because we find them relatable, but could the same not be said for Larry? What Curb fan hasn’t walked into a Starbucks and, at least once, thought to themselves, “I’ll have one of the vanilla bullshit things”?

The lesson of both the Curb finale and the Seinfeld finale is the same — assholes are always assholes, and even a court case in which every instance of their awfulness is presented to the public cannot make them see the errors of their ways. But, as Jerry’s stand-up set proves in the final closing credits of Seinfeld, prison didn’t change him, just as Larry’s brief incarceration led to no epiphany or introspection before ending with a Jerry ex machina.

Plus, who is George Costanza if not the prototype for Curb Larry? If George isn’t an asshole, then he’s an importer/exporter by the name of Art Vandelay.