Navigate to News section

Why Larry David’s Take on ‘Nothing’ Matters Now More Than Ever

After a five year haitus, ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ will return for a ninth season

by
Rachel Shukert
June 16, 2016
Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXII
Comedian Larry David speaks on stage at the VIP Closing Dinner during Advertising Week 2015 AWXII at Sotheby's in New York City, October 1, 2015. Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXII
Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXII
Comedian Larry David speaks on stage at the VIP Closing Dinner during Advertising Week 2015 AWXII at Sotheby's in New York City, October 1, 2015. Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXII

This week, it’s been hard to see straight through the grief and anger I feel—we all should feel—over the monstrous massacre at the LGBT nightclub Pulse in Orlando, followed by the repellent scramble of the right-wing to uphold their support for assault weapon ownership and a GOP vote to block a gay-rights amendment. Even grading on the increasingly steep curve our increasingly terrible world has given us over the past several months, this week has been particularly awful. We can, and rightfully should, talk of little else.

Old wounds, long thought healed, have been ripped painfully open once again. It seems, even in light of thoughts and prayers, that nothing will actually be done to stop such an eminently preventable tragedy from happening again (like, you know, not allowing people the FBI has investigated for links to terrorism from buying automatic instruments of death at their local Whatever-Mart, while that same Whatever-Mart has the right to make it almost impossible to fill your utterly innocuous prescription for birth control pills or anti-depressants. Again, NBD!)

So it’s only fair that this be infinitesimally tempered by the teeniest, tiniest modicum of pretty, pretty, pretty good news. HBO has announced that Curb Your Enthusiasm will be returning to the network for a ninth season. The series—never cancelled, always on hiatus (the epitaph I want on my gravestone, by the way)—last aired in 2011. Its creator and star Larry David describes the subsequent Curb-less period thus: “In the immortal words of Julius Caesar: ‘I left, I did nothing, I returned.’ ”

David may not feel he’s done much to write home about—a run on Broadway in his play Fish in the Dark notwithstanding—which may be precisely why he feels ready to make his triumphant return. Larry David’s comedy has always flourished because it’s interrogated “nothing,” the kind of mundanity that few remember but actually spend most of our lives dealing with. He doesn’t write about falling in love; he writes about what you’re supposed to get as a birthday present for the son of the woman you’re dating. He writes not about death, but about the seating politics at a funeral.

But the world is changed, if even since the last season aired. It has become, often terrifyingly, a place where things happen. Since Curb last went off the air, a civil war in Syria rages on, Congress has given itself over to mob rule, and a basically self-described fascist has become the de facto head of one of our major political parties who may soon live in The White House. Social media is bigger than ever, and there are more than ever groups of people to offend (and eager to take offense.) The idea of someone like “Larry David” making his way through this landscape, a world that takes itself so seriously (because it must) feels like more than a just another season or just another show. Watching Curb now, I imagine, will feel like a radical act of comic terrorism. I can’t wait to watch.

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.