‘Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness’ Review: Larry David Show

Having run out of aspects of contemporary American culture to kvetch about, Larry David turns his sights to the past with mixed results in HBO’s Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness.

The seven-episode limited comedy series is backward-looking for the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator — both because it finds him using his modern sensibility as a filter through which to process American history and because the sketch structure is a throwback to David’s brief but memorable stint as a writer on Saturday Night Live.

David famously had only one sketch aired during his Saturday Night Live tenure, which was more notorious for the time he allegedly quit the job and then returned to work two days later, sans comment. 

Given the tumult on Saturday Night Live during David’s mid-’80s run, and the number of writers who struggled under the show’s yolk only to become wildly successful in other endeavors, it’s impossible to say with certainty if David was bad at the gig, too esoteric and strange for the gig, or just one of many people who may have been in the right place at the wrong time. 

Even after watching all seven Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness episodes, I can’t say if this is a format that works well with David’s energetically grouchy persona — at least not consistently. 

With the exception of one episode where an Abraham Lincoln-centric sketch takes up the majority of the half-hour, each installment includes four different vignettes in which a Larry David-esque protagonist is injected into a famous historical moment and produces cantankerous complications. 

Of the full season of sketches, I would say that maybe only five or six of them, including that extra-long Lincoln piece, are actually good. Four or five are either excruciatingly bad or end without a conclusive sense of what the joke even was. The rest are exactly what they promise to be, namely Curb Your Enthusiasm circumstances and punchlines — quite literally, in many cases — in mediocre period garb, briefly amusing and then going no deeper than the foundational gag. 

If David had been a regular Saturday Night Live host (he hosted episodes in 2016 and 2017, in addition to making a bunch of guest appearances as Bernie Sanders), it would be easy to imagine the appeal of seeing one of these time-traveling sketches for each appearance, distributed across a 20-year period — basically identical to what would happen with Nate Bargatze’s George Washington bits if Bargatze made hosting into an annual occurrence. 

And if you’re thinking, “Well the first George Washington sketch was hilarious, but the second one was less funny and the attempt to transplant the gag to the Emmys was a total dud,” now imagine that two-year window of diminishing returns taking place over 35 minutes and then repeating for six straight weeks. Whether fatigue sets in swiftly or takes a few episodes hardly matters, because it’s almost guaranteed that it will eventually set in.

HBO is asking critics to be coy when it comes to specific sketches and the roles played by specific guest stars, which is an unintentional acknowledgement of what is disappointing about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: Too many sketches feature an identical core, so if I tell you who the guest stars are playing that eliminates the only real unknown from sketch to sketch.

It’s astonishing to see something go from clever to formulaic this fast, but it’s a feat that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Unhappiness creators David and director Jeff Schaffer pull off — though it’s worth checking back in for the seventh episode. 

The first sketch — the only one I’ll spoil in this level of detail — finds David playing Robert Livingston, one of the original drafters of the Declaration of Independence, and a rare time he isn’t playing a character named “Larry,” “Lawrence” or “David” in the series. The joke here is that Livingston has complaints that go far beyond the historically established grievances with King George III, including that if you pick a line, you have to stay in it and nobody should be allowed to wish anybody a “Happy New Year” after January 7. And many, many more. It’s a laundry list sketch, and some of them are funny and most of them are not, but it represents what roughly half of the sketches here turn out to be: A Larry David character gets in the way of a historical moment with Curb Your Enthusiasm-style complaints. 

You may, in fact, remember that David’s issues with belated “Happy New Year” wishes were featured in the premiere of the tenth Curb Your Enthusiasm. 

This new series has the logline “Those who don’t know history…are doomed to watch Larry David repeat it,” and by “it,” I can only assume HBO means “Jokes he’s made on other shows.” Among the Curb Your Enthusiasm materials repurposed here are “Respect Wood,” “Chat ‘n’ Cut” and at least one “Pretty, pretty good.” The first time one of those direct lifts occurred, I thought it was cute that Larry David was doing a self-homage. The third or fourth times, my own enthusiasm had been curbed. 

There’s so much similarity to the sketch structures that by the third or fourth episodes, I was latching onto and appreciating the most minor of variations. I mentioned the extended Lincoln sketch, and even though much of it exists in the shadow of Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!, the jokes still build nicely. A gritty, ’70s-drenched play on All the President’s Men, one of the few times Schaffer evokes a less stagey aesthetic, works almost entirely because my guess of how the premise — “Larry David as Deep Throat” — would play out wasn’t exactly right. I didn’t laugh at the two sketches that boil down to straight-up lampoons of the Trump administration, but David’s anger is at least palpable. 

Otherwise, the things here that don’t remind you of Curb Your Enthusiasm will probably remind you of Drunk History or Hulu’s semi-recent History of the World, Part II. 

Since most of the series’ guest stars have been announced in nebulous terms, I can tell you that the best of the group is Bill Hader, the sort of spirited performer who gives the impression he could riff with David for hours at a stretch. Hader is teamed with Kathryn Hahn, who is excellent, which almost goes without saying. David gets an assortment of former collaborators to join him, including Jerry Seinfeld, JB Smoove and Susie Essman, with Essman having the silliest part. 

Generally, it’s a top-notch group of guest stars, but there are very few people whose presence in the series or whose success with the material generated by David and Schaffer surprised me on any level. It’s more like, “Sure, making comedy cameos is what Jon Hamm does,” or “Yes, JB Smoove, I see you repurposing the initial Leon arc.” 

Barack Obama, an executive producer along with Michelle Obama, introduces the first episode and gives the impression that he’s going to be the series’ version of Rod Serling, but after those opening two minutes, he vanishes for much of the show before making a full-blown sketch appearance. The sketch, like his bookending observations, is a reminder that no matter what you think of his politics, Obama’s comic timing is a precise and impressive thing. Somebody should find a discarded script that was once intended for The Rock & Will Ferrell or Kevin Hart & Will Ferrell and repurpose it as an Obama/David vehicle, or at least prep a guest actor Emmy nomination campaign for next year.

Closing the series, Obama articulates what I guess we’re pretending is the series’ theme: that “American progress has never been smooth or steady,” but if people invest in the American experiment, we should get another 250 years out of it. Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness isn’t smooth or steady either, but in another 250 years, give or take, I should be ready for another season.