It's a man's world

Larry David, Ed, and Jackass take over the tube

by Robert David Sullivan

It may be a coincidence. The new HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sundays at 10 p.m.), which has been picking up very favorable reviews, is about a character who looks and acts like a TV critic -- at least, stand-up comic Larry David looks and acts like most of the TV critics I've ever met, starting with myself. He's got the eyeglasses, the balding head, the shlumpy wardrobe, and the expression of someone who's constantly disappointed by the stupidity of his fellow human beings. The main difference is that TV critics are allowed to turn off the set once in a while and retreat to some part of the world where people don't look to Friends for behavior models, whereas David (at least the "fictional" Larry David) is confined to Sitcom Hell. Worst of all, David has to bear some responsibility for his predicament, since he did help to create the ultimate "no exit" sitcom, Seinfeld.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a lot like Seinfeld. Each episode strings together a bunch of minor misunderstandings and petty outrages that, in the end, don't change the main characters' lives in any way. In the first episode, for example, a little extra fabric in the crotch of David's new pants causes a woman -- a friend of David's wife -- to think she has aroused him. He tries to explain, she doesn't believe him, and they yell at each other for a few minutes, but since they had an awkward relationship to begin with, there's really nothing at risk here. In the second episode, David goes bowling and a stranger walks off with his shoes. A few days later, he's gotten into arguments with the guy who took them and with a prissy Barney's salesman, but he has his shoes back. He's just happy that his life isn't any worse than it was at the beginning of the episode.

There are certain differences between the two shows that make me wonder whether David isn't trying to get in the last word now that the NBC sitcom is safely dead and buried. The Seinfeld character George Costanza (Jason Alexander) was based on David, and I can imagine George sputtering with rage as he watched what NBC did to his concept of a sitcom based on "nothing" -- just as I can imagine David quietly pouting at the over-the-top portrayal of himself by musical-theater star Alexander. To begin with, Enthusiasm is largely improvised, whereas Seinfeld became increasingly fast-paced and tightly scripted during its eight-year run. Because it's on HBO, Enthusiasm also dispenses with a laugh track. Most sitcoms without a laugh track resort to lots of "here comes something funny" music (highly annoying on HBO's Arli$$, for example), but the bouncy-yet-creepy music on Enthusiasm is more appropriate for a carnival freak show. When I first heard it, I thought of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's paintings of clowns, and I'm pretty sure that no other sitcom, not even Get a Life, has had the same effect on me.

Enthusiasm has a succession of whiny Jerry Seinfeld-like characters (real-life friends of David's playing themselves, beginning with Richard Lewis in the premiere episode), but so far it has no lovable doofus along the lines of Cosmo Kramer. That's not surprising: Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, won three Emmys (to Alexander's none), and he expanded his role at the expense of David's fictional alter ego. I'm sure that the scatterbrained secondary characters on Enthusiasm, such as David's agent, will be kept in their place. (The same rules seem to apply on CBS's Bette, where star Bette Midler plays herself in a universe of supporting characters who stay the hell out of her way.)

There is definitely no counterpart to Seinfeld's Elaine Benes on Enthusiasm. Jerry Seinfeld's TV character had plenty of flaws, but his friendship with Elaine showed that he wasn't threatened by strong women. On Enthusiasm, a disproportionate share of David's irritations come from the opposite sex, beginning on the pilot episode with a hostile woman in a tight blouse who accuses David of looking at her breasts. David snaps that she shouldn't accentuate her breasts if she doesn't want men to notice them, and for a moment I accepted this scene as a sly bit of commentary on political correctness as enforced by the women's movement. Then I realized that I don't actually know any women who are this nakedly hypocritical, and I was back to viewing Enthusiasm as a parody of the sitcom genre, full of superficial characters who exist only to give our hero something to get upset about.

But the overriding theme of the series is how David suffers for his sense of humor. In the first episode, he sarcastically refers to his contentious wife as "Hitler," and he's forced to apologize to an elderly Jewish couple who overheard him. In the next installment, he offends Mary Steenburgen's mother by pretending to gag when it's pointed out that he's drinking from her glass. A lot of Seinfeld episodes have similar plots, but Enthusiasm goes even farther: the fictional Larry David has somehow surrounded himself with a spouse and friends who don't find him the least bit funny. Yet he keeps making wisecracks, hoping that his wit and brilliance will somehow find their way to an appreciative audience. As I said, no wonder the TV critics love him.

JACKASS (Sundays at 9 p.m. on MTV) is another celebration of the stoic male, but this time there's real suffering involved. In the tradition of MTV's own Tom Green Show, this series features real people doing really stupid stunts. Host Johnny Knoxville, a lanky 29-year-old often seen with crutches or without clothes, introduces film clips showing him (or one of his young confederates) in such activities as getting sprayed by a skunk, jumping into a kiddie pool filled with elephant dung, getting pounded by a sumo wrestler, and unsuccessfully trying to ride a Big Wheel down a flight of stairs. In one episode, the gang compete to see who can eat the most hard-boiled eggs, and Knoxville tells them that "vomiting is encouraged." It was also televised, and I got to watch several long minutes of people puking into white buckets. (Why doesn't my remote have the visual equivalent of a mute button?)

Sometimes, the show is more like Candid Camera as hosted by Jon Waters. In one episode Knoxville puts a doll in a baby's car seat and drives around with it perched on the roof of an SUV; as you'd expect, bystanders (thank goodness) scream at him to stop. In another segment, Knoxville goes to Asian restaurants and slips dog turds into his food, then complains to the staff about it. The same episode features a guy smeared all over with refried beans (made to look like you-know-what) standing on a street corner and offering "free hugs" to passersby. The strangest bit yet involves a guy in a red devil's suit who marches along city streets with a sign that says KEEP GOD OUT OF CALIFORNIA. Things go pretty well until an angry man (who looks like a biker, of all things) grabs the sign and breaks it, then starts punching the poor Prince of Darkness. Because Jackass does not include interviews with the people who get sucked into its stunts, we never find out whether the assailant actually believed that he was single-handedly saving California from Satanic conquest. Maybe he'd been watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Is there a point to any of this? We already know that people will do anything to get on television. And we already know, thanks to elections, that there's no limit to the American public's gullibility. (Speaking of which: I would love to meet anyone who "invested" $48 in buying all 24 of this week's TV Guide covers featuring characters from The Simpsons.) I should note that Jackass is co-produced by Spike Jonze, who directed the similarly compelling but inscrutable film Being John Malkovich. Perhaps both the TV series and the film are nothing more than a celebration of the human body, and specifically the desire to experience as many physical sensations as we can before our time runs out. Knoxville and friends certainly seem to enjoy the abuse; when he puts on an electronic dog collar and shocks himself, he laughs and screams in the same breath. Then again, I have a nagging suspicion that there's an army of Johnny Knoxville clones somewhere at MTV headquarters -- and that when one of them breaks his neck trying to ride a bull, another one is dragged out of storage and given the microphone. The proof will come when Jackass enters its 10th season and Knoxville still looks 29.

ANOTHER CRITICS' DARLING, the NBC comedy drama Ed (Sundays at 8 p.m.), held up pretty well in its third episode, avoiding the sweet sentiment of Providence and the forced whimsicality of Northern Exposure in its declining years. In case you haven't seen it, Ed is about a New York lawyer (Tom Cavanagh) who returns to his home town and opens a law office in a bowling alley. He also stalks his childhood sweetheart, which is something that good-looking men are allowed to do in romantic comedies.

There was one weird moment in this week's episode. Ed is talking to the object of his affections, a schoolteacher, about Career Day. She remarks that the most popular speaker to appear before her class was Jack Barry, host of the TV game show The Joker's Wild. "Did he bring the giant lever?" says an impressed Ed. When you consider that Barry died in 1984, I think this is a rather obscure pop-culture reference, especially when I keep reading about how all of prime-time TV is written by and for people under 30.

Still, the same episode has a character quoting poet Walt Whitman, so Ed isn't all bad when it comes to name dropping.