Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

“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.

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.

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.

The series can get a little repetitive — this one’s better to savor from week to week, versus stacking up as a binge. .... Every once in a while, though, it goes hard with its messaging, building to some hysterical comedy that’s also on some level a primal scream about today.

“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.

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