An article about Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David in the New Yorker. Interesting article, about his failed stand-up comic beginnings, and a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about how an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm is conceived and filmed. (Thanks to Howard Bashman for the link.)

In all honesty: I'm not a huge "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fan. I can appreciate that it's funny, I can recognize that Larry David is very talented, and very gifted at what he does, and when I watch an episode, I will usually laugh. But I find the show unsatisfying. I don't seek it out, I don't "like" to watch it. I think it's a idiosyncratic preference I find I have for television shows and movies where I like the characters. I like them to be funny, I like them to be entertaining -- but I also like to like them as people, I like to be able to identify with them, to understand them, to root for them. And the problem I have with Curb Your Enthusiasm -- and that I had with Seinfeld, and Cheers, and that I have with Frasier, for example, is that I don't like any of the characters, I don't identify with them, I don't want to know them, want to watch their lives unfold, want to see them escape from sitcom situations. When I was a kid, I liked "Doogie Howser," I liked "The Wonder Years," I liked the dorky math show on public television, "Square One" with the "MathNet" detective bits (which might not be a good illustration of the point I'm making, but good lists always come in threes). Characters that were, on their own, without the weekly plots and stories, enjoyable to watch, characters I could identify with, and could root for. I feel like that happens to me when I watch movies too. I thought "Finding Forrester" was great. No one else did. I liked "Bubble Boy." Really no one else did. At all. But in "Bubble Boy," the title character had an innocence, a naivete, a vulnerability -- I felt for him, I wanted good things to happen. I watch a movie like "American Beauty," which everyone besides me thought was amazing, and I don't like any of the characters, I don't like the world they live in, and I just don't enjoy the movie. I can't sit through the Lord of the Rings movies, the Matrix movies, anything science-fiction really, because I just can't get caught up in what's going on, I don't care about the world they're in.

All this is just to say the Larry David article is interesting, even if you're not a huge fan of his show. And also I wrote all this because I felt like sharing. :)