Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

You don’t have to be anhedonic to embrace “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America,” the seven-episode limited sketch comedy series that Larry David cooked up with that beacon of hope and culture maven President Barack Obama. Oddly enough, with the help of co-creator Jeff Schaffer, they make beautiful comedy together.

Even though such familiarity has been known to breed contempt, David’s cringe-inducing brand of confrontational contempt more often than not provides a refreshing bite of irreverence that in its own take-no-prisoners way is as patriotic if not as uplifting as the latest Ken Burns dissertation.

What I will tell you is that it’s pretty, pretty, pretty funny. It’s not “Drunk History,” it’s “Cringe History.”

As with most sketch shows, some sketches hit and some miss, but David’s batting average here is decent (unless a viewer really tires of his style of humor).

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” always excelled when sweating the small stuff. “Life, Larry” is no different, even though it has the potential for far larger stakes than its antecedent. Those stakes are best deployed for clarifying contrast, as when David’s James Buchanan is more concerned with introducing the newfangled concept of passed apps than addressing the brewing secession crisis.

The show is safer and less inventive than his best work. Still, there’s fun to be had in this time machine whose ultimate destination is dad-joke heaven.

“Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” is far from an innovative in its approach to poking fun at American history, and its lengthy sketches can grow tiring as they plod toward their expected conclusions. But .... Watching the Larry we know and love shuffling through time, arguing with presidents and generals, is funny — and during the roughest sketches, he’s still funny enough.

There’s still plenty in Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness to admire and David is clearly having a star-spangled blast. But these are lightweight laughs compared to what the Curb creator is capable of.

You know who the good and the bad guys are, and who you’re meant to be rooting for, even if the answer is frequently no one. In other words, it all feels a little safe. If David isn’t quite apologizing for loosing his self-interested monsters upon the world, he seems intent on making sure we know we’re supposed to be laughing at and not with them.

While the sketches in Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness sound great on paper, many feel a little tame in the execution. One problem is the format. .... It all feels too tightly scripted.

The dialogue of Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness has the shaggy, off-the-cuff feel of Curb, or Schaffer’s fantasy-football comedy The League—but within the confines of a sketch, there’s no time to meander toward the type of explosive conclusions that those shows could sometimes reach.

Larry David throws comic darts at 250 years of American history. What a shame his aim is off. Prettaaay prettaaay good, it’s not.

It's pretty, pretty mediocre.

It manages to turn great events of history into mundane observational comedy.

Sometimes it's funny. Most of the time, unfortunately, it's just cringey.

The things here that don’t remind you of Curb Your Enthusiasm will probably remind you of Drunk History or Hulu’s semi-recent History of the World, Part II.

Some of it is pretty, pretty, pretty good. And some of it plays like a group of friends getting together to do interminable improv bits keyed to the stubbornly broad and diffuse subject of U.S. history.

Takes a simple premise—what if David annoyed people throughout American history?—and hammers viewers over the head with it for thirty minutes at a time.

There’s just naive optimism that David doing what David does best—ranting about indignities none of us could dream of—will suffice in the absence of sharp comedy.

Life, Larry and … is seven half-hour episodes in search of a punchline.

There are outrageous bits that work. Others that begin well and then fall over: Mr. David does a fairly dead-on impersonation of Joseph McCarthy, but the sketch has nowhere else to go and so turns frantic. Others begin awkwardly and end well. .... They have little sense of direction, though. Likewise, “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness.”

Larry David's HBO sketch comedy "Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness" saddles an all-star comedy cast with flimsy material and recycled jokes.