Seinfeld, Jerry

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      The Best Laughs on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Have Always Been Larry’s Own

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      For almost 25 years, Larry David has charmed us with his knowing mischief and endearing jolliness.As the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David has been ambling in and out of view for almost 25 years, playing a version of himself whose odyssey is now winding to a close: This month, the show began its 12th and final season, concluding a run that started in the last days of the Clinton administration. David has also, in a more colloquial sense, played himself. “Curb” sends up his celebrity, rendering him a tetchy caricature whose showbiz success has granted him time enough at last to enjoy the pettier things in life. This “Larry” is a gadfly who goads others, and himself, into fits of rancor. Yet he’s also gregarious, the type for whom every car ride is an occasion to discuss, say, the serenity of gardeners or a possible link between the words “yoga” and “yogurt.” In “Curb,” discomfort has always been made tolerable by such frivolity, and by the knowing mischief of David’s performance. At its heart is the signature of David’s screen persona: his own irrepressible laughter. “I am laughing constantly when we’re shooting,” David once said in an interview with the journalist Bill Carter. He extemporizes a lot too: The actors on “Curb” largely improvise their way through scenes, following basic outlines. This accounts for the show’s charming strangeness, its relaxed approach to dialogue and narrative incident. As one of the show’s executive producers, Jeff Schaffer, recently explained, David “wants to be surprised” while filming — and if his reactions “seem like real laughs, they’re real laughs, because Larry’s hearing it for the first time, too.”In other shows, these moments might constitute “breaking,” disruptions to the reality of the scene that are usually edited out. On “Curb,” too, many of David’s reactions have become outtakes. But some remain in the show itself, roiling its mixture of absurdities and half-truths. There is an artful, unstudied naturalism to David’s acting, which makes the boundaries between real laughs and stylized ones elusive. The viewer looks for a telltale sign, some jolt of spontaneity — which is just what David’s most authentic laughs provide. At such moments he’s still Larry David, tactless noter of peccadilloes. But you can also detect an overlapping spectacle: Larry David himself, openly appreciating the comedic inventions of his scene partners. Or even, sometimes, his own. In Season 4, we watch him rehearse how he might request some baseball tickets from a friend whose father recently passed away. “I know you’re still in mourning,” he begins — but he’s quickly cut off by the familiar sound of his own chortling, a kind of protracted, gut-punch wheeze.His biggest reactions combine the toothy luster of dentistry ads with the unstoppable giddiness common to pot-addled youths. The only inducement he needs is a bit of banter. In Season 7, Jerry Seinfeld, with whom David famously created a hit sitcom, guest-stars as himself. After overhearing the clamor of David’s urination, a baffled Seinfeld registers his astonishment: “I’ve never heard a — a stream like that.” David’s response: an eruption of hearty, jaw-trembling laughter. His laughter is so robust, so distinct, that other stars trade stories and impressions. “He laughs so hard at stuff,” the actor Bill Hader once marveled on Conan O’Brien’s podcast. “Like if you just started yanking on the cord of a ventriloquist dummy, up and down,” O’Brien replied. “That’s his laugh.” The same endearing jolliness distinguished “Seinfeld.” In his own self-performance, Seinfeld often seemed delighted by his colleagues, and by the ridiculous opportunities the show afforded its cast. He made many scenes funnier simply by acknowledging their silliness. In one episode, he cannot keep a straight face while being scolded by an improbably intense “library investigations officer.” Nor can he hide his smile in “The Diplomat’s Club” as his supposedly harried character announces that he is “freaking out.” There’s a difference between a thoughtfully airy performance and a carelessly bad one, and in both “Curb” and “Seinfeld,” a measure of informality becomes something felicitous. Each show offers up endless varieties of pique and mendacity — all of which you learn to laugh off. Seinfeld and David do not anchor their shows so much as cut the ropes and let them drift free. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Quiz: Do You Respect ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’?

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      Photo credits: HBO (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”); NBC (“Seinfeld”); Craig Barritt/Getty Images (Elmo); Albert Ceolan /De Agostini Picture Library, via Getty Images (St Benedict amongst Angels, detail from The Glory in Heaven, 1746, by Johann Jakob Zeiller); Peter Dazeley/Getty Images (snakes); James Warwick/Getty Images (zebra); Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (Moamer Kadhafi); Paramount (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”); Shawn Thew/EPA, via Shutterstock (Bernie Sanders); Universal Pictures (“Back to the Future”); Kenny Holston/The New York Times (Sanders); Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images (Sanders)Produced by Sean Catangui, Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli and Josephine Sedgwick More

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      George Shapiro, Talent Manager Who Pushed for ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 91

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      He left his job as an agent in the 1970s to guide the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Carl Reiner and other comics.George Shapiro, an ebullient Hollywood talent manager who nurtured and oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 91.His family announced the death in a statement.Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Mr. Seinfeld, whom he signed as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980. He lobbied NBC to build a series around him and was an executive producer of the hugely popular “Seinfeld” sitcom.“He was the only person to read every draft of every episode of the series and was very critical as they went from first draft to shooting draft,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview. “He was the only one who really knew what we were doing.”He added: “The bond between George and I was, we thought show business was the greatest thing invented by man, and we couldn’t get enough.”Mr. Shapiro was also an executive producer of Mr. Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which is on hiatus.A schmoozer who loved to be on sets, Mr. Shapiro was a partner for more than 40 years with his childhood friend Howard West in their talent management firm Shapiro/West & Associates.As managers, they oversaw and protected their clients interests by being executive producers of various projects, including “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” (1977), starring and co-written by Marty Feldman; “Summer Rental” (1985) and “Sibling Rivalry” (1990), which Mr. Reiner directed; and two TV specials starring Mr. Kaufman.Mr. Shapiro first watched Mr. Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in 1978, despite the comedian’s reluctance.“They already had the character of Latka. And, of course, Andy did this Foreign Man character, so it was a perfect match,” Mr. Shapiro told Newsday in 1999. “Taxi,” too, was a hit.Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.He was soon promoted to agent, with a salary of $38 a week, before eventually moving to the company’s Los Angeles office, where he specialized in packaging mid-1960s TV series like “Gomer Pyle — USMC” and “That Girl” with the actors, writer and directors represented by William Morris.But Mr. Shapiro disliked being responsible for so many clients, and so in 1973 he started his own management firm to focus on a few preferred ones. Mr. West, with whom he had worked at William Morris, soon joined him, and they ran Shapiro/West & Associates until Mr. West’s death in 2015.To push for a sitcom for Mr. Seinfeld, Mr. Shapiro sent numerous letters to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment. The nudging eventually led to a meeting with Mr. Tartikoff and other network executives at which Mr. Seinfeld laid down a firm rule.“Jerry made one thing clear,” Mr. Shapiro told the Television Academy. “He said, ‘I’m not going to play a shoe salesman or an accountant or a father with a job.’ And he came up with the premise of the series, that he would play himself.”In recent years, Mr. Shapiro produced “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” (2017), a documentary in which Mr. Reiner talked to nonagenarians like Betty White and Dick Van Dyke, and “The Super Bob Einstein Movie” (2021), about the comic actor and writer known for his ongoing television portrayal of Super Dave Osborne, a hapless parody of a daredevil.Mr. Shapiro is survived by his former wife, Melody (Sherr) Shapiro, from whom he was divorced; his daughters, Carrie Shapiro Fuentes and Stefanie Shapiro; a son, Danny; five grandchildren; and his brother. His marriage to Diane Barnett ended with her death in 2005.Mr. Reiner’s son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, said Mr. Shapiro had been a nurturer, professionally and personally.“He loved my dad, he looked up to him — he was like a father to him,” said Mr. Reiner, whose company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced “Seinfeld.” “George loved being around my dad, and when he started getting older, he’d come over to the house and walk him around the block. That’s the thing you need to know about George: He took care of everybody.” More

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      'Friends Reunion': How the Sitcom Helps People Learn English

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      Language teachers say the show is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from the West Village.True or false: In the television show “Friends,” Monica Geller was invited to Rachel Green’s wedding.The question is part of an English lesson for international students in San Jose, Calif., that is based entirely on the show’s pilot episode. It was designed by Elif Konus, a teacher from Turkey who once binge-watched “Friends” to improve her own English.The class, and the teacher’s TV habits, illustrate an international phenomenon that emerged in the 1990s and has endured across generations: Young people who aren’t native English speakers appear to enjoy learning the language with help from the hit sitcom.Seventeen years after the final “Friends” episode, students and educators say that the show, still seen widely in syndication around the world, works well as a learning resource. The dad jeans and cordless telephones may look dated, but the plot twists — falling in love, starting a career and other seminal moments in a young person’s life — are still highly relatable.“It’s really entertaining compared to other sitcoms, and it addresses universal issues,” Ms. Konus, 29, said by telephone from her home in Monterey, Calif. “The themes, if you ask me, speak to everyone.”Over the years, several prominent celebrities have said that they learned English from “Friends.” The list includes Jürgen Klopp, the German soccer coach who helms Liverpool in the English Premier League; a number of Major League Baseball players whose first language is Spanish; and Kim Nam-joon, the leader of the South Korean pop group BTS.“I thought I was kind of like a victim at that time, but right now, I’m the lucky one, thanks to my mother,” Mr. Kim, who performs under the stage name RM, told the television host Ellen DeGeneres in 2017. “She bought all the seasons.”The “Friends” reunion episode that premiered Thursday on HBO Max included a cameo by the members of BTS and scenes from the show that had been translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. Fans around the world, from Ghana to Mexico, also reminisced about how the show helped them cope with personal dilemmas or tragedies.‘“Friends” just seems to have the magic something.’Measuring the popularity of “Friends” as a teaching resource is an inexact science because so many people watch it outside of formal classrooms. But educators, academic studies and page-view data suggest that the show still has a wide following among English-language learners.“I’ve been on YouTube for 13 years and I have not been posting ‘Friends’ content the whole time,” said Rachel Smith, the founder of the learning site Rachel’s English, based in Philadelphia. “But I’ve definitely never sensed that the time for it has passed.”In one apparent sign of that, “Friends”-based learning videos that Ms. Smith posted in 2019 have received significantly more views per day on average — 839 — than those featuring other shows or movies, she said. After the United States, the most popular markets for her videos as a whole are Vietnam, India, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea.Other seminal American TV shows can serve a similar learning function, Ms. Smith said, but they tend to be too particular for nonnative English speakers. The humor in “Seinfeld” is a bit too gritty and New York-specific, for example, while “The Big Bang Theory” could come across as too much of a “scientific nerd thing.”“Other shows do work,” she said. “‘Friends’ just seems to have the magic something that is even more attractive.”Fans and educators on three continents echo the sentiment, saying that “Friends” is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan’s West Village.Kim Sook-han, 45, known in South Korea for her YouTube videos about teaching herself English, said that the show helped her understand the basics of American culture, including which holidays are celebrated in the United States, as well as how people there deal with conflicts between friends and family members.“My favorite character is Monica because I think we have similar personalities,” she added. “She is very meticulous and clean and always insists on using a coaster because she hates when a cup leaves water stains on a table.”A few fans said they could pinpoint precisely when and where they saw “Friends” for the first time.Ms. Konus was teaching English at a military academy in Ankara, Turkey, six years ago when she noticed that her roommate kept laughing while watching “Friends” on a laptop. Ms. Konus began watching “nonstop,” she said, and learned far more about English than she had in years of grammar-based classes.Jamie Ouyang, 30, discovered the show during her last year of high school in south-central China when she bought a box set in her hometown, Changsha, for about $15. She was hooked from the first episode, in which Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston, meets the other characters in a wedding dress after abandoning her groom at the altar.Ms. Ouyang, who attended college in Ohio and now works as a film producer in Beijing, said that “Friends” gave her the confidence to make small talk with Americans. It was comforting, she added, to see Rachel make grammatical errors on her résumé.“But Rachel also grew a lot: She did well at her job and found her own path,” Ms. Ouyang said. “Over time, I noticed that people stopped teasing her about her grammar. I paid close attention to that.”Language teaching has changed in recent years.“Friends” may have endured as a teaching tool in part because the internet has made it accessible to new generations of fans. YouTube, especially, allows nonnative speakers to watch clips without having to, say, buy pirated DVDs under a bridge, as Ms. Ouyang did in China 12 years ago.Another reason, said Ángela Larrea Espinar, a professor in the department of English studies at the University of Córdoba in Spain, is that people who teach foreign languages have gradually shifted over the last two decades from a “communicative” approach that emphasizes grammar to one that encourages cross-cultural understanding and reflection.“Culture is a difficult thing to teach, and if you rely on textbooks what you get is stereotypes,” she said.To avoid the textbook trap, Ms. Konus, the English teacher in California, built lesson plans around the sitcom’s 1994 pilot episode. In addition to the question about whether Monica, played by Courteney Cox, was invited to Rachel’s wedding (answer: false), there are exercises that ask students to analyze scenes, idioms and character motivations.Why, for example, does Rachel breathe into a paper bag? And what does Monica mean when she tells Joey Tribbiani, played by Matt LeBlanc, to “stop hitting on” her friend? (Answers: “She is scared of her decision about living on her own” and, “to try to start a conversation with someone that you are interested in.”)Ms. Konus said that her students — who are from Brazil, China, Colombia, Japan, South Korea and Turkey — generally like the “Friends” lessons and end up binge-watching the show on their own. They also slip lines from it into conversation, including Joey’s signature “How you doin’?” greeting, and mimic the depressive way in which David Schwimmer’s character, Ross Geller, says “Hi.”After one class, a Turkish student observed that her teacher’s English sounded not quite native, but also “not Turkish.” Ms. Konus said she took the comment as high praise.How, the student asked, could one hope to reach the same level of English proficiency?“Just watch ‘Friends’ and try to imitate the characters,” Ms. Konus told her. “You’ll get there.”Amy Chang Chien More

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      Richie Tienken, Whose Comedy Club Propelled Careers, Dies at 75

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRichie Tienken, Whose Comedy Club Propelled Careers, Dies at 75At the Comic Strip, which Mr. Tienken and two partners opened in 1976, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld and many others made a lot of people laugh.Richie Tienken onstage at the Comic Strip in Manhattan in an undated photo. He and two partners opened the club in 1976, and a long list of careers began or were advanced there.Credit…via Tienken familyMarch 6, 2021, 3:25 p.m. ETRichie Tienken, a founder of the influential Manhattan comedy club the Comic Strip, where Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and countless other leading comics did some of their earliest work, died on Feb. 27 in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 75.His wife, Jeannie Tienken, confirmed his death and said the cause had not been determined. In recent years, he had struggled with throat cancer.In the mid-1970s, Mr. Tienken, who owned several bars in the Bronx, went to see one of his bartenders, an aspiring comic, perform at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star, which was in Manhattan at the time. It was a Monday night — normally a slow one in the bar business — and Mr. Tienken was impressed by how packed Catch a Rising Star was, as told in his 2012 book, written with Jeffrey Gurian, “Make ‘Em Laugh: 35 Years of the Comic Strip, the Greatest Comedy Club of All Time!”In a telephone interview, Mr. Tienken’s son Richie said another business fact was not lost on Mr. Tienken: At the time, comics weren’t generally paid (though the Comic Strip did eventually start paying modest amounts).“He was paying bands $400 a night” at his bars, the younger Mr. Tienken said. He did the math, and he decided that opening a comedy club to compete with Catch a Rising Star and the Improv, the only other prominent comedy club in Manhattan at the time, could be profitable.He and his partners settled on a run-down bar on Second Avenue between 80th and 81st Streets.“The place was old — really old,” Mr. Tienken wrote in the book. “But the bathrooms were in place, which meant that the plumbing was all in.”The Comic Strip (now known as Comic Strip Live) opened in 1976, and a long list of careers began or were propelled along there.“Richie Tienken’s club gave me my start in comedy,” Mr. Seinfeld, who first performed there in 1976, said through a spokesman. “And he had a wonderful, fatherly way about him that gave us all a feeling of encouragement as we stumbled around his stage trying to figure out how to do it. We all loved seeing him every night, and he took good care of us.”Mr. Tienken, second from left, with, from left, the comedians Jimmy Brogan, Jerry Seinfeld and Mark Schiff. “Richie Tienken’s club gave me my start in comedy,” Mr. Seinfeld said.Credit…via Tienken familyMr. Seinfeld returned to the club to perform a 2017 Netflix special, “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” in which he included the first jokes he told from the Comic Strip stage.Mr. Murphy, soon to achieve stardom on “Saturday Night Live,” was another comic who honed his stand-up at the club in its early days. Mr. Tienken and one of his co-founders, Robert Wachs, managed him for a time, and they both had producer credits on some of Mr. Murphy’s movies.A somewhat later group included Adam Sandler, Ray Romano and Mr. Rock, who wrote the introduction for “Make ‘Em Laugh” and compared comedy clubs like Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip to colleges for young stand-ups.“Catch was Yale, and the Strip was Illinois State University, Urbana,” he wrote. “Catch was stressful, like you were always on the verge of being expelled if you didn’t keep up your grades. The Strip was laid back. If you put in the work and studied, you would do well. But if you blew off a term smoking pot, it didn’t go on your permanent record.”And Mr. Tienken?“He had powerful shoulders and was genial,” Mr. Rock wrote, “like a bouncer who babysat on the side.”Richard John Tienken was born on June 11, 1945, in Manhattan. His father, John, was an electrician, and his mother, Helen, was a homemaker and also worked in a department store.He left home at 13, he said — he had stolen a car, and when reform school loomed, he hit the road to avoid it. His father was surprisingly supportive when he announced his plans.“He said, ‘After looking into them’” — that is, reform schools — “‘I understand; here’s 50 bucks,’” Mr. Tienken recalled last year in an episode of Mr. Gurian’s video series, “Comedy Matters.”He sold magazines and delivered groceries, and he eventually got into bar and bingo hall ownership. Then he moved into comedy.Mr. Gurian, a writer, comic and comedy historian who worked with Mr. Tienken again on a 2016 update of the 2012 book that they called “Laughing Legends: How the Comic Strip Club Changed the Face of Comedy,” said that among Mr. Tienken’s innovations was instituting a schedule so comics would know when they were going onstage; in other clubs, they might sit around for hours not knowing when or even whether they would get stage time on a given night.Some of the comics who came through his club were known for edgy material, but Mr. Tienken’s son Richie said his father was a fan of restraint.“He encouraged comics to tell stories about their own life over shock value and vulgarity,” he said.Mr. Tienken married Jeannie Nardi in 1991. In addition to her and his son Richie, Mr. Tienken, who lived in Hawthorne, N.J., is survived by another son, Jonathan; three daughters, Jacqueline, Dawn and Christina; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Tienken’s club had financial troubles at times (its post-pandemic future is unclear), and in recent years he had been embroiled in legal battles with the widow of Mr. Wachs, who died in 2013. But in the video interview last year, he said Mr. Seinfeld’s recent special had given the club a financial lift.So did a gesture by another alumnus, Mr. Sandler, who shot part of his 2018 Netflix special called “100% Fresh” there. But unlike the Seinfeld taping, that one was a surprise to Mr. Tienken; his wife kept it a secret from him.“She said to me, ‘When you come in tonight, dress nice,’” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More