Be honest. You are Larry David on the inside

Philosopher Mark Ralkowski on the meaning and legacy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

With the end of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s unsparing, magisterial commentary on America’s foibles, the actor and screenwriter has wrapped up one of the great intellectual inquiries of our time — at the very least, a pretty, pretty good one. Philosopher Mark Ralkowski feels the same way, so we turned to him to help take stock of the wisdom Larry brought back for us as he stared into the void of American social norms.

An associate professor of philosophy at the George Washington University, Ralkowski has written extensively on Heidegger and Plato, but is better known outside of academia for his reflections on comedy and what it has to tell us about American culture. He’s tackled these big questions in a series of edited volumes, including Louis C.K and Philosophy: You Don’t Get to be Bored; Dave Chappelle and Philosophy: When Keeping it Wrong Gets Real; and, of course, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy: Awaken the Social Assassin Within.

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There’s been a lot of writing and tributes recently about how singular and idiosyncratic and cranky a figure Larry David is. But you argue something almost opposite. You argue that he’s all of us. And we’re all him. He is, as you call him, a “social assassin.” But so is everyone reading this, secretly. Explain.

This is a great question because opinions vary on what it is that makes “Curb Your Enthusiasm” funny. In promotional materials for the sixth season of “Curb,” HBO compared Larry David’s character to a painting in a museum that shows each of us something different, depending on our perspective. This was a perfect choice. “There is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say what it is they see.” That is a line from Virginia Woolf’s beautiful essay on Michel de Montaigne, the French Renaissance-era essayist. It just as easily could be a description of Larry David’s character on “Curb.” What exactly do we see in him? Why do some of us find it funny while others find it disturbing?

I think sometimes we laugh with Larry David’s character in “Curb,” identifying with him and siding with him in his conflicts with other characters, or in his rejection of social norms. For example, we might agree with him that you should never give “anonymously” to charity and then tell everyone about it, that “a dog without a bag is incomplete,” or that you shouldn’t monitor your colleague’s bathroom usage frequency in the office.

Other times we laugh at him and side with the other characters and the social norms they uphold. In these cases, we might agree that Larry was wrong to invite a known sex offender to Seder, or to ask Susie for the guest list before accepting her dinner party invitation, or to offer edible panties to a conservative orthodox Jewish woman on a ski lift. 

His character is a kind of television-based Rorschach test for viewers: are you socially deviant, like Larry, or do you defend the status quo, like most of the other characters in the show?

You argue that part of the appeal of the show is its examination of what you call the “unknown known” — all the little codes and rules and practices for living in a society that we don’t even realize we know or think about. But Larry David thinks about them. Why do you think it’s so satisfying to have someone make explicit and examine the arbitrariness and sometimes the oppressiveness of our codes, and often the fact that they are not as widely shared as we imagine?

There’s something funny about the concept of an “unknown known.” It’s a paradox: how can we not know something that we know? And yet that is exactly what this kind of knowledge is. As the late philosopher John Haugeland once pointed out, we all know that if you drop a piece of grass it will fall, and that it won’t make a sound when it lands because it is soft. We know countless things like this. Some of them are facts about the world; some are facts about norms and rules in our social lives, and some are unrecognized aspects of our conscious experiences.

One of my favorite examples of this is Jerry Seinfeld’s description to Larry King of what he likes about driving: “You’re inside but you’re outside; you’re moving, but you’re still — all at the same time.” Plenty of people relate to this. They find it true but surprising, and funny to hear it articulated for exactly those reasons. We’ve always known this about driving. That’s why it makes sense when Jerry spells it out. We just haven’t said it or thought it explicitly.

Having these kinds of things pointed out to us, as Larry David does on “Curb,” is a little bit like the experience of looking for your glasses and finding them on your nose, or looking for your keys and finding them in your hand. We laugh at ourselves in those moments because we feel like genuine buffoons. How can we miss something that is so close to us?  

There are a few philosophical theories about humor that might shed more light here.