Larry David has fashioned a celebrated career out of being an irascible, kvetchy malcontent. And after years of honing that abrasive persona on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he employs it for an ever-so-slightly more noble purpose in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness.
A sketch-comedy miniseries produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions that’s timed to the United States’ 250th birthday and boasts support from the 44th-commander-in-chief, this seven-part HBO venture 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. Despite occasional laughs, it more often than not earns dead silence.
Think of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness (June 26) as David’s version of Drunk History, with the star (who co-created and wrote it with director Jeff Schaffer) remixing famous moments from the country’s past. The issue is that there’s only one real joke in this scattershot affair, and it involves David playing the role of a nuisance, complainer, and jerk who constantly interferes with our illustrious ancestors as they strive to achieve their great feats.
In a prologue, President Obama describes such individuals as “these deeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress,” and that, along with a collection of notable cameos, more or less sums up all that follows.
There’s more in Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness from the former president, whose appearances bookend the absurdist action. As he’s demonstrated throughout his time in the public spotlight, Obama is charming and witty, and he’s an amusing presence opposite David, especially in his primary segment. Alas, its destination is so obvious that the bit ends before it truly begins—a situation that comes to define much of this silliness.
David’s Curb cohorts Susie Essman, Jeff Garlin, J.B. Smoove, Vince Vaughn, and Jon Hamm (though notably not Cheryl Hines) are along for the ride in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, as are the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill Hader, Isla Fisher, Rita Wilson, and Jerry Seinfeld. Their participation pays modest dividends, with at least a few of them creating sparks with the headliner.
The problem, however, is that David is merely doing the same old schtick, and while that familiarity will no doubt please die-hards who’ve missed him since his HBO series wrapped in 2024, it turns the proceedings predictable, reducing most sketches to dull platforms for David’s selfishness, spitefulness, and grouchiness.
HBO has forbidden discussion of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness’ specific plots and jokes, but its chapters (all prefaced with brief contextual history lessons from a famous narrator) focus on well-known incidents, be it the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Rosa Parks’ momentous bus ride, or the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
In virtually all its vignettes, David embodies a peripheral figure who, wouldn’t you know it, behaves just like Larry David, griping about the unpleasantness of sharing, generosity, and altruism. Whether at a dinner party, a political rally, a closed-door meeting, or at home with his wife, the comedian’s characters are a uniform lot, causing trouble through niggling idiocy and narcissistic unfriendliness.
I confess to chuckling a handful of times over the course of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, but the ratio of hits to misses is decidedly poor—even for sketch comedy. Worse, though, is that its conceit is unadventurous and monotonous. At every turn, David’s nudges come off as antisocial, bitter, mean, and egotistical. And they do so in a way that’s telegraphed from the sketch’s basic set-up, such that the only humor comes from those fleeting instances when an improvised back-and-forth yields an inspired line.
Of the guest stars who can be discussed, Hader and Kathryn Hahn shine brightest—no stunner given their pedigree for off-the-wall lunacy—whereas Smoove and Essman engage in bickering with David that’s as musty as their sketches’ subject matter. Rewrites or additional takes might have helped, but the bigger hitch is that David incorrectly thinks that being himself in wigs and period-specific outfits is itself the height of hilarity.
Unfortunately, it’s not, and though he sporadically tailors his jokes to the era at hand—such as those regarding churning butter and making barrels—he mainly inserts his usual hang-ups (about coasters, gift-giving, and line-cutting) into ill-fitting 18th- and 19th-century situations.
At multiple points in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, David makes thinly veiled critiques about our current 2026 reality, and though one of those features the contribution of a beloved late icon, their punchlines are foreseeable from the get-go. There’s virtually no surprise to be found here, and even less variety. Consequently, things rarely take flight, including a sketch about the Wright Brothers that, as with many others, vainly tries to generate ridiculousness from imagining the past in modern terms.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness has one governing idea from which it never deviates, as do most of its vignettes, and it quickly proves enervating. More than once, David pivots a given chapter around men finding women off-putting and undesirable, and an early riff about guys fanning themselves is strangely tone deaf.
Generally, though, the show isn’t insensitive so much as bland, content to coast along on David’s cantankerous charm and the hope that something great might materialize from these History 101 scenarios—a wish that mainly goes unfulfilled.
David’s grievances in Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness aren’t very different from those tackled by Curb, suggesting that this endeavor was just a way for him to fill the void left by his HBO comedy’s end. Considering the middling quality of David’s latest, however, it would have been shrewder to resurrect that predecessor for another season, complete with many of these supporting players.
That’s especially true in light of the fact that the series doesn’t care about history except as an anachronistic setting for David’s distinctly modern grumbles about social etiquette, independence, and obligations—all of which have been heard, in slightly different forms, since Seinfeld premiered back in 1989.
There’s no joy in saying that Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness is a disappointment, what with David being one of the country’s most uniquely cathartic comedians—an artist who gives gloriously unhinged voice to Americans’ everyday discontents. Nonetheless, this one-off is a poor vehicle for his trademark short-tempered ire, and—unlike his prior, acclaimed small-screen outings—seems destined to go down in history as merely an ill-advised footnote.
