Curb Your Enthusiasm: A Psychoanalytic View
When it comes to humor, legendary psychologist Sigmund Freud believed it to be an integral part of human existence. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious he reveals how humor serves as a coping mechanism for our subconscious. Freud believed that without jokes our minds would shut down in some way, unable to handle our true thoughts.
HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm follows the show’s creator Larry David as a fictionalized version of himself. He lives in a world in which he lacks all social awareness and constantly breaks the rules of everyday etiquette. As a result, Larry often finds himself in awkward or compromising situations. Curb Your Enthusiasm offers a great example of how humor is necessary for keeping life both balanced and interesting. This is especially true for the character of Larry, who - usually through his own doing - always finds a way to mess everything up.
By way of analyzing jokes, Freud’s book is divided into three principal sections: Analytic, Synthetic and Theoretical. In the first of these, Freud examines delivery, word play and metaphors. He believed jokes either contained some sort of hidden, underlying meaning or were purely innocent. He also suggested laughter is a form of a psychological release; a way of purging the stress we’ve repressed inside our subconscious mind.
Freud proposed our most repressed emotions deal with sexual desire and unresolved anger — both of which can’t easily be dealt with in the outside world. This therefore results in most jokes being about sex, tension or both. When a sexual joke is being told, the listener is letting their repressed sexual thoughts out through either laughter or the act of listening. When a joke attacks a certain person or group, the repressed energy of anger is released. Our ego builds up our defenses when a joke starts, but once the punchline is revealed, that built up energy becomes laughter instead.
Freud describes the interaction of the joke teller and the audience like so:
There are two ways in which the process at work in humor may take place. Either one person may himself adopt a humorous attitude, while a second person acts as spectator, and derives enjoyment from the attitude of the first; or there may be two people concerned, one of whom does not himself take any active share in producing the humorous effect, but is regarded by the other in a humorous light.
There’s a form of energy being transferred through jokes. Even if someone tells a terrible joke, the listener could either find it funny or be completely dismayed by it. Humor arises when we are surprised or shocked by something we couldn’t figure out. This explains why some jokes lose their humor once you’ve heard them.
Freud describes the movements of a clown as something humorous. The clown struggles to walk correctly and exaggerates anything else. We try to make sense of what the clown is doing — as a result we laugh. Freud felt that jokes were so much more than merely a construct of words designed to make people laugh. He believed jokes could describe a certain time in life. Jokes are a way to impart a society’s everyday pressures on the ordinary person.
We can see how all this applies to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David is in his later years and largely retired. The show focuses on his life post-Seinfeld. He has amassed a considerable amount of wealth from being co-creator (along with Jerry Seinfeld) of the famous sitcom. With complete autonomy, Larry can live anywhere he wants and work on anything he wants, and yet he is constantly finding conflicts; his paradise is always disturbed.
In any given episode, he usually causes an embarrassing incident or ends up in complete disagreement with someone else — one that’s usually avoidable. In some cases, Larry has no control over the problems appear in his life, but most of the time he his the direct cause. He later tries to do the right thing or at least what he thinks is right. It usually backfires due to some sort of miscommunication, often caused by Larry’s stubbornness or the breaking of a social rule. Larry is his own worst enemy and that’s what makes the show funny.
Curb’s humor is derived from the concept of a human being that — essentially — lacks a conscience. The protagonist has little to no compass when it comes to social rules. He causes conflict with himself and takes it to those around him. His strong ties to his own personal ethics often make small, easily avoidable situations into moments of real hostility. He rarely lets go of his opinions and makes issues with almost any stranger he interacts with. He argues about loaded topics with total abandon, leaving him ostracized in public settings.
Larry’s not just the main character, but also the chief clown. He runs the show both on screen and off. Even though the series is based on an over exaggerated persona of himself, it has a layer of truth to it. The fictionalized Larry David lacks self-awareness and self-consciousness. He knows all too well what awkward situations are, but can’t seem to grasp when he’s heading into one. He remains uncooperative in social settings, generating a continuous series of unfortunate (yet hilarious) situations.
Glimpses of the real actual subconscious of Larry David lend the show depth. The main difference between the fictional Larry and the real one is the filter. Larry has actually commented about the two personas in a Rolling Stone article:
The character really is me, but I just couldn’t possibly behave like that. If I had my druthers, that would be me all the time, but you can’t do that. We’re always doing things we don’t want to do, we never say what we really feel, and so this is an idealized version of how I want to be. As crazy as this person is, I could step into those shoes right now, but I would be arrested or I’d be hit or whatever.
David acknowledges society has unwritten rules that we all abide to. He uses these to create a character that’s truly himself, but free from those constraints. He’s a clown, but an unpredictable one. Even if there’s a pattern to his actions, there’s no guarantee how he’ll make it out of a conflict unscathed. The show constantly alludes to the popularity of the Seinfeld and Larry’s real life marriage and divorce, again blending a layer of reality within fiction.
In the episode Mister Softee, Larry visits his psychiatrist and they discuss how the sound of an ice cream truck can negatively affect Larry in numerous activities. He struggles to perform with his partner or his baseball team every time he hears the ice cream truck. Once he tries resolve the issue, more problems arise. Throughout the episode, the show touches on topics of sex, death, masculinity and Judaism. The episode uses ridiculous and over the top scenarios to dissect each topic. Each topic is highlighted by an over exaggerated character. This in turn allows the audience to consider the topic in a new light, and encourages them to laugh.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Curb Your Enthusiasm is the central conflict of Larry’s life in the show. Even though he has an office, he’s rarely shown working. And when he does, it’s usually for some ulterior motive, such as winning his wife back. Larry’s character has reached a level of autonomy that millions would desire. His life appears to be perfect, but he always finds himself facing those complicated altercations. This version of Larry David lives in a world where he can avoid so much conflict, but he paradoxically embraces it. His actions and motives are at times completely baffling, and that’s what creates the humor.
The constant friction creates a form of comedy that plays with our own sense of what is socially acceptable. Freud positioned humor as a necessary part of human life — not only in entertainment, but as a means of coping with negative emotions. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great example of just how important humor can be and — whichever way you look at it — how it can relieve the everyday stress of life.
