Larry Charles Dishes on ‘Curb,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘Borat’ and Life

Larry Charles has what might be the single most impressive comedy résumé of any American. As a writer and sometimes director on Fridays, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he outstripped even the writer of those classics, his mentor and frequent benefactor, Larry David, because Charles also helmed Borat, Bruno, Entourage and Mad About You.

Comedy Samurai is at its most readable and most useful when Charles details his thoughts, quite profound in spots, of how pain and discomfort contribute to comedy. It’s no surprise that his primary influences are not just comedians like the Marx Brothers but great American writers who really suffered like Charles Bukowski and Harvey Pekar. Charles consistently advocates for marginalized Americans, their humanizing of freakish characters. That sensibility finds its way into Charles-written episodes of Seinfeld like “The Limo,” with its Aryan Union terrorists — heavy stuff for a network sitcom.

Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter  
By Larry Charles
Grand Central Publishing; 397 pages

There’s plenty of juicy Hollywood dish in Comedy Samurai, as well. Charles made his reputation as someone who doesn’t give a fuck. For years, he wore pajamas everywhere, including to important meetings with important people. So it should come as no surprise that he’s willing to discuss exactly what an asshole he thinks Sacha Baron Cohen turned into after his early success – even as Charles admires Baron Cohen’s devotion to his craft so much that he thinks Borat should have not only won Cohen an Academy Award, but caused the renaming of that award from Oscar to Sacha.

By the time Charles is directing The Dictator, he claims that Baron Cohen’s ego had gotten so out of control that he could not tolerate any of the supporting actors getting a funny line.

“I would shoot scenes with Sacha and Jason Mantzoukas and with people like Fred Armisen, John C. Reilly, and JB Smoove doing hilarious and potentially classic scenes with Sacha that crackled with the kind of comic energy the movie was starved for, only to see their roles wind up being cut down into straight men and foils for Sacha in editing. It was disheartening to witness this process.”

That frankness makes Comedy Samurai a lively read. Elsewhere, Charles’ willingness to detail exactly how treacherous Ari Emanuel could be feels like straight talk from someone who’s not really worried about damaging his career. And as the director of many of the best episodes of Entourage, the show in which Ari Emanuel doppelgänger Ari Gold provided the show’s electricity — Charles oughta know. Emanuel is also the villain of a hilarious scene in which he and Lloyd Braun phone Charles at 8 AM and simultaneously scream at him about his planned Larry David documentary, a film that ends up putting the final nail in the strained friendship between the two brilliant Larrys.

Emanuel is not the only power player subject to Charles’ eye for What Makes Sammy Run perfidy. Talent manager Dave Becky of 3 Arts has long courted Larry and sung his praises. But when Larry needs him to go to bat when Bob Weinstein is utterly ruining Charles’ cut of Army of One, Becky literally ghosts him. Becky simply won’t return his client’s calls in his eagerness not to offend half of the powerful Weinstein brotherhood.

Charles is not precise with his language the way Jerry Seinfeld and especially Larry David are. For example, in describing his time as showrunner, he writes “Mad About You, like most comedies, was required to have a happy albeit hopefully well-earned happy ending.” That repetition of the word would never occur unintentionally in a Larry David script, where shrinkage, yada-yada-yada, spongeworthy and pretty pretty good all became indelible catch phrases. Other word choices are imprecise conceptually. He describes a blackberry as a social media device; that’s wrong but it provides a valuable insight into how much the tech-averse Charles values old-fashioned human connection.

Meanwhile, he’s more than capable of turning a memorable phrase himself. In describing the need to create settings for Borat’s confrontational comedy, which could sometimes go off the rails in a dangerous way, Charles writes, “We didn’t ‘scout’ a location, we ‘cased’ it.”

Many of the book’s most tiresome moments occur when Charles leans on the same liberal politics that render Larry David’s work so dated at times. When a homeless crack addict wanders into his daughter’s Halloween party and smashes the stained glass window of his 1911 house in Hollywood, she is not to blame; the fault lies with Ronald Reagan.

That’s perfectly on brand for a counter-culture type with a ZZ Top beard but, coming 40 years after Reagan, it sounds as comically out of step as the episode of Curb when Larry David can’t follow through on his 10-year anniversary hall pass with Cady Huffman after discovering she was a George Bush voter. This is all in the section, by the way, where Charles describes leaving Hollywood for Bel-Air.

It’s the classic take on America by a progressive elite. Charles travels across the country virtually unfettered, films scene after scene critical of the powerful and endures no consequences. He is showered with wealth and fame and yet concludes that America is “A dark, angry, hateful, violent place filled with deeply held prejudices and simmering resentment. All of which we’ve now seen come to the surface with the success of Donald Trump.”

Charles’ distrust of America and hatred for Trump is so extreme that as with many detractors, it results in cloudy overreactions. During the making of the 4-part Netflix show Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy, its creator holds that one must be “skeptical” of “simplistic explanations” that blame the “so-called terrorist group al-Shabaab” for the many crises consuming Somalia. Charles attributes the violence and disorder more to “a mysterious American military and business presence there that only made things worse.” Yep, it’s America’s fault, not the Al Qaeda-aligned Islamist group that, for just one example among many, killed 587 people in Mogadishu with a suicide truck bombing.

On much firmer ground is Charles’ encyclopedic knowledge of oddball American and world media. When Larry David’s down-the-hall neighbor, Jeff Garlin, suggests that Larry film his post Seinfeld return to stand-up comedy, Charles conceives of the project by citing the seminal silent 1922 documentary feature Nanook of the North and the work of French ethnographer Jean Rouch.

Referring to his work with Bob Dylan, with whom Charles created the truly original Masked and Anonymous, he discusses what Harold Bloom characterized as the “anxiety of influence” — the struggle to create something beyond the work of those who’ve shaped one’s own. Charles himself is enormously generous in crediting Larry David and other mentors such as David Steinberg, while modestly downplaying the enormous influence his own writing and directorial style have had on an entire generation of TV makers and onto today’s “auditors” who create content for YouTube by being outrageous.

In fact, that’s a blind spot in Charles’ reflection.

As reflective and thoughtful as Charles is about what makes Borat funny and also what makes it relatable, he fails utterly to turn that introspection on the dubious morality of using well-meaning ordinary folks’ good intentions against them. And again, the elitism at the heart of so much of Borat’s humor goes unmentioned.

Charles describes the famous nude fight in hilarious detail, including the mask Baron Cohen used to prevent Azamat’s balls from hanging too far in his face. The mask later mysteriously disappears but Charles won’t let Baron Cohen tap out — anything to nail the scene. He describes how important it is to the movie for viewers to see Borat searching the country alone. That’s well observed about how drama works.

Less well reflected upon is whether it’s right to go into a mega church and tell the parishioners that Borat is spiritually bankrupt and ask them to pray for him. And the worshipers do so, with real heart. What fools and rubes these well-meaning Midwesterner are!

It’s a cheap shot and an elitist one that looks down on the good intentions of a subculture Baron Cohen and Charles find worthy of lampooning. I thought it was mean then, and I think so now, and I thought the same even when they’re punching up by tricking Rudy Giuliani, then 76 years old, into behaving in an unflattering way for the sequel (not directed by Charles). This is stupid shit and I don’t love it in Borat and I don’t love it when some underling at the EPA who matches on Tinder is tricked into bragging about his agency and loses his job.

The way Charles tells it, makes it perfectly clear that he thinks each Baron Cohen movie was meaner and less funny than the last. Charles details exactly how Baron Cohen stopped trusting his own and his director’s comedic instincts and started dial testing each joke. Literally having staffers measure how test audience is responded to each gag. Charles paints him as the Frank Luntz of comedy and it’s just so unfortunate when one considers the early electricity of Ali G and Borat. Charles remains complimentary even as he’s describing Baron Cohen’s cruelty and insecurity and need to be the only comedic focal point. In fact, to my mind, the only worthy thing Baron Cohen has created since the first Borat was his portrayal of Eli Cohen in The Spy, a straight acting job with no humor where he revealed just how talented he is when he’s not being such an asshole.

By the time we get to Charles describing the shooting of Bruno, there’s too little theory of comedy and too much detail of how each shot was obtained. Almost all involved humiliating the bystanders. It’s an embarrassing and punishingly dull catalog of punching down, justified because the targets are white supremacists, religious Jews, or other inferiors, and therefore fully deserving the wrath of Hollywood royalty.

Stories about various people who are made uncomfortable by his homoerotic comments are related as though he were shooting Citizen Kane. Some of the stories are indeed hilarious. But the overall effect is of learning too much about movies that ultimately don’t mean that much. Surprisingly, some of the book’s best parts are actually those deep dives into the details. The description of Baron Cohen firing his longtime costumer Jason Alper and hiring Albert Wolsky simply because Albert had a more impressive résumé is oddly gripping. Ultimately, just as Charles’s movies with Baron Cohen themselves, this book would’ve benefited from a really good editor.

(Oddly enough, one of his only projects Charles doesn’t mention is Dilbert, the animated series he co-created with Scott Adams; hard not to wonder if Adams’ rightward turn explains its absence from an otherwise exhaustive career catalog.)

It’s not until chapter 14 that we get the first glimpses of introspection, and by then they feel a bit too late. His career has already blossomed, his marriage has cratered. The revelations flood in with some real wisdom and self-flagellation, but one gets the sense that Charles believes a creative person must choose between uncompromising art and being a decent human being. That might be true, and Charles makes a convincing case, both in this book and over the course of his remarkable career. But it’s a sad reality.