Comedy guru Larry Charles is a celebrated writer/director whose credits include Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the first Borat movie. He’s an inherently subversive countercultural dude with a dark, absurdist sense of humour.
In Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter, he analyses his craft with good-natured intensity. Charles takes comedy seriously, as all great comic artisans do. It’s a fascinating, colourful book.
He lavishes praise upon his “accidental mentors” Larry David, Sacha Baron Cohen and Bob Dylan (Charles co-wrote and directed the 2003 Dylan vehicle Masked and Anonymous, the making of which sounds just as bewildering as the film itself). But he also writes, with palpable sadness and exasperation, about the disintegration of his relationships with David and Cohen.
He hasn’t spoken to David, with whom he’d been friends for over 40 years, since 2022 when David put the last-minute kibosh on a documentary Charles had made about him. According to Charles, his subject felt he came across as too serious and emotional in the film, an image he wasn’t keen to share with fans of the fictional Larry David from Curb. Ironically, the real Larry David’s petty, neurotic and cowardly handling of this situation was entirely on-brand.
As for Cohen, by the time they’d made his third and final film, The Dictator, Charles claims he’d become a control freak surrounded by yes-men who was impossible to deal with. Charles writes about the experience like someone with PTSD.
I see no reason to doubt his version of events in both these cases, as he comes across as a very honest, thoughtful, generous and decent man of integrity who tends to criticise himself more than anyone else.
