Larry David perfected the sitcom with his groundbreaking hit Seinfeld, but he completely reinvented the genre with his follow-up show, Curb Your Enthusiasm. David got his start as a standup comedian, but he found his true calling when fellow comic Jerry Seinfeld was approached by NBC executives to create his own sitcom, and he asked David to co-write the pilot.

In its first couple of seasons, Seinfeld struggled to find its voice. But it eventually settled into a unique comedic storytelling style that would go on to define David’s career. After he left Seinfeld’s writing staff between its seventh and eighth seasons, David came up with an even more revolutionary sitcom as his follow-up project.

Seinfeld Is The Gold Standard For Multi-Camera Sitcoms

There have been many great multi-camera sitcoms over the years that have revolutionized the genre. I Love Lucy created the sitcom as we know it today, The Mary Tyler Moore Show introduced the notion of the workplace family, Cheers set a high benchmark for ensemble shows, and M*A*S*H managed to mix humor into the horrors of the Korean War.

But all those great shows were just precursors to Seinfeld. With its idiosyncratic voice, its fiendishly complex plotting, and its subversively pitch-black sense of humor, Seinfeld is the gold standard of the multi-cam sitcom. Neither Seinfeld nor David had ever written a sitcom before they got the opportunity to write their own, but they picked it up pretty quickly.

They followed the traditional format of the sitcom — situational storytelling in two acts — but they put their own twist on it. David famously instituted a “no hugging, no learning” policy. The characters could never learn from their mistakes or even express genuine affection for one another. This policy eschewed the sentimentality that distracted from the laughs in other sitcoms.

Seinfeld and David also pioneered a method of dovetailing plotlines that made Seinfeld’s storytelling much smarter and more engaging than the average sitcom. Traditionally, sitcom episodes have an unrelated A-plot and B-plot and cut between the two. But Seinfeld and David intertwined their plotlines and eventually brought them together for a hilariously ironic payoff, like Kramer’s golf ball in the beached whale’s blowhole.

There have been many great multi-cam sitcoms over the years, but none of them are as sharply written, pitch-perfectly performed, or singularly focused on laughs as Seinfeld. David perfected the multi-cam sitcom format with Seinfeld, and then, with his next project, he reinvented the genre entirely.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Pioneered A Whole New Way To Make A Sitcom

At the end of Seinfeld’s seventh season, David left the show. He went out with a bang — killing off George’s fiancée Susan for some morbid laughs — and he would eventually return to pen the divisive series finale, but seasons 8 and 9 were made with Seinfeld as sole showrunner as David went off to pursue other projects.

David wrote and directed a movie called Sour Grapes, which was panned by critics and bombed at the box office, and he tentatively returned to the standup stage to relaunch his comedy career. But all this post-Seinfeld experimentation eventually led him back to the medium that made him a legend: the sitcom.

In 1999, David teamed up with Jeff Garlin to create a different kind of standup special for HBO. Instead of just shooting an hour-long standup show, Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm would show David slowly building up that hour of material — and in between sets, we would see him in his downtime, hanging out at home and going on the road.

But instead of shooting real documentary footage, David wrote scripted scenarios for himself and his co-stars to act out. He cast Garlin as his manager and Cheryl Hines as his wife, and put himself in awkward situations like being faced with a pornography charge in a hotel lobby and getting caught with another woman by one of his wife’s friends.

Some of the standup segments are really funny — including one bit about Hitler admonishing a magician and one bit about Jonas Salk’s mother rubbing her pride in people’s faces — but it was these scripted scenarios in between the standup that really left an impression. So, HBO wanted to expand those sequences into a full series, and Curb Your Enthusiasm was born.

Using the mockumentary style of the standup special as a jumping-off point, Curb Your Enthusiasm pioneered a whole new way to make a sitcom. There had been other single-camera sitcoms before Curb; The Larry Sanders Show predated it, and even some old mid-20th-century classics, like Bewitched, Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, were filmed with a single-camera setup.

But Curb went a few steps further than simply removing the theatrical artifice of the three-walled sets and multi-camera format. Curb was shot on shaky handheld cameras, frantically capturing the action as it unfolded. The actors improvised their dialogue from a tight story outline, and a lot of them — including David — played themselves, or at least used their own names.

Curb’s Improvisational Approach Put More Emphasis On The Situations

By removing the scripted dialogue and allowing the cast to improvise all their lines, David deconstructed the sitcom to its barest elements. This improvisational approach put more emphasis on the situations of situation comedy. The actors aren’t trying to be funny; the stories are already funny, the actors just play them straight and react authentically to what’s happening.

So many stale sitcoms are just a vehicle for jokes, but there are no jokes in Curb (at least not in the traditional sense). In Curb, it’s not about coming up with a clever line; it’s about playing into each comedic scenario that David has cooked up, whether that scenario is a tour of a rapper’s house or a meeting with an incest survivors’ group.

When Marty Funkhouser is chastising Larry for stealing flowers from his mother’s roadside memorial, he’s not necessarily saying anything funny. Bob Einstein is authentically reflecting the rage he would feel over such a betrayal; it’s just such an absurd, audacious thing for Larry to have done — and the comeuppance is so excruciatingly awkward — that it gets a huge laugh.

Curb Blurred The Line Between Fiction & Reality

In a traditional multi-camera sitcom, when you’ve got actors on brightly lit sets that you only ever see from one angle, it’s clearly make-believe. The audience is under no illusion that what’s happening in Friends or The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother — or, indeed, Seinfeld — is actually real. But Curb ingeniously blurred the line between fiction and reality.

The most obvious example of this is having everyone play a satirically exaggerated version of themselves. David cultivated a curmudgeonly persona for himself, Richard Lewis leaned into the debilitating insecurities he openly discussed on-stage, and Ted Danson leaned into his sanctimonious, holier-than-thou compassion as the perfect foil for Larry’s self-centered misery.

Even the actors who played characters, like Jeff Garlin, Cheryl Hines, and Susie Essman, used their own first names. J.B. Smoove’s character Leon Black is an entirely fictional creation, but he plays that part with such conviction that he feels as real as any of the actors playing themselves.

This, paired with the show’s signature vérité shooting style, made every comic situation feel painfully real. Whenever Susie screams at Larry, or Larry ruins a dinner party, or Larry ruins a wedding, or Larry ruins a funeral, it rings hilariously true.

Seinfeld & Curb Both Satirized The Mundane Minutiae Of Everyday Life Perfectly

While Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm are shot in very different styles, they both exhibit David’s unique comedic voice. He’s less interested in satirizing the bigger issues that affect the whole world and more interested in poking fun at the mundane minutiae that affects our daily lives. In both of these shows, David points out the absurdity of the unwritten rules of polite society.

David’s characters will often protest these rules, or at least question why they exist. Larry doesn’t understand why he has to thank his friend’s wife when his friend paid the check. George Costanza doesn’t understand why it’s acceptable to bring bread and wine to a dinner party, but not Ring Dings and Pepsi.

When is the official cutoff time for phone calls at night? Is it hygienic to double-dip a chip? If a couple breaks up right before a party they were both invited to, which one gets to go? These are the questions that fascinate David.

David has coined the perfect terms to describe the annoying little things that bother us throughout the day. He came up with the term “stop ‘n’ chat” to describe the time-consuming small-talk that takes place when you bump into someone you vaguely know on the street. He came up with the term “chat ‘n’ cut” to describe someone joining an acquaintance in line to skip to the front.

He coined the term “pig parker” to describe someone who parks their car across multiple spaces and causes a domino effect for other drivers. He coined the term “I respect wood” to distinguish himself from people who carelessly put their drink down on a table without using a coaster. There are dozens of Larry-isms for everyday use.

Every little thing that bothers David — whether it’s the ratio of mixed nuts or at what point it’s too late to wish someone a happy new year or the epidemic of “verbal texting” — made it into his TV shows in some form or another. Together, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm form a perfect, comprehensive social satire.