Conservatives Freaking Out Over Larry David’s Politics Have Only Themselves to Blame

As HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm nears the end of its much-celebrated 12-season run, capping a quarter-century of creator Larry David’s fictionalized self-portrayal as a quick-to-anger misanthrope, a curious derangement seems to have gripped a certain subset of the show’s viewers. Many of them—in between whining about wokeness and evading questioning about where they were on Jan. 6—appear to be discovering for the first time that the real Larry David is not, in fact, on their side. That’s right: The Hollywood mainstay behind Seinfeld and Curb is a liberal. And those who’ve uncovered this newfound knowledge are not taking it well.

The conservative freakout over David’s politics has been brewing for a while now. Back in September, after HBO officially announced Curb’s impending return, the white supremacist–friendly host of the popular No Jumper podcast tweeted that David was now “doing the Howard Stern thing where you spend your whole life being genuinely funny and then in your final decade or two of life you become an annoying woke scold.” What prompted this lash-out? A New York Post item about a snippet from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography, detailing an incident where David confronted the Tesla CEO over his recent alignment with the GOP. Such complaints only escalated after the new season premiered in February, with a core plot line pegged to the notorious Georgia voter-suppression law that, among other things, prohibits anyone from handing water to citizens standing in line near a polling place. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, always happy to defend the worst legislation from her home state, tweeted that the “episode lied and painted GA conservatives and Trump supporters as racists and red necks and made fun of our good new law that stops the Stacey Abrams vote pandering machine and prevents voter fraud.” (Incidentally, Stacey Abrams herself has a Curb cameo praising Larry for his attempt to defy said law, and in real life, executive producer Jeff Schaffer told the Hollywood Reporter he “was thrilled” that Greene was so bitter.) The conspiratorial congresswoman wasn’t alone in responding: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger penned a snarky response to David after a Curb-loving aide asked his boss to defend the law.

Most notorious, perhaps, was David’s recent appearance on Chris Wallace’s talk show, where he denounced Donald Trump as a “sociopath” and a “sick man.” Far-right pundit Charlie Kirk commented that “ever since Donald Trump came on the scene, Larry David is not as happy of a person as he once was.” If that incoherent take proved anything, it’s that Kirk may finally be catching up to how right-leaning fans of David’s have felt ever since Trump hosted Saturday Night Live and earned a “Trump’s a racist!” jab from the comedian. After all, Larry premiered Curb Season 10 with an episode in which he dons a MAGA cap to stave off an angry biker’s road rage and, in a separate instance, merely to keep restaurantgoers from sitting next to him. The then-president shared the biker clip as an endorsement of “TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP!,” even though the episode’s message was something of the opposite—as David himself elaborated during a 2020 panel discussion when asked about possibly “alienating” Trump-loving Curb fans: “Alienate yourselves! I could give a fuck.” Happy to put this into practice in his personal life, David went on to disavow the politics of his longtime pal Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and blow up at Alan Dershowitz over the lawyer’s coziness with the Trump administration: “I saw you with your arm around Pompeo! It’s disgusting! You’re disgusting!”

Dershowitz’s reply, offered as a quote to Page Six, was revealing: He referred to David as “a knee-jerk radical” who “takes his politics from Hollywood” and “doesn’t read a lot.” Such comments, coupled with those by Kirk and by No Jumper’s Adam22, almost convey a sense of betrayal—that the man who created two of the most successful sitcoms of all time is not on their side. But they also betray deep historical ignorance and cultural illiteracy: Neither Curb nor its creator have ever made a secret of their hot-blooded liberalism, even before the era of Trump and the #resistance.

Just look back to Curb’s second season, which debuted just weeks after 9/11 and displays Larry conspicuously reading a copy of Closed Chambers, a 1998 book that blamed conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist for overseeing a Supreme Court that “discard[ed] judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results.” Or to Season 4’s “The Surrogate,” where Larry refers to famed progressive outlet the Nation as a “fabulous magazine.” Or to that season’s finale, where Larry turns down the opportunity to have sex with a Producers castmate (actress Cady Huffman, likewise portraying a fictionalized version of herself) because she’s a Republican with a massive framed photo of George W. Bush in her dressing room. Another instance when David mocked the younger Bush? Season 5’s “The Seder,” which pokes fun at a blowhard neoconservative (played by Stephen Tobolowsky) who ranks George W. Bush on par with presidential icons like Abe Lincoln and FDR. Yet another occasion: the entirety of Season 6, when Larry’s environmentalist wife, Cheryl (played, of course, by RFK Jr.’s partner, Cheryl Hines), persuades him to take in a Black family displaced by “Hurricane Edna,” the Curb universe’s counterpart to Hurricane Katrina.

All of which is to say: If the show’s conservative fans somehow think Curb wasn’t so “woke” during its Bush-era heights—a time when both the fictional and real Larry David proudly drove a Prius and talked up the “special club” to which he and his fellow hybrid enthusiasts belonged—well, I’m not sure they were watching the same show I was. They definitely weren’t paying attention to the many other liberal stalwarts who made laudatory appearances throughout the show’s run: Wanda Sykes, former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, Michael Bloomberg, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Laverne Cox. In more recent seasons, David has granted Trump admin whistleblower Alexander Vindman a cameo appearance, incorporated such liberal-media figureheads as Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist, and cast longtime lib Bruce Springsteen—who, in this past Sunday’s episode, took Larry to task for giving him a nasty case of COVID and for deadnaming a transgender character.

Of course, literal signposting in any work of art is one thing, and vibes and feelings are another. It’s not surprising conservative viewers would take to a show about a filthy rich entertainer who’s suspicious of and often gets into spats with lower-class workers: receptionists, parking lot attendants, delivery guys, waiters, housekeepers, you name it. It’s also not surprising they would enjoy Curb’s consistent (and legitimately daring) willingness to flout the boundaries imposed by polite society and elitist pieties, especially in touchy situations regarding race and class and religion and sex and sexuality and disability and celebrity. There’s perhaps no better or timelier example than “Palestinian Chicken,” the infamous 2011 episode where Larry frequents a restaurant specializing in the titular dish and romances one of its servers, to the horror of religious friends appalled that said restaurant opened up near a Jewish-owned deli. (Ironically enough, Alan Dershowitz himself thought “Palestinian Chicken” could bring peace to the Middle East and once sent Netanyahu a copy. I’m not joking.)

It was perhaps easier for right-wingers to brush aside Curb’s liberal markers when they could ignore David’s anti-Bush op-eds and otherwise appreciate moments when Larry pretended to be conservative to get into a country club (Season 4’s “The 5 Wood”), tried to categorize “anti-bald prejudice” as a hate crime (Season 2’s “Trick or Treat”), or got accused of racism because he fired a Black repairman who was actually rather incompetent (Season 3’s “The Benadryl Brownie”). Add that to later Curb narratives where Larry appears unsure of how to proposition women in the #MeToo era (Season 9’s “The Shucker”), persuades a Jewish dry cleaner to clear the stain off a Klansman’s robe (Season 11’s “The Watermelon”), and faces disaster after his fully electric BMW runs out of juice (this year’s “The Colostomy Bag”), and you can see how a certain type of Curb fan can project their neuroses and prejudices onto a cranky old man who feels the times have passed him by. Or even onto the IRL Larry David, who in real life has defended his onetime collaborator Woody Allen.

Still, such has always been the magic of Curb Your Enthusiasm—its ability to display the cloud-yelling old man, Larry David’s fictional alter ego, as a complex figure worthy of both admiration and frustration, a social pariah neither just good nor bad, but both well-intentioned and heavily flawed. Curb’s Larry says and does a lot of truly despicable things, but the show never goes easy on him for it; there’s always a foil, whether that is a stranger, a friend, a moralistic celebrity, or a spurned sex partner, willing to scold him for it. At the same time, there are several occasions where Larry is in the right, or is guilty only of an innocent mistake or mix-up or miscommunication, yet still catches grief for it. That’s less “political” or “woke” than it is just a reflection of the human experience.

Still, the point stands that Larry David—who was once married to An Inconvenient Truth’s producer, who formerly referred to himself in a HuffPost blog as a “liberal insomniac,” who stated he’d willingly choose Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump any day, who donated to Pete Buttigieg during the 2020 primary—has never hidden his political leanings, in his everyday life or on Curb Your Enthusiasm. That clearly hasn’t let up as the show itself finally wraps. It’s also not going to let up at any point in David’s post-Curb career. So if you encounter anyone who tries to claim that David has traded in real humor for unfunny virtue-signaling, you should ask them whether they’ve actually ever watched Curb Your Enthusiasm, and give them a good interrogatory stare while you’re at it.