DUCKSTEIN: I feel badly for you, because life is like this (spreads arms wide open), and what you’ve done is made it like this (puts hands close together).
LARRY: (pointing to Duckstein’s hands) I want to make that smaller.
DUCKSTEIN: Really?
LARRY: Yes. Shrink it. Shrink it. Put the hands together. (Duckstein puts hands together) That’s what I want!
—Season Eight, “The Bi-Sexual”
“Maybe one day I’ll get a chance to do something good for somebody.” Larry says this at the beginning of “The Grand Opening” (Season Three). He and Jeff are standing outside a school, looking at a group of teenagers with shaved heads. Jeff explains that one of their classmates is undergoing chemotherapy, and the kids have shaved their heads in a show of solidarity. Larry is moved: the kids are so selfless, so considerate, so . . . good. He wants to be good, just like they are.
This isn’t an isolated incident. A concern with being good is one of Curb’s major themes. The characters are very interested in right and wrong, and they put a lot of energy into discovering the right thing to do. In almost every episode, there are passionate debates about how to treat other people, animals, and the planet.
Some of these debates seem trivial: Are diners obliged to coordinate tips? If I give you a gift certificate to an expensive restaurant, do you have to invite me along? If you’re at the driving range and a ball rolls toward you, are you obliged to pick it up? How long is one expected to spend moving furniture for a blind stranger? Is it okay to express concern about his decorating choices?
Other debates are darkly humorous: Are you a bad person if you commit suicide and don’t leave a note? How about if you engage in vehicular fellatio? Or if you use a racial slur to get out of jury duty? These may not be the ethical questions that interested Mill or Kant, but a concern with goodness is clearly a big part of the show.
But as always on Curb, there’s a twist. Sure, the characters say they want to be good. But again and again, their concern with goodness is exposed as a sham. They want others to think they’re good, and they try hard to look as though they’re good. But they do these things to win admiration, or to have something to hold over their friends, or to shame others into doing what they want. They don’t really care about being good. They care about seeming good, because it’s an effective way to manipulate others.
Consider, for instance, the episode called “The Anonymous Donor.” As it begins, Larry and Cheryl arrive at the NRDC headquarters for a ceremony honoring its benefactors. Larry has paid for a new wing; his name is on the wall. Another new wing is proclaimed to be the gift of “Anonymous.” It soon becomes clear that the anonymous donor is not anonymous at all. Everyone knows it’s Ted Danson, because Ted has let his identity be leaked. No one but Larry thinks there’s anything odd about this. On Curb, it goes without saying that anonymous donors will reveal their identities. They may make a big deal of being above “all the fanfare,” but that’s just a tactic for getting even more fanfare. And while Larry condemns Ted’s use of this tactic, what really annoys him is that he didn’t think of it first. “Nobody told me that I could be anonymous and tell people,” he says to Cheryl. “I would have taken that option.”
It’s sometimes said that morality is what you do when no one else is looking. In Curb, it seems to be what you do only when others are looking. What’s the point in donating money if no one admires you for it? Why give a kidney or help a blind man move if it doesn’t win you praise? The strange part is that with the occasional exception of Larry, no one admits to feeling this way. People claim to take right and wrong seriously. But their actions reveal that they don’t value goodness. They value the appearance of goodness, and they value that only because it helps them get what they want. In this respect, Curb depicts a world in which morality is dead, but the memory of it is powerful. It is a world in which there literally is no good.
In its treatment of goodness, Curb illustrates a condition called nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche describes nihilism as a state in which “the highest values devalue themselves,”1 one in which there is widespread “skepticism regarding morality” (p. 7). In a nihilistic world, people no longer take morality seriously, because they sense that nothing really matters. Nothing is truly valuable; no action is better or worse than any other; all issues are equally trivial. Nietzsche thought the Europe of his day was becoming nihilistic, thanks to the collapse of organized religion and the failures of philosophers and artists to find alternatives to it. He feared that as time passed Europeans would become more and more nihilistic, less and less attached to the values of the past. This worried him. Nietzsche had little use for Christian morality, but he also wasn’t sure human beings were strong enough to face nihilism head on. He wondered where they would find the strength to live and create, once they had rejected the values their civilizations were built on.
Since Nietzsche’s time, people have wondered what it would be like to live in a nihilistic world. Nietzsche himself seemed to think that the appearance of nihilism would be world-shaking. He thought people would find it agonizing to live in a world where nothing really matters. Well, maybe a few people feel this way—especially the ones who’ve read a lot of German philosophy. But Curb offers a different perspective on nihilism. In Larry’s world, the disappearance of morality is humdrum and unremarkable. The characters take it as obvious that there’s no right and wrong, no good and bad. It still matters to them whether someone is generous, or anti-Semitic, or open to romantic relationships with people in wheelchairs.
But these things don’t matter in the ways we might expect, or for the reasons we might expect. They matter because they affect our self-interest, and what’s more, they often do so in ways that seem trivial or stupid. On Curb, if you play ironically at being a wife-beater (or a battered wife), the danger isn’t that others might think you really abuse your spouse. The danger is that the person who sees you might refuse to be your dentist (Season Two, “The Shrimp Incident”). For the characters on Curb, things never seem to matter in the ways viewers expect them to.
On Curb, people find this sort of nihilism so ordinary that they’re surprised when someone actually takes right and wrong seriously. Of course anonymous donors leak their identities. Deep down, we all know that charity is nothing but self-aggrandizement, so how can we blame those who are good at it? Being shocked by cynicism marks you as a rube. And of course Larry should apologize to Jeff’s parents when they overhear him calling Cheryl “Hitler.” After all, they had a gay cousin who escaped Nazi Germany. (“A gay Jew in Nazi Germany? He must have had a hard time. What a combo!”—Season One, Episode 1, “The Pants Tent”). But in the world of Curb, the reason Larry should apologize isn’t that he’s trivialized the Holocaust. It’s that Jeff’s parents have been nagging him about the remark. Insensitivity, spousal abuse, generosity—these things matter, but not in the ways we expect them to matter. Nothing matters in the ways we viewers expect it to matter.
Imagine you get a tip: there’s about to be a major terrorist attack in your city. What would you do? If you’re like most people, you’d immediately cancel your plans and leave town. You’d probably warn as many people as you could, starting with your family and friends. Maybe you’d alert the media so that others could protect themselves as well. You might have some tough decisions to make. If the person who gave you the tip asked you not to tell anyone, you might be torn about whether it’s okay to violate her confidence. You might even decide it’s not okay and keep quiet. Whatever happens, you’d take the issue seriously. You’d rise above the petty annoyances of daily life, saying to yourself: This really matters.
Now consider what happens when the same scenario unfolds on Curb. Wanda tells Larry and Cheryl that she has reliable information about a terrorist attack on L.A. She also asks them not to tell anyone. What do they do? They don’t leave town, or alert the media, or call their loved ones. Instead, Larry treats it as an opportunity to smooth over his tiff with Mindy Reiser, who is annoyed that he didn’t speak to her in a restaurant. To Larry, this tiff is just as serious as the terrorist strike. He drives to Mindy’s store and tells her the news, pleased that she can no longer be mad at him. What we’d expect to be a matter of life and death becomes part of a childish game of hurt feelings and one-upmanship. And it never occurs to Larry that it’s more serious than that. Granted, he’d like to leave town, with or without Cheryl. (“It almost seems a little selfish,” he tells her, “that you’d want both of us to perish”—Season Three, “The Terrorist Attack”). But it never crosses Larry’s mind that he has a duty to warn everyone he knows, let alone a city full of strangers. It never occurs to him that people’s lives are more important than a childish tiff. Having something to hold over Mindy means more to Larry than saving someone’s life—maybe even his own.
This doesn’t make Larry a bad person. But his actions are those of someone who inhabits a nihilistic world. They’re the actions of someone convinced that all issues are equally trivial. This nihilism was already present in Seinfeld.2 There, the abortion debate was depicted as no more weighty than a debate between Kramer and Poppie about when a pizza becomes a pizza. (“It’s not a pizza until it comes out of the oven!” “It’s a pizza the moment you put your fists in the dough!”—Seinfeld, Season Six, “The Couch”).
But Curb pushes nihilism to unprecedented heights. It’s not just that the characters take trivial issues seriously, or vice versa. Much of the time, taking an issue seriously isn’t even an option. It just isn’t on Larry’s radar that protecting people from a terrorist attack might be more important than his game of one-upmanship with Mindy Reiser. In the same episode, it doesn’t occur to Cheryl that saving their own lives might be more important than their plans to attend a benefit at the Braudys’s house. And throughout Season Five, when Richard Lewis needs a kidney, it doesn’t occur to Larry that there might be things to weigh besides his own desires and fears.
We can’t blame Larry for not wanting to donate a kidney. Many people in his situation would feel the same way. But most of us would feel at least a little torn about this—and more than a little guilty. These nobler considerations don’t exist for Larry. It simply doesn’t occur to him that giving a kidney might be a good thing to do, let alone something he’s obliged to do. It’s a horror to be avoided at all costs. To Larry, it goes without saying that morality is a tool to help you get what you want. When there’s no upside to an action—such as giving a kidney—there’s no reason to take it seriously.
Situations like these tell us something important about nihilism. A world where the highest values have devalued themselves is not a world where people no longer care about what they should do. It’s a world where nothing matters more than anything else, a world where all issues are equally weighty and equally trivial. As a result, it’s a world where people have no sense of proportion—no awareness that some things are objectively more important than others. This inability to weigh the importance of things is all over Curb.
Consider what happens when Larry’s mother dies. He’s in New York at the time, shooting a movie with Martin Scorsese. His mother becomes sick, goes to the hospital, and eventually dies, all the while insisting that no one call Larry and ruin his big trip. When Larry gets home and learns not only that his mother has died, but that he’s missed her funeral, he’s outraged, and yells “This is insane!” (Season Three, “The Special Section”). He thinks he’s the only person who gets it—the only one who understands what matters. But later in the episode, he shows the same lack of perspective, as he uses the death to talk Cheryl into sex and to convince Richard Lewis to split a mantra with him. Larry doesn’t feel like a vulgar opportunist. It doesn’t cross his mind that he shouldn’t exploit his mother’s death. He doesn’t like being on the receiving end of this treatment, but he can’t make sense of the idea that it’s wrong.
On Curb, it’s not just actions that are nihilistic. All the trappings of morality are missing as well. Real ethical debate, for example, doesn’t exist. People talk endlessly about what’s right and wrong, but their discussions are transparent attempts to look good and manipulate others. In a way, this is liberating. Larry can have a reasonable, earnest conversation with Krazee-Eyez Killa about avoiding repetitive lyrics by juggling profanity. Mothers can openly discuss their daughters’ intimate medical conditions with male colleagues, oblivious to their discomfort. And it’s no surprise to find yourself fighting with a stranger over who will get to the doctor’s office first.
The downside is that as people talk, their principles are so easily discarded that real discussion never takes place. In the “Opening Night” episode, when Larry finds David Schwimmer’s lost watch but quickly loses it again, there’s a debate over whether or not Larry owes Schwimmer a watch: did Larry lose a watch that belonged to someone else, or was the watch for all intents and purposes still lost? Schwimmer wants Larry to replace the watch, while Larry thinks this is beyond the call of duty. The two seem to be arguing about a principle: do we owe our friends special moral consideration or not?
But on another occasion, Larry and Schwimmer take opposite sides in a debate over the same principle. On the flight to New York, Larry suspects that Schwimmer has tattled to a flight attendant about Larry’s seat not being in the upright position. Larry expects Schwimmer to keep his mouth shut, although cutting corners on flight safety to protect a friend is probably beyond the call of duty. In this case, Larry expects Schwimmer to go the extra mile—just as Schwimmer expects Larry to go the extra mile and buy him a new watch. In the end, Larry is able to return Schwimmer’s watch, after wresting it from the arm of the hotel employee who found it. But once more, resolving the dispute isn’t enough for Larry. He has to know: “What did you say to that stewardess?” Larry’s position in this situation is the one he takes in many of the debates on Curb. We might be arguing about affirmative action, or whether to remove our shoes, or where to have our next meeting. The goal is always the same: to get what we want, while claiming the high ground.
Not surprisingly, there are few role models on Curb. There’s no one to turn to for moral guidance, no clear example of good behavior. Anonymous donors are just looking for glory. Marriage and family are dysfunctional, even at their best. Parents don’t want to bother their children by dying, and spouses think adultery makes a great anniversary gift. Politicians are beneath contempt: even Barbara Boxer (D-California) admits that she steals dry cleaning.
Religion is ridiculous and is never taken seriously. When Larry criticizes Christians, it’s not because they don’t respect his Judaism; it’s because they take religion, all religion, too seriously. (In “The Baptism” (Season Two), he wonders: “Why do Christians take everything so personally, with Christ? I like lobster. Do I go around pushing lobster on people? Do I say, ‘You must like lobster’?”) The twist is that the lack of moral authorities doesn’t mean that people have stopped telling each other what to do. In a nihilistic world, everyone is as much of an authority as everyone else, so we all have the same right to judge other people’s behavior.
On Curb, it’s total strangers who care most about our ethics. That person telling you to leave your water outside the movie theater isn’t an usher; she’s an audience member just like you. Random passersby yell at you for being anti-Semitic, just because you’ve been whistling Wagner. All of this makes perfect sense. If there’s no right and wrong, there are no moral authorities, and if no one’s an authority, everyone is. It turns out that a nihilistic world isn’t one where people don’t judge. It’s a world where everyone judges us all the time, and there’s nothing we can say in our own defense.
Philosophers often talk about the good. By this they mean an impersonal standard that makes some actions better than others, some lives more worthwhile than others.
•Plato thinks the good is what he calls a form: something outside time and change, an eternal standard that gives universal answers to moral questions.
•Aristotle thinks the good is happiness, especially the kind of happiness that comes from acting rationally and contemplating the truth.
•The philosophers known as utilitarians define the good as the greatest pleasure for the greatest number.
Philosophers disagree about what the good is, but most of them agree that there is one. They agree that there’s a way to distinguish right from wrong, the serious from the trivial. On Curb, there’s nothing of the sort. There’s no way to distinguish actions that are right from actions that just serve our selfish interests. There’s no way to distinguish things that really matter from things that don’t. But the good hasn’t exactly vanished. It’s been hollowed out, leaving behind an empty shell. The language of morality remains. People still talk as though there’s a good, although deep down, they know there isn’t. But the language still casts a spell. That’s why looking like you care about morality is the surest way to get what you want. If you seem good, you can get away with being bad.
Is there any way out of this predicament? Since Nietzsche’s time, philosophers have tried to find one. One suggestion that has convinced many people appears in Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue, which suggests that community offers a way out of nihilism. MacIntyre thinks, as Curb Your Enthusiasm does, that morality is a thing of the past. Our society, says MacIntyre, has “simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have . . . lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”3
The reason, says MacIntyre, is that moral principles make sense only in a certain social setting. That setting is a community where people agree about what the goal of human life is. Ancient Greek city-states were communities of this sort. So were the religious communities of medieval Europe. When people think life has a goal, and they agree about what that goal is, moral rules make sense. These rules act as a bridge from the way we are now to the way we could be, if only we achieved our goal. Since the scientific revolution, though, we’ve found it harder and harder to think of life as having a goal. Not coincidentally, we’ve also found it harder and harder to take morality as seriously as we once did. We still have rules left over from earlier periods of history, and these rules still have us in their grip. But we no longer have the context to make sense of these rules, and so we’re haunted by the fear that they’re meaningless. In particular, we no longer have a way of choosing between the incompatible principles invoked in many contemporary debates.
Take the debate over abortion. The camps in this debate are sharply opposed, but they both appeal to principles that seem compelling. One side makes plausible claims about the rights people have over their own bodies. The other makes equally plausible claims about the value of life and the importance of protecting it. We find ourselves drawn to both principles, so it’s hard to see how we could determine which side is right. And this leads us to suspect that no one is really right: that the reason we can’t find the truth in this debate is that there is no truth to find. Seen in this light, principles like “Respect individual rights” and “Value life” seem like empty talk. MacIntyre compares them to the ancient Polynesian taboos: we feel like we should care about them, but we can’t remember why. We suspect they’re a sham, but we can’t admit it—perhaps not even to ourselves.
According to MacIntyre, there’s only one way to hang on to morality: rebuild the social settings that make sense of it. We need to cultivate new communities, communities like the ones where morality originally flourished. We can’t go back to ancient Greece, but we can build new communities that give content to moral life. Creating and sustaining a community is an art. It’s a complex process in which people come together to achieve a common goal. To succeed, they have to act in certain ways. They need justice, courage, and other virtues. If the community is working properly, there’s a perfectly good answer to the question of why I should care about doing the right thing. I should care because it’s necessary to keep the community going, and my own well-being is inseparable from the community’s.
Is getting together the answer? Does community offer a way out of the nihilism depicted on Curb?
Frankly, no. For MacIntyre’s proposal to work, communities have to be good things—or at least, not terrible things. Living with others can’t be hellish. People can’t be hostile to each other all the time. They must be willing to live harmoniously, willing to work with others for the common good. That’s not how community functions on Curb. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously has a character in his play No Exit say that hell is other people, but even he couldn’t have imagined how bad social life is in Larry’s world.
On Curb, other people are a constant source of misery. They’re always trying get something from you: a letter of recommendation, or an introduction to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, or a new pair of glasses. When you try to be nice to them—when you let them leave an elevator before you, for example—they throw your kindness back in your face. A visit from relatives is the deepest pit in hell: they drink your liquor, and sing at all hours, and whine when you don’t say goodnight. Your in-laws wake you up when you accidentally eat a cookie manger scene.
“Larry, you ate the baby Jesus and his mother, Mary” “I thought He was a monkey” . . . “You didn’t see the toasted coconut hay, the barn . . .?” “I thought it was all part of the zoo. . . . I’ll make it up to you” “You can’t make it up; you just swallowed our Lord and Savior” (Season Three, “Mary, Joseph, and Larry”)
Even the people closest to you aren’t all that great. Larry loves Cheryl, but when they renew their marriage vows, he doesn’t want to promise to love her for all eternity. The rest of his life—fine. But in the afterlife, he wants to be a free agent. On Curb, the best you can hope for is to be shunned. When Larry injures Shaq at a Lakers game, all of L.A. treats him like a pariah. But Larry’s not unhappy. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Delighted to be left alone, he tap dances in a Starbucks and buys drinks for the whole store.
Even the threat of anarchy doesn’t make social life worth the trouble. When Auntie Rae tells Larry that there have been burglaries nearby and that he should get to know the neighbors, he says: “I’d rather have the thieves than the neighbors. The thieves don’t impose” (Season Seven, “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister”).
Community isn’t the answer. So it looks like there’s no way out. On Curb, morality is a sham, and our last, best hope for fixing it isn’t an option. To be clear, the problem isn’t that there’s a right thing to do, but that people can’t rise to the challenge of doing it. Nor is it that people could rise to the challenge but are happy to settle for an inauthentic morality. The problem is that on Curb, morality is taboo all the way down. It’s a sham, but a powerful sham. People feel obliged to care about it—or to act like they care about it—even though deep down, they know it has no substance. Curb leaves us with only the worst parts of morality: the smugness, the guilt, the endless worrying about what others think of us. We want to be good, we feel like we ought to be good, but we can’t, because our communities are ones where goodness is impossible. In these communities, we’re haunted by the memory of something that no longer exists.
Many philosophers have claimed that ought implies can: that if we’re obliged to do something, it must be possible to do it. On Curb, ought doesn’t imply can. We can feel a crushing obligation to be good even if being good is impossible. Knowing that goodness is impossible doesn’t make the guilt go away. As a result, Curb depicts morality as something tragic. People feel obliged to do the right thing, obliged to act as if they care about being good. They sometimes try their best to be good. But they never succeed, because the world foils them at every step. Thomas Nagel might have been talking about Curb when he said that “We have always known that the world is a bad place. It appears that it may be an evil place as well.”4
So in “The Grand Opening,” when Larry yearns for the chance to do something good, it seems hopeless. We know he’ll never succeed, because he lives in a world from which goodness has vanished. But has it vanished completely? Actually, there are glimmers of hope. There are rare moments in Curb when, against all odds, small communities form and spontaneously do something good.
The end of “The Grand Opening” is a nice example. It’s opening night at the restaurant in which Larry has invested. Like all the owners, he’s on edge, because their new chef has Tourette’s Syndrome, and is prone to scream obscenities without warning. The restaurant has an open kitchen, so if he does start swearing, the customers will hear. Sure enough, just when the opening seems to be going smoothly, a torrent of French-accented filth comes out of the kitchen.
Everyone freezes. But Larry thinks of the kids with the shaved heads, and remembers his wish to do something good. Seeing his chance, he unleashes a string of obscenities. Jeff follows his lead, and soon, everyone in the restaurant is swearing at the top of his and her lungs. The camera pans back and Larry smiles. Not only has he shown solidarity with the afflicted; he’s created a happy little community of diners, all brought together by kindness and filth. It’s not a traditional community. It’s certainly not the kind of community MacIntyre would like us to cultivate. Larry’s community is based on a lack of civility, a mix of obscenity and comically bad luck. But it’s a community all the same. The people there are united by a common purpose, and they’re happier than they would be alone. Despite all the cynicism, Larry has done a little bit of good.
That doesn’t make everything better. It’s hard to know how stable this new community is. Do the diners join in because they want to help, or because of a childish delight in bad words? How can we keep the community going once the swearing stops? Can Larry repeat his gesture in other settings? Would he even want to?
The whole scene is so absurd, so disconnected from the rest of life, that it offers little to build on. But if nothing else, it shows that tragedy isn’t the whole story. We can always hope. And once in a while—if we’re lucky—we might find ourselves being pretty, pretty good.5
1 The Will to Power (Vintage, 1968), p. 9.
2 As pointed out by Thomas Hibbs in Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld (Spence, 1999), pp. 159–166.
3 After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 2.
4 Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 74.
5 Thanks to Matt Faubert and Peter Norman for their help with this chapter.