How Mel Brooks became Larry David’s ultimate hero: “My parents were beside themselves”
Picture the scene. A youthful Larry David – presumably with a full head of hair, although that’s difficult to imagine – is in his childhood home, laughing himself silly at a comedy album on the family’s record player.
After a few minutes, David’s father bursts into the room, wondering what the hell his son is listening to. He and his wife are used to the young boy chuckling at the comedy albums of the era, but this uproarious, uncontrollable laughter is something else entirely. The man gazes upon his son, whose eyes are wet with tears, his jaw affixed in a wide grin, belly laughs pouring out of his mouth, and is so disturbed by the display that he finds himself at a loss for words.
To Mr David’s horror, it turns out that his boy, who would grow up to become the hilariously grouchy co-creator of Seinfeld and creator/star of HBO’s utterly hilarious Curb Your Enthusiasm, wasn’t just feasting his ears on any old comedy album. Instead, he was experiencing Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s legendary 2000 Year Old Man, a recurring sketch about an old Jewish man who has lived for 20 centuries and seen a whole lot of ‘mishigas’ in that time.
As the young David laughed so hard that he struggled to breathe, Brooks’ ancient senior citizen railed against mistreatment by his many, many families (“I have over 42,000 children and not one comes to visit me!”) and the struggles of travelling 2000 years ago (“What was the means of transportation then? Mostly fear.”).
As David listened to different iterations of the act, he began to realise that each sketch was semi-improvised, with Reiner’s interviewer character rarely seeming to know what was going to come out of Brooks’ mouth next. It was the kind of comedy high-wire act that would later come to define Curb Your Enthusiasm, whose scenes were vaguely outlined, but entirely improvised in terms of dialogue.
In truth, 2000 Year Old Man was so beloved that, even when Brooks later became the king of cinematic comedy with movies like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, his fans would constantly ask him about it. This is the power of good comedy.
David’s sincere love of the sketch, which spawned a series of comedy albums in the ’60s and captivated audiences, eventually took him to the AFI stage to pay a customarily caustic tribute to Brooks in 2013.
“I never knew a person could be that funny,” noted David, who amusingly stressed how alien it felt for him to say such glowing things about someone who was still alive (“Lavishing praise on people does not come easy to me. In fact, I find it quite distasteful.”). Still, he admitted that he’d happily make an exception for Brooks, his ultimate comedy hero.
Naturally, though, because David has expertly cultivated a comic persona as a misanthropic contrarian, he claimed that Brooks’ comedy genius didn’t actually inspire him to follow in his footsteps. Instead, it put him off trying to be a comedian at all, because he thought he’d never be able to measure up.
“Mel Brooks didn’t get me into comedy,” David railed, as the AFI audience erupted in hysterics, and a smiling Brooks watched on. “He kept me away from it. I wasted years doing nothing because of him. No job, living at home, lying on the couch watching Shindig.” Then, for the pièce de résistance, David brought everything back to the father so unnerved by his son’s laughter. “My parents were beside themselves,” he claimed with a sly grin. “They cried themselves to sleep every night!”
Of course, in reality, David was heavily influenced by Brooks, and he fulfilled every fan’s dream in 2004 when he convinced the aging star to play a vital role in Curb Your Enthusiasm’s fourth season. In an extremely metatextual tale, David is hired by Brooks to star in a new stage version of The Producers alongside Ben Stiller, but he and the Zoolander star soon fall out.
Stiller is then replaced by Friends’ David Schwimmer, who also butts heads with the irascible David, but they at least make it to opening night as a double act. During that performance, though, David forgets his lines, and it is revealed that Brooks cast him purposely because he knew he’d be a disaster. In Curb world, he wanted nothing more than for David’s haplessness to tank The Producers forever, enabling him to be “free” of it at long last.
