Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy

Edited by Mark Ralkowski

Popular Culture and Philosophy® series

In one of HBO’s promotional videos for the eighth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David appears as Godzilla, walking through the streets of New York City, terrorizing everyone who sees him. People scream and run for their lives. Larry, meanwhile, has a quizzical look on his face and asks, “What, are you people nuts?”

There’s something very apt about this image. It captures one of Larry’s defining characteristics. But what exactly is it? What makes Larry a monster, and why doesn’t he know that he’s a monster? Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy discusses philosophical answers to these questions.

Most of Curb Your Enthusiasm revolves around Curb-Larry, the character that the real Larry David plays on HBO’s popular television series Curb Your Enthusiasm: his values and outlook on life, his unusual ways of interacting with people, his inability or unwillingness to conform to the world, and his relationships with others, including the real Larry David who plays him.

Some of the chapters discuss ethical and existential issues, such as whether Larry is a “bad apple” or perhaps worth emulating. Others talk about sexuality, religion, and race relations. There’s a chapter on enthusiasm itself, another on giving gifts, and one on the philosophical significance of Larry’s piercing stare into other people’s eyes.

Larry is not a typical philosopher: he doesn’t ask questions about free will, or wonder whether the world outside our minds really exists. But that’s only because he’s more like Socrates than Descartes. Larry is a philosopher of the everyday. He describes us, and he tries to liberate us. He questions the value of our values, and recommends new ones. He tells us bitter truths about the way we live our lives, and he says and does the things that most of us wish we could. There’s something heroic about his independence from social conventions, and there’s something tragic about his tendency to hurt people with his frankness, which is rarely malicious.

In the end, though, Larry is a healer. As he turns our world upside down, trivializing what we find important and obsessing over things we find trivial, he offers us consolation. He shows us that it’s okay to be a monster. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy tries to figure out whether that should concern us. It also helps fans make sense of Larry David's world.

Mark Ralkowski is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Honors at The George Washington University. He is author of Heidegger's Platonism (2009) and editor of Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude (2005).