ANGRY MIDDLE-AGED MAN.(comedian Larry David)(Interview)

From 2000, David Owen on George Meyer, the writer behind "The Simpsons"

At the end of the nineteen-eighties, Larry David was a standup comic in trouble. He was middle-aged, single, living in a building with subsidized housing for artists on the West Side of Manhattan, and just scraping by. He had been doing standup, with mixed success, for more than a decade; his chances for breaking through were long past. He had written for and acted on a short-lived ABC variety show called "Fridays." He had been on the writing staff of "Saturday Night Live" in the 1984-85 season, though only one of his sketches aired. He had played bit parts in a few movies. He had written a screenplay--a dark comedy, never produced--called, appropriately, "Prognosis Negative."

David had a reputation as a comic's comic--"which means I sucked," he likes to say. His material was uncompromisingly to his own taste, filled with wild tirades about apparent trivialities. In one routine, he went on at length about the use of the familiar "you" in foreign languages ("Caesar used the tu form with Brutus even after Brutus stabbed him, which I think is going too far"). He imagined himself as a professional masturbator so talented that people stopped him on the street to ask for advice ("You must practice!"). He wondered how answering machines might have changed the Old West. (For one thing, you could get out of joining a dangerous posse by screening your calls.)

David's onstage manner was almost willfully uningratiating. He was intense and bespectacled, and often wore an old Army jacket. He had started going bald at thirty, and by his early forties "the hair was a combination of Bozo and Einstein," the comedian Richard Lewis says. David and Lewis, who were born three days apart, originally met at Camp All America, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, when they were thirteen. They disliked each other immediately. A dozen years later, they met again, at the bar of the Improv, a comedy club in Manhattan, and became close friends. "Talk about walking to the beat of your own drum," Lewis says of David. "I mean, this guy was born in a snare drum."

Club audiences were puzzled by David, or, worse, indifferent to him. The managers who occasionally took him on invariably recommended that he make his material more accessible. He found new managers. "I was not for everyone," Larry David said, laughing, when I met him last October. "I was for very few." He was sitting at his big desk in the Santa Monica offices of Larry David Productions, the company behind "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the half-hour cinema-verite situation comedy on HBO.

Contrary to the cliche that comedians are stingy about giving out what they most ardently seek, Larry David is a surprisingly easy laugh. He has several laughs, ranging from a brief, wry exhalation that reveals what Shelley Berman (who plays David's father on "Curb") calls his "wondrously perfect teeth," with their pronounced canines, to an uninhibited guffaw. Perhaps David's most striking laugh, however, is a snort that is exactly like the one Jason Alexander made famous when he played "Seinfeld" 's George Costanza--a character who, David claims, is largely based on himself.

The similarities between prototype and character are not instantly apparent. David has a lanky, wiry build and an athletic, slightly bowlegged walk. His cranium is long and sleek, surrounded by a fringe of curly whitish hair that is neatly trimmed, except for rampant sideburns. The afternoon we met, he wore what was evidently a customary outfit, in a style that I came to think of as comedy-tycoon casual: a navy-blue shirt jacket, a medium-blue zipper-neck shirt, khakis, white socks, and dingy beige Pumas.