EMPEROR OF NOTHING

How ‘Seinfeld’ Became Absolute ‘Torture’ for Larry David

The show’s co-creator once said he’d “rather spend a year in prison” than make another season.

Seinfeld was total agony for Larry David, his biographer reveals in a new interview on Obsessed: The Podcast.

The comedian, 79, created the iconic sitcom with Jerry Seinfeld. The show was ultra-successful, running for nine seasons, collecting 10 Emmy Awards, and solidifying its status as a cultural mainstay.

But David’s anxiety meant that, before the start of Season 5, he said he would “rather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld,” his biographer, Blake J. Harris, revealed.

Harris’ biography, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David, profiles the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and chronicles his prolific comedy career. A thread throughout the narrative is the pressure that came with David’s success, from both external and internal factors.

His “prison” claim “hints at how torturous it was for him to run Seinfeld,” Harris said. “That torture largely came from the pressure he put on himself to come up with good ideas, which is a constant theme in the book.”

After reading a draft of the biography, David told the author, “I think we’ve done too much of this—of me being anxious and worried about coming up with ideas.”

Harris replied, “No, we haven’t, ’cause that’s all anyone talks about.”

In the book, Harris wrote that David’s stress ultimately stemmed from his “affection” for Seinfeld.

“To him, every second of every episode needed to hit a certain caliber of quality and trying to clear that bar—day after day after day—seemed unsustainable,” he wrote. “Or put more succinctly, as one of Larry’s future Seinfeld colleagues would later tell The Hollywood Reporter, ‘[Larry’s] so consumed with perfection that doing episodes is as painful for him as passing kidney stones.’”

“It was agony for him,” David’s lawyer and close friend Lloyd Braun tells him in the book. “Because he had such high standards. And the amount of work that he had to do was absolutely relentless. So it was very hard for him to enjoy it, even though I’m sure he and Jerry had an absolute blast a lot of the time.”

Jerry Seinfeld’s can-do attitude offset David’s anxiety, Harris explained. When the network’s demands made David tense, Seinfeld could calm him down. David was largely “uncompromising,” Harris said. Seinfeld is “definitely much more optimistic and idealistic than Larry in this regard,” he continued, which helped give David perspective.

“Jerry’s the kind of guy who’s always like, ‘We can figure it out, I’ll figure out how to do this,’” Harris told Obsessed. “Whereas Larry’s like, ‘No, how are we gonna come up with 24 episodes? This is crazy. It can’t work; it’s too hard.’”

Seinfeld would often tell David to “take it one day at a time,” Harris said, and to focus on an individual episode rather than the entire season. He had “a knack for bringing the best out of Larry,” Harris wrote.

“That’s one of the interesting things about Larry’s life story,” Harris said. “You see in this book that Larry is a singular talent. He’s a one-of-one. He is, in my mind, the greatest storyteller and greatest comedian of the past half century or the history of television. But I don’t think that he would have been nearly as successful if he didn’t have Jerry to be that yin to his yang.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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