It is always an emotional blow to see former US president Barack Obama pop up on one’s screen. The Instagram algorithm sends me a lot of him, because it knows I always click on him being charming with babies, statesmanlike in speeches, cool at rallies, articulate and witty at anything, endlessly composed, compassionate, intelligent, handsome, thoughtful – a fully functioning adult human, if you want the short version. The algorithm does not know that I jack-knife in pain before I click and weep softly at how far we – the US sneezed, but the UK has surely caught a cold – have fallen.
And then he turns up at the beginning of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: an Almost History of America (one of the offspring of his and Michelle’s TV company, Higher Ground Productions) to remind us that on top of all that he also has immaculate comic timing. As he walks through what I assume is the new Barack Obama Presidential Center, he modulates his performance so beautifully that I almost began to softly weep again. If I’d known what a shambles was to follow after this masterclass, I would have sobbed.
Life, Larry and … is seven half-hour episodes in search of a punchline. E pluribus unum. The luckier instalments find two, maybe three. God save the rest. Each half-hour comprises three or four sketches starring Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm as Larry David doing his shtick from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Which is a slightly different and much worse thing. It is mostly shouting stuff you’ve probably heard before and put better, in period costume. In the opening episode he shouts in a powdered wig as a member of the Continental Congress who had a crack at drafting the Declaration of Independence before Jefferson. In 18th-century Larry’s hands, it was intended to deal with far more than 27 historical grievances. He wants to make it illegal to share umbrellas (“You forgot your own umbrella? Too bad!”), share desserts (for Seinfeldian double-dipping reasons) or wish anyone a happy new year after 7 January. And everyone should have the right to ask who the other guests are before they accept a dinner party invitation.
It goes on. All the sketches do. The next is about the first telephone call between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson. Both are awkward, tedious and don’t know how to finish. Another, in the third episode, about the McCarthy hearings, goes on almost as long as the witch hunts themselves.
Other sketches have Larry shouting as a first world war soldier in the trenches, trying initially to avoid agreeing to deliver a fellow fighter’s letter to his girlfriend if he dies, and then war altogether by pretending to be shot in No Man’s Land, or shouting as the third Wright brother, objecting to having to take the middle seat in their first aircraft. Again, familiar. Which wouldn’t necessarily matter – Larry David fans will be tuning in to see Larry David as Larry David – if his gifts were on full show and skewering the cowardice and hypocrisies of the human condition so we are writhing in exquisite agony with him and/or the people round him. But they are not.
A couple that touch on racism – Larry as a talkative dullard sits next to Rosa Parks on a bus and bores her back to the back; Larry as a host along the Underground Railroad who is taken advantage of by his guests who refuse to help out (on the grounds that that’s “slave stuff”) – manage to be both exercises in punch-pulling and punching down. This makes for a bad experience comedically as well as in many other ways. That said, there is one moment – when Larry the Bore asks Rosa if she would rather be robbed by a black or a white man (“Interesting, sociologically”) – when you are reminded of David at his razor-like best, distilling the essence of an array of unspeakable human complications into one line. But they are desperately few.
It’s the familiarity of the material, though, that is the most striking flaw. What’s on offer puts you in mind of HL Mencken’s definition of a hotdog – “the sweepings of the abattoir” – instead of peak Larry, especially during a sketch about Lewis and Clark with guest star Jerry Seinfeld (they’re just going on their expedition to get away from their wives! My sides!).
To an extent that the great man surely would not be happy with, Life, Larry and … depends for any success on a blend of faith and nostalgia that is almost indistinguishable from charity.
It’s worth watching the Obama introduction, though. And weeping softly.