Jesse Helms curbed their enthusiasm

When we moved to North Carolina (twenty-five years ago last month), we saw a fair number of bumper stickers around liberal Chapel Hill that said, "I did not vote for Jesse Helms!" Today's huge headline on page one of our local newspaper announces Helms's death yesterday:

1921-2008
JESSE HELMS
HE REDEFINED POLITICS IN NORTH CAROLINA, REINVIGORATED U.S. CONSERVATISM

An accompanying article, by Bob Christensen, explains that

North Carolina was a one-party state when Helms was growing up, and he helped transform it by making it acceptable for conservative Democrats to vote Republican....
    More than that, Helms changed American history.
    He and his political organization rescued Ronald Reagan's political career during the 1976 North Carolina Republican primary. Although Reagan did not win the nomination that year, it set him up to win the White House in 1980....
    Had Reagan not been elected, would we have had the two George Bushes?....

Later, as I was washing a few dishes and my wife was poring over the newspaper, I heard her cry out in disgust, "What did he do now? That's so stupid!"

"What did Bush do now?" I asked.

"No, not Bush. Me!" (She must have said, "What did I do....")

She was only doing a Soduko. Sometimes she screws up like that. But my reaction reminded me of another uproarious theme during Season Four of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Probably in the same opening episode in which Mel Brooks hears Larry David sing to Karaoke, Cheryl reminds Larry that their tenth wedding anniversary is approaching. For her wedding present, Larry agrees that they'll repeat the wedding ceremony, this time with more pomp apparently than Cheryl enjoyed the first time. "And what do you want?" she asks him. "Oh, don't you remember? You already told me what my present would be."

There's a ten-year flashback to the evening they agreed to get married. Larry was reluctant to take that step, their relationship was fine. Cheryl got him to go along with it by offering to let him have sex with another woman for their tenth anniversary....

Larry's attempts to find a woman to have sex with provide a series of entertaining situations throughout Season Four. There's the big, black hooker, who just doesn't quite appeal to Larry in that way. Besides if he's seen with her, it could put the kibosh on his attempts to join a new, very conservative country club....There's the randy wife of the local dry cleaner. They arrange an assignation (to which Larry brings a satin sheet with the hole already cut for his penis), but while she's telling him that the business about Hasids' only making love through a hole is bullshit, an earthquake begins to rumble....

Finally, it looks as though it's going to happen, only a few hours before the deadline imposed by Cheryl. Cady Huffman (playing herself playing the Swedish typist in "The Producers") invites Larry into her dressing room an hour before opening night. Everything's going fine until Larry spots a big framed photograph of Bush on the wall. "You're a Republican?" he asks, in disgust. Of course, it's all over.

Mel Brooks is Max Bialystock

Last night, while watching the credits for Episode 9 of Season Four of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," I noticed for the first time (incredibly) that there was a "story by" credit. It was by Larry David. And just a little while ago, at the end of Episode 10 (the seasons' final episode), there it was again, "Story by Larry David." I went back to Episodes 6 and 7 to confirm that their stories, too, were by Larry David. I didn't bother to check Episode 8. They all had to be by Larry David, and I suppose that all of the stories of all of the seasons (whose DVDs I've returned to the library) were by Larry David. I feel even more emphatically now that the EO (ExtraOrdinary) rating I've given Seasons Three and Four was deserved. Extraordinary story writing indeed and extraordinarily satisfying to this viewer's taste (and his wife's, who has also seen more than half of the first four seasons' forty episodes).

The final episode of Season Four, which we watched after lunch today, revealed the major premise for the whole. In Episode one, none other than Mel Brooks hears Larry sing to Karaoke at a club and in Episode Two approaches him about taking over the role of Max Bialystock in "The Producers" on Broadway, to play opposite Ben Stiller as Leo Bloom. It takes only a few episodes for Ben Stiller to become so irritated by Larry that he tells Mel, "It's either him or me." It barely occurred to me to wonder why Mel didn't hesitate a second to tell Stiller good-bye and start looking for a replacement...David Schwimmer. Larry and David's relationship is similarly rocky, but at last (in Episode 10) we're on Broadway for opening night.

And here's where that major premise was revealed and took my breath away: Mel, viewing the opening from the back of the auditorium, doesn't look as though he's enjoying what he's seeing. In fact, he looks as though he thinks the spectacle is putrid. Both my wife and I felt puzzled about this. "What's going on?" I actually said outloud. Then Larry David forgets a line and draws such a blank that the show seems to stop dead. Some members of the audience (including Jerry Seinfeld) get up and move toward the exits. Mel leaves for the bar and meets Anne Bancroft (his wife of 41 years, before her death in June 2005), whom he tells he was right, Larry David is terrible. "I knew when I first saw him he was a disaster, and everything he touches is a disaster...At last, we're going to kill off this show and be done with it!" In other words, Mel Brooks is trying to pull a Max Bialystock: put on a show that is sure to flop.

In the meantime, back on stage, Larry (and most everyone else in the audience) hears an altercation in the middle of the theater between a turbaned sikh and the man sitting behind him whose view is blocked. Larry knows both men. He has given them tickets to the show: the sikh handyman who has adjusted his hotel room thermostat and his cousin Andy. Larry smoothly seques into a monologue about his cousin and soon has the audience in stitches. The people who were heading toward the exits start to return to their seats. And eventually Larry remembers the line he missed and the show recommences.

Of course, the show's a big hit, just the way Bialystock's "Springtime for Hitler" is in Mel Brooks's original movie, with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (and in its remake and original Broadway production, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick). Larry David places the capstone of his premise, and Mel Brooks's identity with Max Bialystock is complete!

The second season

Friday and last night, I watched the ten episodes of the second season (2001, according to Wikipedia) of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I watched them in such quick succession that they're mostly a blur in my memory already, but I remember that I liked them very much. And one of them (though not the best of the lot) I do remember quite well because of its hilarious (and all-too-true) comment on people's religious behavior.

I'm referring to Episode #9, "Baptism," in which the sister of Larry's long-suffering wife Cheryl (played sympathetically by the lovely Cheryl Hines) is getting married. Now Cheryl and her sister aren't Jews, and while Cheryl may be married to one, her sister will have none of it and has prevailed on her fiancé to convert to Christianity in order to become her husband. He is to be baptized into the faith immediately preceding the wedding.

Predictably (for nothing ever goes quite according to plan for Larry) Larry and Cheryl's itinerary from L.A. to Monterey gets derailed and they arrive late for the proceedings. Larry staggers out of their rental car into the woods and walks a few feet before spotting down below two men standing in the edge of a fast river, one of them apparently trying to drown the other—the one with the apprehensive look on his face. Right, the apprehensive one is Cheryl's sister's about-not-to-be-a-Jewish fiancé.

Well, anyway, Larry (always eager to help and try to make things better) spontaneously yells "stop" and starts to run down the hill. Startled, the church officiant who has been in the act of dunking the fiancé lets him go, and the bride and the rest of the wedding party, after turning around briefly to see where the "stop" came from, turn back to the river to see the fiancé starting to be carried downstream. They all rush into the river to save him from drowning.

You've got to see this for yourself, but the upshot of it is that the groom refuses to go back into the river to complete the baptism, claiming that during the moment he was initially dunked he had the impression that something or someone was telling him that it just wasn't right, what he was doing.

"Not right to become a Christian," his horrified bride asks?

"No, no, not that," he says. "Wrong to renounce my Jewness." [That isn't the actual dialogue, but I'm too lazy today to go transcribe the exact words, which of course are better than my paraphrase and deserving to have you find out for yourself by renting the DVD.]

The episode ends in the more or less standard way of Larry (joined in this case by Cheryl) looking into the short distance trying to make sense of it all as the Christians on one side and the Jews on the other jeer and shake their fists at one another.

Larry David, at least the TV persona

Having tired of "House" (and wondering how Hugh Laurie continues to endure the title role), I'm glad to have discovered "Curb Your Enthusiasm," starring its apparent creator (as himself), Larry David, who we're given to understand had something big to do with "Seinfeld."¹ The program seems to have debuted on HBO in 2000 (according to the Wikipedia).

I wonder whether one of the "big things" Larry David did on "Seinfeld" was to create the character of George Costanza, whom my wife couldn't stand (or the character Elaine, whom she can't stand either) and thinks the Larry David character resembles. I can see the resemblance, but the Larry David character seems much more sympathetic to me. Rather, George Costanza didn't seem sympathetic at all (although I find it impossible to dislike Jason Alexander in the role, same as I find Julia Louis-Dreyfuss too appealingto dislike her as Elaine). And the Larry David character somehow seems very sympathetic. To me.

The character seems driven to try to be liked but cursed by a warped sense of what he should do (and not do) to obtain the result, his actions usually turning out disastrously, mainly for himself. I much enjoy the artistry of the elaborate plots the writers have devised to bring these disasters about, with Larry David inevitably left standing there looking into the near distance trying to absorb the pain of it all and understand once again where he went wrong.

The same as when we walk dazed out of a darkened movie theater, with its gigantic screened faces and jacked-up sound, and we find ourselves taken over by one of the dominating characters (so that we hear ourselves talking with his voice and moving our bodies the way he does), I've started occasionally to have the unelected sense that I'm myself Larry David, in all his sympathetic foible and bewilderment. I think I've become a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fan not only because I'm hooked on the artistry of its writers (although I don't care much for the "Woodly Allen style" of improvisation or for the hand-held camera), but also because I identify with the Larry David screen persona, however like or unlike the unsympathetic George Costanza he may be.

The resource center also has the DVDs for Seasons Two, Three, Four, and Five. You know I've the second to start watching this evening!
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1. According to the Wikipedia, Larry David "teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld to co-create the television series 'Seinfeld,' where he also acted as head writer and executive producer. David's work won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993. In 1999, he created and stars in the HBO series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' an improvised sitcom in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself."