Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness

Streaming on: HBO Max

Episodes viewed: 7 of 7

Four score and seven years ago (actually, scratch that, it was October 2000), Larry David brought forth onto TV a new form of comedy, conceived in cringiness and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal — and should act as such in social situations. No stop-and-cuts in the buffet line at restaurants. No cutting the queue when arriving to see your doctor (especially if the person you’re jumping ahead of just held the door for you in the elevator). No taking too many samples at the ice cream parlour — the list goes on. Okay, the time he killed a swan on a golf course is a little harder to describe as Thomas Jefferson-esque, but on Curb Your Enthusiasm — the Seinfeld co-creator’s long-running sitcom, which finished in 2024 — David really did defend deeply held American values of fairness and what’s right. The Founding Fathers would have been prettay, prettay proud.

All of which makes Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness — the 78-year-old’s new sketch show — a somewhat fitting follow-up. Released to coincide with his nation’s upcoming 250th birthday celebrations, each skit zooms in on a pivotal moment in US history and finds pop-culture’s favourite pedant at its centre, causing chaos with history-defining ramifications. In one sketch, David is the chatty bus passenger sitting next to Rosa Parks as she attemptsthe protest that would spark a civil rights movement. In another, he’s Deep Throat, the Watergate informant who helped fell Richard Nixon. World War II, the invention of the telephone, the Lincoln assassination and everything in-between — The Pursuit Of Unhappiness skewers them all, and like the history of America itself, there are definite highs and lows.

The series’ guest stars are impressive. Barack Obama, a producer here through his Higher Ground production company, makes an appearance to introduce the show. Samuel L. Jackson narrates, while there are cameos from Bill Hader as Abraham Lincoln, Kathryn Hahn as Mary Todd Lincoln and Jon Hamm and Sean Hayes as airplane inventors the Wright Brothers. Almost the entire ensemble from Curb are here too, of course, with Susie Essman — who played Larry’s frequent arch-nemesis Susie Greene — magnificent as famous suffragette Susan B. Anthony in one of the show’s funniest vignettes. One scene set during the Great Depression, in which David discovers an acquaintance killed himself but declined to name him in his suicide note, feels like David going where he couldn’t in Curb Your Enthusiasm, with hilarious results.

There are also sketches in which The Pursuit Of Unhappiness’ period laughs bleed fascinatingly into the present day. Throughout his comic career, David has been adored by factions spread across the entire political aisle — there are those on the right, for example, that view his truth-telling ways in Curb as a riposte to left-wing political correctness. Here, though, the comic lets fly at Donald Trump and his administration in ways he hasn’t done before. Case in point — the only Curb co-star who doesn’t make an appearance here is Cheryl Hines, wife of US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and when you get to a certain sketch about the curing of polio, you’ll probably be able to surmise why.

For all those hilarious moments, however, there are sketches that drag on too long and suffer in comparison with David’s former work. Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, rather than being a declaration of independence from what came before, is a continuation of Curb’s comic style, albeit in fancy dress and broken into bitty segments. The genius of Curb was often in how storylines and jokes had a habit of coalescing at the end of episodes in surprising ways. The sketch-show format doesn’t allow David to flex that particular talent, leaving us instead with what sometimes feels like a YouTube playlist of America-themed SNL skits.