Larry David Reimagines US History with Socially Awkward Humor

‘I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. He didn’t say that the song was “USA! USA!” backed by a klaxon and accompanied by a foam finger. For a country evangelical about its superiority, there is a dark and sizable underbelly they would prefer to ignore. A pretty big overbelly, too. Yet every society has its truth tellers – and they’re generally obnoxious types who can’t let things go.

Who better to educate America on its history, then, than Larry David? Loads of people. But none of them have a series on HBO, executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America reimagines key scenes from 250 years of US history, as if they were a series of rapidly escalating, socially awkward celebrations of epic pettiness. In other word, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in britches and bonnets. I’m excited.

Curb ended its 12-season run in 2024, with a now 78-year-old David claiming he was too old to be playing an argumentative prick every week on TV. True to his word, he’s here playing about 25 of them. His characters include Deep Throat, the shadowy informant at the heart of the Watergate scandal, a first world war soldier disgracing himself in battle, Alexander Graham Bell and a Great Depression-era destitute on the breadline. The latter are sturdy setups for anachronistic (yet ironically dated) observations of phone and queue etiquette. But it’s in the hottest parts of American history that the sketches bite harder and funnier.

David has always been drawn to heresy, the taboo conversation. The show zooms into historical moments involving Rosa Parks, Susan B Anthony and the underground railway. Sympathetic abolitionists hiding enslaved people in safe houses is a noble enterprise; that doesn’t mean both parties would escape domestic friction. These sly scenes unfold unexpectedly, but you know how they end. A puce-faced David calling someone out, or being humiliated, an explosion of sarcastic theatrics either way. The more unhinged his rants, the more we warm to him.

That’s because he’s not actually unhinged. The Larry David persona is shrewd, pernickety and committed to fairness. Modern life relies on us all swallowing indignities, getting on in order to get along – and he can’t do it. He escalates arguments and suffers consequences, losing friends and sexual opportunities. On Curb, he’s constantly being punished by doctor’s receptionists and valets. He’s insufferable, but he’s not wrong.

This is a simple sketch show draped over the scaffold of a history lesson. We get a little voiceover context for the Boston Tea Party, or the writing of the Constitution, before David and his mates pop up in funny wigs. It likely owes a debt of inspiration to Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda even appears in the series, along with a gallery of familiar stars, from Bill Hader and Jon Hamm to Kathryn Hahn and Jane Krakowski. Funny hot people, in other words.

David’s genius lifts LLATPOU: AAHOA above didacticism – or below it, I’m not sure. His social observation is acclaimed, but he’s just as captured by the absurdities of language, right down to the sonic level. (There’s a reason ‘pretty, pretty, pretty good’ is so funny, even if it isn’t rationally explicable.) Leaping haphazardly between historical scenarios, from the 1700s to 2018, gives him a new, postmodern sandpit to play in. “This gets up my dander,” he’ll throw out, mostly to amuse himself. At another point, while playing Senator Joseph McCarthy, he warns “no one sniffs out chicanery like tail gunner Joe.”

American history, and therefore politics, is no playground though. You need titanium balls to wade into it, and David is equipped. Anti-bully, he’s here to poke holes in American lore, the marching band fanfare of the credits as sarcastic as anything that comes out of his mouth. There’s a sketch in the second episode that made my jaw drop with its audacity. Barack Obama appears too, like everyone’s cool dad who’s not angry, just disappointed. More than old-timey fun, the show holds an antique mirror to the USA of today, and finds what it sees … pretty, pretty, pretty bad.