Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter
By Larry Charles
Grand Central Publishing | 400 pages | $32.50
How could I not be intrigued by the prospect of a new memoir by Larry Charles? He’s Seinfeld at its best. “The Library”! “The Subway”! “The Bubble Boy”! He wrote all those episodes. And more. So I expected an entertaining romp through a career in comedy writing. I’d forgotten that Charles also directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentaries Borat and Brüno (both of which were intermittently droll but also unsettlingly exploitative of their unwitting targets of satire) and his movie The Dictator (which wasn’t amusing at all) as well as Bill Maher’s superficial, self-satisfied documentary Religulous.
In any event, there’s not so much as a chuckle in Comedy Samurai.
The first sign that it won’t necessarily be a laugh riot comes in the early pages, when Charles declares that he takes “a violent approach to comedy,” that he approaches it with “seriousness” and “intensity,” and that in his work he seeks out the “deeper codes of comedy.” What to think of this? Raised, as he puts it, on “the streets of Brooklyn,” Charles makes a big point of just how unpretentious he supposedly is. He doesn’t even “know how to be pretentious,” he insists. But the “deeper codes of comedy”? I’d call that a mite pretentious. And indeed, as this book progresses, we discover that Larry Charles considers himself not just a gifted joke-meister but a sort of philosopher-comic. For heaven’s sake, the biggest names in the field — Woody Allen, Mel Brooks — don’t talk about themselves that way. (RELATED: The Politics of Comedy)
Then there’s this: during his Seinfeld years, Charles was, by his own admission, “one of the strangest-looking comedy writers at that time. I … wore sunglasses more often than I should’ve …. For a long time I wore only pajamas.” Pajamas? Yes, pajamas: “Not fancy Hugh Hefner pajamas. Just sturdy reliable Everyman pajamas.” In other words, not pretentious pajamas. “Sometimes matching sets, in light blue hues, like a mental patient who had escaped from a hospital. Sometimes, plaid flannel, which made me look like a Bay City Roller. I often wore a bowler like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I also had hair and a beard each halfway down my torso. And a lot of beads.” Charles would have you believe that this bizarre look was just an aspect of his distaste for anything fancy or formal. I would submit that, on the contrary, it was a way of indicating that he was above ordinary manners and morals. Superior to mere mortals. I don’t know if it counts as pretentious, but it sure is obnoxious.
Anyway, his career. His first writing job was on the short-lived late-night sketch show Fridays. He sold gags to stand-ups. He “punched up” movie scripts. And he served on Arsenio Hall’s writing staff. The Arsenio gig gives him the opportunity to decry “institutional racism” and to assert that America is “still naturally segregated” because like seeks out like — thereby obliging the government to force change by taking “extreme measures” such as “quota systems.” Well into his thirties when he worked for Arsenio, Charles had lived in both New York and L.A., but was — surprisingly — surprised that there were “striking” differences among the individual black writers on Arsenio Hall. He hadn’t realized “how complex black society is.” He thinks most white Americans still don’t realize it. In short, he’s a fool. A fool who, like many fools in Hollywood, regards himself as a profound thinker, even though his politics are standard-issue Tinseltown leftism. (RELATED: Politically Incorrect Comedy Still Survives)
On to Seinfeld. He was the first writer hired. Co-producer Larry David, whom he’d met on Friday’s, had already written a few scripts, including “The Chinese Restaurant.” In an attempt to “get” the show, Charles “read and reread” them. But it wasn’t easy. David’s scripts “defied description.” They were about “morality, the question of ethics, questions of faith and belief, existence, ambiguity.” Displaying “a truth and honesty about human nature and life in the lower regions of both our mind and our economics,” they brought to mind “Bukowski and Pekar and even Zola and Gorky.”
Some might call the Zola and Gorky references a bit pretentious, but I’ll let it pass.
Seinfeld was, admittedly, unique. If it bore no resemblance to other sitcoms of the 1990s (Cheers, Roseanne), one reason is that the principals — David, Seinfeld, and Charles — hardly ever watched those shows. Instead, their influences were from decades earlier: Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges. The fixed rule was “No Hugging, No Learning”: “There were no false morality lessons or fake happy endings.” Charles’s own first Seinfeld script was “The Statue.” The story of its genesis was new to me. I’d forgotten that my grad-school friend John Mascaro had later been a neighbor of Larry Charles’s in West Hollywood. The idea for “The Statue,” it turns out, was from John, one of whose students had nabbed a cheap statuette from his home during a party.
Although Seinfeld was a dream gig, Charles eventually began to feel out of place. By season four, the writing staff had expanded to include “a more affluent class of writers.” The result was episodes like “The Hamptons” (which gave us “shrinkage”) and “The Smelly Car,” about a parking valet with body odor. “This was a very ‘bougie’ LA problem,” Charles writes. Indeed. Written by Larry David, that episode, aside from arguably being the series’ weakest, would’ve been a better fit on Curb Your Enthusiasm, set in L.A., than on Seinfeld, set in Manhattan.
Put off by the new vibe, Charles bailed. He spent two years at Mad About You, making it darker and more realistic. He wrote and directed a film for Bob Dylan entitled Masked and Anonymous. (Several of the comments on IMDb describe it as unfunny, pointless, and — yes — pretentious.) For a year he was executive producer of both Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Then Sacha Baron Cohen hired him to direct Borat. Charles was awed by Cohen’s acting:
In my mind, his performance took the concept of acting to another level. Well beyond the groundbreaking styles of Laurence Olivier and even Marlon Brando. No one was doing what Sacha did. No one had ever done what he did. And no one has done it since. He should’ve been nominated for an Oscar for Borat. Neither Peter Sellers nor Jim Carrey nor Christian Bale nor Joaquin Phoenix nor Daniel Day-Lewis ever even attempted anything like this. It broke all the rules with “great success.”
No, I didn’t make that up.
Borat also allows Charles to bash Americans. For the movie is about how Americans are “either completely arrogant and ignorant of anything outside their borders or a smug condescension about it.” (Yes, I copied that sentence out correctly. Charles’s prose can be incredibly sloppy.) While they were shooting in the American South, he writes, “The Confederacy reared its ugly head everywhere we went. And quite blatantly. We met antisemites and neo-Nazis and secessionists.” Yes, because they sought them out for comic purposes!
Borat was a hit. It was followed by Religulous, then Brüno. Both took Charles to the Holy Land. Writing about Maher’s movie, he sheds tears for Palestinians. For Brüno, he interviewed a terrorist from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Throughout his account of the interview, Charles puts the word terrorist in scare quotes, explaining that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” On the West Bank, we learn, he met “kind, gentle people, not terrorists, not criminals, not militants, but hardworking, peace-loving Palestinians,” who “were literally ‘imprisoned’ by the Israeli military, unable to move about freely and subject to their capriciousness of how the law was applied.”
No mention of October 7.
Charles tells us that if Brüno awakened him to the humanity of Palestinians, it exposed him, even more than Borat, to the hatefulness of Americans. In a bar on Election Day 2008, a patron told Cohen, in character as Brüno: “This is the worst day of my life. They just put a nigger in the White House.” “For me,” writes Charles, “this was America distilled in one sentence.” He seems to forget that it was Americans who elected Obama to the presidency. Twice. And that no other Western country has yet come close to electing a black head of state.
Larry Charles is 68. If he never makes another movie or TV show, it will be fair to say that his career ended not with a bang but with a whimper. He directed Cohen’s terrible, scripted picture, The Dictator, but the shoot was plagued with disagreement, and he was denied the final edit. He was supposed to direct a film adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (which “was like a walk through the dark true history of America. An almost iconoclastic Howard Zinn-ish version of our country’s trajectory and the lies that we tell ourselves”), but it fell through. He directed Nicolas Cage in Army of One — “a dark metaphor about America’s imperialistic delusions” — but again had the picture taken away from him. His director’s cut is now on YouTube.
In fact, he spends a lot of time on YouTube these days, mostly ranting about our current president. His case of Trump Delusion Syndrome rivals that of his old pal Larry David. On the 2024 election:
The media would have you believe that Trump as president is no big deal but you know better. If he is allowed and not resisted, he will further rob you of your freedoms regardless of gender or age or ethnic or racial derivation.
About COVID:
Trump killed America … He is a psychopathic serial killer we’ve allowed to run rampant. That has eluded the authorities. We can’t leave it to history to judge him. Only we can stop him.
And about — well — the entire Trump administration:
We are watching the unraveling of the world in real time. Trump, Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth and the other power hungry incompetent inept white supremacist fascist trash in charge.
He’s come so close to threatening Trump directly that I’m surprised he’s not in prison. Talk about leaving comedy behind you as far as humanly possible!
What to make of Larry Charles? He desperately wants us to see him as a rebel, a nonconformist, an enemy of the establishment — a man who, out of pure dedication to the art of comedy, has made war on commercialism and compromise, burned bridges (he’s no longer on speaking terms with either Larry David or Sacha Baron Cohen), and thereby done untold damage to his career and personal finances. In reality, he’s rich as hell, as Hollywood establishment as they come, and as reflexive in his mindless Left Coast progressivism as in the driving ambition that he tries unsuccessfully to hide. Put it this way: he tells us proudly that he considers Malibu to be “elitist and unnecessary.” He also acknowledges — rather sheepishly — that he lives there.
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