You don’t have to be anhedonic to embrace “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America,” the seven-episode limited sketch comedy series that Larry David cooked up with that beacon of hope and culture maven President Barack Obama. Oddly enough, with the help of co-creator Jeff Schaffer, they make beautiful comedy together.
No one could have been more surprised than the President, who has said that despite his vast political experience, “nothing has prepared me for working with Larry David.”
On its face, the series (I’ve watched the six made available of seven) seems like something that should be destined for middle and high schoolers considering our current civics education deficit. The Boston Tea Party? Paul Revere’s Ride? A dinner party at the Rochester home of teetotaler Suffragist Susan B. Anthony? Yawn. I thought it was the kind of educational series, like a dramatization of “Johnny Tremaine,” that the cool teachers showed on Friday afternoons while they went outside to escape their endlessly needy young captives.
But, no! There’s too much profanity for minors. Also, it’s very much good enough for grownups raised on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Seinfeld,” and that have suffered through the recent unfunny attempts by our fearless leader to dismantle democracy.
The 30-minute format allows for multiple, star-packed sketches of varying lengths with David playing a key historical character. He’s cast as Explorer Lewis Merriwether opposite Jerry Seinfeld’s William Clark; an aide to Abraham Lincoln (Bill Hader in a beard, Kathryn Hahn hilariously as his mercurial wife) on the eve of the president’s assassination; and a disgruntled uninvited guest at the Boston Tea Party thrown by Lin Manuel Miranda.
Despite these (real and imagined) characters’ places in the history books, they’ve all been “Davidized,” meaning even if they are remembered more nobly over time, they’ve adopted his petty, neurotic, obnoxious and endlessly insulting qualities for comic effect.
While sketch comedy can be hit or miss, “Larry” boasts a high ratio of hits to misses. Depending on your taste, you will have your favorites. Among mine is a sketch with the Black pioneer Rosa Parks. It tells a story of her trying to integrate a bus before her bold refusal to surrender her seat to a white person in Birmingham, AL in 1955. In the sketch, David plays an anonymous white man who urges her to keep her seat when she’s challenged by a white mob. But his endless kibbitzing, ridiculous musings and off-putting bodily habits send her climbing over their two-seater for the back of the bus. Anything to escape Larry.
There’s a scene at a poker game with Wyatt Earp, brother Virgil and Doc Holliday, where David’s cowboy gets shamed for hogging a hitching post made for two horses for his single pony. (Classic David ado about nothing.) There’s also much discussion of whether the actual gunfight happened at the corral or an adjacent vacant lot — something that I spent days mapping out when I was writing a book on Tombstone, AZ, and the Jewish wife of Wyatt Earp. (It was indeed in the lot, not the corral, history nerds.)
The familiar yet ridiculous historical moments pile on. David plays the third least intrepid Wright Brother besides aviators Jon Hamm and Sean Hayes. He argues with his wife (Isla Fisher) as they try to flee the British, and she has the temerity of criticizing his butter churning skills. And, as the Northern owner of a house on the Underground Railroad, he welcomes a runaway slave as picky and bristly as he is.
In addition, the production values are surprisingly high from the set design to the costumes and make-up. Apparently, when a comic legend works with Obama on a comedic retelling of the great and not-so-great moments of American history on our 250th anniversary, the standards are high, and so is the hope that one day in the not-so-distant future, we can laugh at our own period of history with as much enthusiasm.
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America” premieres Friday on HBO and HBO Max.
