When you think of Larry David, strong dedication to following the rules probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Indeed, a repeated theme of Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry’s tendency to get himself into trouble by failing to do what others expect of him.
He ignores Cheryl’s fear of dying in a plane crash in favor of ensuring the repair of his TiVo, he tries to trick a Christian Scientist into taking allergy medication, he picks up a prostitute in order to use the car pool lane, and he takes flowers from a roadside memorial. I could go on—as could you.
In truth, however, Larry David is a dedicated and consistent rule follower. While rather selective in the rules he accepts as legitimate, when Larry accepts a rule he goes to great lengths and physical discomfort—literally, as in “The Massage” (Season Two)—to act in accordance with it.
Larry would be the first to admit that he doesn’t always follow the rules of polite society. But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t a good rule-follower. We can see this by doing a bit of philosophy and asking ourselves what it really is to be a rule-follower. This may seem a silly question. Of course, a rule-follower is just a person who follows the rules, right? But which rules? All of them, all the time? Most of them, most of the time? Surely you don’t have to be perfect to be a good rule-follower. (There’s probably a rule against exiting a car during a carwash cycle. But we wouldn’t want to say that Cheryl’s desperate escape from the carwash in “The Grand Opening” (Season Three) renders her a rule-flaunting renegade.)
We must also consider the source of the rules. If we were to consider Larry a rule-follower only if he followed every rule endorsed by anyone (social rules, rules of etiquette, moral rules, rules of law, and so forth) we would quickly end up with cases in which Larry would be a rule-breaker no matter what course of action he chose. All this requires is a situation in which two rules (of whatever source) make incompatible demands.
In “The Ski Lift” (Season Five), Larry finds himself stuck alone with Rachel (the daughter of the head of the kidney consortium) in a ski lift at dusk, and she jumps to the ground to avoid breaking Jewish law. Many of you probably felt, as I did, that it was rather rude of Larry not to offer to jump himself. (He was a perfect gentleman, however, in offering to share his edible panties!)
Nonetheless, there are safety-based rules in place when we ride on a ski lift: foremost amongst these, we should not jump out of it. So if Larry had jumped, he would have broken a rule (as Rachel did when she jumped). But, of course, the only other option was not to jump, thereby breaking the Jewish law. Whatever Larry did, he would be breaking a rule, and the same is true of Rachel. Thus, if we understand rule-followers simply as those who in fact comply with all (or even most) rules, we’ll be forced to say that some people can’t be good rule-followers no matter how hard they try—simply because circumstances have conspired against them.
This seems rather harsh, though. In fact, it was largely because of Rachel’s strong dedication to the Jewish law that she violated the ski lift safety rule. It would be rather perverse to label Rachel a rule-breaker simply for violating the safety rules. So we don’t want to say that Larry is a rule-follower only if he follows all the rules (all, or even most, of the time).
Another reason for rejecting the view that good rule-followers are those and only those who in fact follow the rules involves the possibility that people may break or follow rules completely by accident. Indeed, a person might follow the rules while actually trying to break them, as Hasidic dry cleaner Anna did when an earthquake prevented her from fulfilling Larry’s anniversary gift and cheating on her clueless husband Schlomo (“The Survivor,” Season Four). We certainly shouldn’t credit Anna with following the rules of marital faithfulness when she would have broken her vows but for the earthquake.
This leaves us with the difficult question of precisely when failing to follow a rule counts against a person’s credentials as a rule-follower. There are, in fact, two quite different categories of rule-breaking:
1. You might acknowledge the legitimacy of a rule yet break it anyway
or
2. You might not acknowledge the legitimacy of the rule in the first place (either because you aren’t aware of the rule, or because you have considered and rejected it).
Take Larry’s agent Jeff Greene. Jeff acknowledges that it’s wrong for him to cheat on his wife Susie, yet he repeatedly does it anyway. In this case, it is pretty clear that Jeff is not acting as a good rule-follower should. A rule-follower must at least try to follow the rules he accepts.
By contrast, consider Larry’s after-hours phone calls to the Greenes and Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “The Wire” (Season One). After much debate with Cheryl, Larry decides that the rule against late-night calls does not come into effect until 10:30 P.M. and calls at 10:20 with the thought that this is perfectly acceptable—only to be told (loudly) by Suzie that calling after 10:00 P.M. isn’t allowed. Then, believing that Suzie was correct, Larry calls Julia at 9:50 and is informed that he has violated the 9:30 P.M. cut-off time. This case is significantly different from Jeff’s infidelity. Larry actually tried to follow the rules, but he was simply mistaken about what the rules were.
In cases such as this, in which we are blamelessly unaware of the rules, it again seems unreasonable to hold our infractions against our credentials as rule-followers. But you needn’t be ignorant of a rule in order to accept it. In “The Special Section” (Season Three) it’s painfully clear to Larry that his mother’s (re)burial in a secluded section of the cemetery was mandated by a rule against mutilating one’s body (due to her youthful tattoo indiscretion), and he’s outraged and insists that his mother be returned to her planned resting place not because he accepts but wishes to break the rule, but rather because he completely rejects the legitimacy of the rule in the first place. And thus, Larry isn’t acting with the intention of breaking a rule. He’s instead acting on the conviction that there is no legitimate rule to break.
Larry takes the same attitude toward the “unwritten law of dry cleaning.” Larry’s rejection of this rule is so strong that he attempts to convince Senator Barbara Boxer to have fairer dry-cleaning rules written into law: “Well it’s not balancing out for me, Senator. I never get an item. And you know what? If I got it, I would return it. Because I think the whole system is flawed!” (“The Anonymous Donor,” Season Six).
The larger point is that if people have good reason to reject a rule in the first place, their violation of it shouldn’t count against their status as rule-followers. This suggests that a person who both accepts the legitimacy of rules and consistently acts in accordance with them meets the conditions of a good rule-follower—especially since nobody can follow all the rules all the time. What we want in a rule-follower is a person who truly accepts that there are legitimate rules and makes a real effort to follow them.
Even if accepting the legitimacy of some rules and acting in accordance with those rules is enough to make somebody a good rule-follower, however, Larry is a rule-follower only if he actually does both of those things. To use the language favored by philosophers, you might ask whether Larry meets the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions required of a good rule-follower.
Larry does seem to satisfy the first condition: accepting the legitimacy of some rules. In “The Corpse-Sniffing Dog” (Season Three), Larry’s horrified when his dinner companions, the Braudies, rudely insist upon sending back wine. He accepts that there’s a rule of etiquette in play and he wants his dinner party to comply with it. And in “Trick or Treat” (Season Two), Larry emphatically endorses age and costume requirements for trick-or-treating on Halloween when he refuses to give candy to two teenage girls who are, according to his rules, ineligible for candy. Larry even picks up a prostitute in “The Car Pool Lane” (Season Four) so that he can use the faster lane without breaking the multiple passenger rule!
You might question, however, whether the above cases point to a difficulty for Larry’s standing as a sincere rule-follower. In all of these cases it seems that Larry is following rules which are to his advantage. As the great philosopher Immanuel Kant noted, whenever your duty (the action required by the moral rules) coincides with what is to your own personal benefit, it’s nearly impossible for outsiders (and maybe even for you!) to determine whether you have acted out of a commitment to moral duty, as opposed to mere self-interest. It’s only when you follow the rules and thereby frustrate your own self-interest that we can clearly see that you were motivated by a concern for the rules rather than your own benefit.1 And so, if we want to clearly demonstrate that Larry’s a good rule-follower, we should also look for cases in which he endorses, and follows, rules which don’t benefit him.
Fortunately, there are just such cases available. In both “Kamikaze Bingo” (Season Five) and “Krazee-Eyez Killa” (Season Three), Larry accepts a rule requiring spouses to share information, albeit reluctantly in the latter case. In “Kamikaze Bingo” Larry wants information from Cheryl, but in “Krazee-Eyez Killa” the reverse is true. Larry knows that Wanda’s rapper fiancé Krazee-Eyez has been cheating on her. Krazee-Eyez bragged about this to Larry in confidence, and Larry is terrified that Krazee-Eyez will “put a nut in his eye” if he spills the secret. But Cheryl suspects that something is up and insists that spouses are rule-bound to share information. So Larry admits that Krazee-Eyez is cheating, even though he believes that doing so puts his safety at risk. Then, a mere three episodes later (in “The Grand Opening”), Larry accepts the personal disadvantages of rule-following when he refuses to fire the new chef at Bobo’s Restaurant even though the chef’s frequent outpourings of expletives threatens to destroy the restaurant. As Larry says, “You can’t fire a survivor!”
And again, in “The Interior Decorator” (Season One), Larry follows the rules to his own disadvantage. This case is especially telling, as Larry follows a doctor’s office rule for which he himself is responsible and which in the end works against him. After his chivalry (in his opinion unfairly) causes Larry to lose his scheduled appointment time, he insists that the “first-come, first served” rule be abandoned in favor of a rule according to which patients are seen in the order in which their appointments were scheduled. Clearly, Larry endorses his own improvement rather than the original rule. And when he later arrives early to his next appointment only to learn that the office has adopted his rule—with the result that Larry must again wait to be seen—he accepts that he must wait, as dictated by his rule.
Larry also quite consistently follows the rules in sexual matters with Cheryl. Season Four includes an arc in which Larry takes great care to figure out, and obey, these rules. While Larry wants to sleep with other women (as becomes especially apparent in “Mel’s Offer”), he doesn’t seriously consider doing so while married except when permitted by mutually-endorsed rules stemming from his engagement to Cheryl. As a tenth anniversary gift, Cheryl has given Larry permission to sleep (once) with another woman.
Not only does Larry put much thought into selecting a woman, but he also has a lengthy discussion with a rabbi about whether taking Cheryl up on her promise would be wrong—ultimately getting a green light on the pursuit: “She’s giving you something out of generosity, and I think you should probably accept it in that same sense of generosity” (“The Survivor,” Season Four). Larry is here consistent in his endorsement of, and adherence to, rules against adultery. And even more impressive is Larry’s dedication to marital fidelity in “The Massage” (Season Two), when he inspires awe in his friends by calling a hasty end to his rub-down.
So Larry meets the first rule-follower condition with flying colors. How about the second condition? Does Larry consistently follow the rules he himself has accepted? Unfortunately, showing that Larry satisfies this condition will be a little more complicated. All we had to do before was find some examples of Larry clearly accepting the legitimacy of rules—which was easily done by pointing out a few examples. But merely finding a couple of cases in which Larry follows a rule can’t convincingly make the case that Larry always, or even usually, follows the rules he endorses.
What we need, in addition to examples of Larry’s rule-following, is a lack of cases in which Larry fails to follow the rules—or, more specifically, a lack of cases in which Larry fails to follow the rules even though he accepts their legitimacy. And short of detailing every choice Larry has made in eight full seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, our best strategy is to address the most obvious cases of Larry’s rule-breaking and explain why these do not count against Larry’s credentials as a dedicated rule-follower. (I will leave it to you to consider less obvious examples on a case-by-case basis. I’ve actually found this to make for a fun “game” while re-watching my favorite episodes!)
Some of the clearest cases of Larry’s failure to follow rules include the following:
•Larry insists on taking his water bottle into a movie theater, even though this is against theater rules.
•Larry is angered when the Loebs refuse to accept the Davids’ wedding gift, claiming that there is a one-year window after which the exchange of wedding gifts is no longer permissible.
•Larry sneaks his mother into her planned burial plot, in contravention of Jewish Law.
•Larry uses a bathroom stall reserved for the disabled after attempting to leave a party early against the objections of his dinner party, in order to use his “home-base” bathroom.
•Larry attempts to walk through a drive-thru.
•Larry manipulates Jeff into letting the air out of a pro-wrestler’s tires.
•Larry takes a fork from a restaurant.
•Larry steals flowers from Funkhouser’s mother’s memorial.
•Larry takes food from the Funkhousers’ fridge without permission.
At first glance, this list perhaps seems to show without a doubt that Larry David is not a good rule-follower. But in fact, each of the above rules falls into one of two categories, neither of which counts against Larry’s rule-following credentials: rules which Larry doesn’t accept as legitimate, or rules which don’t apply in the circumstances as their very justification has been violated. These two categories are closely related, and by examining them in turn we can uncover the underlying pattern in Larry’s rule-following.
As we’ve already seen, if Larry is to qualify as a good rule-follower, he must both accept the legitimacy of (some) rules and consistently act in accordance with those rules. It would help Larry’s case, however, if there were some principled way in which he comes to accept rules. It would count against Larry’s credentials as a rule-follower if he selected just one or two insignificant rules completely arbitrarily—however consistently he followed them. In other words, Larry’s credentials as a good rule-follower are much stronger if he’s not just inventing the rules as he goes along.
But to Larry’s credit, a careful investigation of the cases in which he appears to break the rules shows that Larry’s choice of rules is far from arbitrary. Larry accepts as legitimate those rules which (at least in his view) follow from the values of fairness and reciprocity. Where a rule does not so follow, and especially when it fails to further any beneficial end whatsoever, Larry quite reasonably rejects it out of hand.
Take Larry’s attitude toward leaving dinner early in “The Bowtie” (Season Five). At the Funkhousers’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party Cheryl and Susie insist that Larry must use the public bathroom, as leaving before dessert isn’t permissible. Although he ultimately gives in to Cheryl’s demands, Larry makes explicit his reasoning in rejecting the rule: it serves no good purpose whatsoever: “What am I supposed to do, sit here for another four hours and be uncomfortable?” Larry would certainly want others to leave his party rather than be uncomfortable, so it’s only fair that he be permitted to do the same.
And why should it count against Larry if he fails to follow a rule which has no good purpose? After all, if a rule serves no purpose, it is difficult to see what would justify a requirement to follow it. We may indeed have very good reason not to follow purposeless rules—especially in light of our earlier conclusion that circumstances sometimes conspire such that we are forced to violate at least one rule. Where two rules conflict, we should certainly follow the one which is supported by better reasons. A good rule-follower therefore doesn’t just blindly follow the rules, he follows the good or legitimate rules.
Indeed, as the philosopher J.J.C. Smart has argued, following rules for no good reason, especially when following the rules leaves everyone worse off than they would otherwise have been, is the trademark of irrational “rule-worship.” If a rule has no purpose, it’s pure folly to insist upon following it! On this point, Smart demands:
Is it not monstrous to suppose that if . . . we know that in this instance to break the rule will have better results than to keep it, we should nevertheless obey the rule? Is it not to erect the rule into a sort of idol if we keep it when breaking it will prevent, say, some avoidable misery? Is not this a form of superstitious rule-worship and not the rational thought of a philosopher?2
Like Smart, Larry repeatedly rejects purposeless rules from which no good can come. Larry is flummoxed by rules against walking through the drive-thru in “Lewis Needs a Kidney” (Season Five) on precisely these grounds: refusing to serve walkers seems to serve no purpose. Serving walkers would benefit non-driving customers and increase restaurant profits, and it would inconvenience neither restaurant employees nor more traditional drive-thru patrons. Similarly, in “The Special Section” (Season Three), Larry’s outraged that his mother’s casket has been moved due to her tattoo. What good purpose is possibly served by segregating the tattooed dead?
Finally, Larry’s insistence that reasons be given for a rule if he is expected to follow it is made loudly explicit in “The Hot Towel” (Season Seven) when Susie refuses to tell him who has been invited to her dinner party:
SUSIE: It’s a social convention that people don’t ask who’s going to be there at the dinner party. It’s just not done.
LARRY: Big deal! Why isn’t it done?
SUSIE: Because it isn’t. I don’t know the derivation of the convention.
LARRY: Then why are you following it, blindly like that?
While it’s folly to follow a rule with no good purpose, it’s even crazier to follow a rule when following the rule actually frustrates the purpose it was intended to serve. Consider Larry’s arrest for “stealing” a fork in “The Massage” (Season Two). General reasons for anti-theft rules seem not to apply in this situation, since Larry was going to bring the fork back. (As Larry himself notes, he was actually trying to borrow, rather than steal, it.) And in the particular case of restaurant flatware, anti-removal rules seem intended to maintain a stock of utensils for restaurant patrons to use in the enjoyment of their dinner. But as Larry tries to explain to the judge, his driver’s enjoyment of the restaurant’s food was itself frustrated by his lack of fork access.
Similarly, in “Club Soda and Salt” (Season Three), Larry objects to a one-year cut-off rule which disallows the Loebs from accepting the Davids’ wedding gift. If it has any purpose at all, the rule seems to be aimed at ensuring that the bride and groom receive their gifts in a timely manner and that the gift-givers aren’t inconvenienced. But in this case, by refusing the gift the Loebs fail to receive their gift at all (whether in a timely manner or not), and the Davids are insulted and inconvenienced far more than they would have been had the Loebs graciously accepted. By following the rule, the Loebs are frustrating its very justification—another case of irrational rule worship!
So what does Larry take to be good justification for a rule? We see early in the series that Larry’s a fan of the Golden Rule: treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. In “The Doll” (Season Two), a theatergoer insists that Larry not bring his bottled water into the theater (as “there’s no food or drink in the theater”). Larry here explicitly and emphatically defends his rule-following character, insisting that the relevant rule is the Golden Rule, which requires equal (reciprocal) consideration. Larry asks his accuser to put herself in his shoes and think about whether she would want similar consideration if their roles were reversed. After all, Larry’s officially dehydrated. And what if he had a serious medical condition? Given that she would want to be allowed to have her water, it’s only fair for her to allow Larry to have his water. In Larry’s view, the most important rule in this case is a rule of fairness. And so by bringing the water into the theater, Larry is acting in accordance with the rule he accepts—and for which he has offered explicit justification.
This isn’t just an isolated case. The importance Larry attaches to fair treatment is a recurring theme in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry makes this particularly clear in “Thor” (Season Two) when making meeting plans with Jason Alexander. Jason wants to meet, yet again, at his office rather than at Larry’s home—on the grounds that it’s more convenient for Jason. But while begrudgingly agreeing to meet at Jason’s office, Larry expresses his displeasure with the unfairness (and lack of reciprocity) of the arrangement. After all, it would be more convenient for Larry to meet at his house. And if convenience counts as a reason for Jason, it should also count as a reason for Larry. They should take turns choosing a meeting place.
The importance Larry places on reciprocity again comes to the fore in “The Bowtie” (Season Five) when he catches a disabled man using the regular bathroom stall at his private investigator’s office. This is the very same man who earlier chastised Larry for using the disabled stall! Larry argues that if he must wait for the regular stall, then his adversary, facing an exactly parallel choice, must wait for the disabled stall. After all, it’s only fair.
Similarly, in “The Hot Towel” (Season Seven) Larry criticizes Christian Slater for violating an unwritten caviar rule. Slater, after wolfing down several large helpings of the delicacy, insists that there are no rules regarding how much caviar he can have. But Larry argues that when indulging in caviar at a party, one must be fair to others. Out of respect for fairness and reciprocity: “We’re each entitled to take a certain amount, so everybody else can have a little bit too.”
Not only does Larry’s dedication to reciprocity provide a cohesive account of the rules he does in fact accept (and an explanation of his attitude toward those he doesn’t), it also gives a justification for Larry’s behavior in cases where he seems to violate a rule even though he accepts it as legitimate. Larry would most likely recognize that, in general, you ought not to take flowers from a roadside memorial. But he feels that his case in “The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial” (Season Six) is special: fairness itself justifies his exemption from the general rule.
Funkhouser has repaid a debt to Larry with a sweaty fifty-dollar bill from his sneaker—which Larry can’t convince anyone else to take. And most frustratingly for Larry, he can’t use it to buy some much-needed apology flowers. Because Funkhouser owes Larry and refuses to pay up (with clean money), Larry takes himself to be restoring the balance of fairness by compensating himself with flowers from Funkhouser’s mother’s memorial.
Larry even more obviously violates a rule which he has previously endorsed in “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister”: the rule prohibiting taking food and drink from a host’s fridge without asking first. Larry takes food from the Funkhousers’ fridge. But that is perfectly consistent with fairness and reciprocity, as Marty Funkhouser has already explicitly deemed permissible Dr. Schaffer’s taking lemonade from Larry’s fridge without permission.
And fairness and reciprocity are cited yet again in “Thor” (Season Two), when Larry (via a favor from Jeff) breaks a rule the general application of which he accepts: one ought not to sabotage others’ cars. Given Larry’s conviction that Thor has already broken this very rule, he feels that fairness justifies his own infraction of it. In fact, it’s entirely because of Thor’s infraction that Larry is motivated to seek reciprocal revenge in the first place.
When we keep in mind Larry’s dedication to the justifying roles of fairness and reciprocity, we can explain why all of the suggested cases of rule-breaking noted above are, after all, consistent with characterizing Larry David as a dedicated rule-follower. But are there any exceptions? Are there any cases in which Larry breaks a rule even though he accepts its legitimacy, and even though there isn’t a fairness-based exception at hand?
If there are such cases, they are what philosophers call “counterexamples.” That is, they are examples which work counter to my claim that Larry is a dedicated rule-follower. Counterexamples are often useful in everyday argumentation, and Larry nicely illustrates their role in “The Bowtie” (Season Five) when he asks Wanda for a counterexample to the claim that all black men who wear bowties are Muslims: “Have you ever seen a black man wearing a bowtie who’s not a Muslim?”
I must admit that there seems to be at least one clear counterexample to the claim that Larry always follows the rules he endorses unless there is a fairness-based exception: the jacket incident in “The Korean Bookie” (Season Five). The comical irony of this episode stems in large part from Larry’s contradictory rule endorsements. The episode begins with Larry’s outrage at Dr. Heineman’s use of the money Larry gave him to repair the car that Larry (intentionally) damaged. Instead of repairing the car, Heineman (the head of the kidney consortium) uses the money to fund breast implants for his daughter Rachel—much to Larry’s indignation. After all, Larry rages, the money was for car repairs, and Larry shouldn’t have to pay for Rachel’s new breasts. Not even the bottom portion of the left half!
But the Davids’ friend Marla has recently given Larry a check to replace a jacket which she ruined. And while maintaining (and blatantly expressing) his outrage with Dr. Heineman during Marla’s wedding celebration, Larry actually wears his soiled jacket—the very jacket which Marla stained and wrote a check to Larry to replace. Given Larry’s continued insistence that reparation money must be used for its intended purpose, he clearly ought to have used the money to replace the jacket—but he used the check to pay his sports gambling debt instead. Larry attempts to justify his use of the money by insisting that it is his to do with as he pleases: “It’s my money. I can do whatever I want with it, no?” But if Larry’s right, then fairness demands that Dr. Heineman be permitted to do whatever he wants with the car repair money.
Here, there is no room to argue that Larry didn’t endorse the relevant rule. He’s upset with Dr. Heineman precisely because Heineman put the car-repair money to a different use. But it’s equally apparent that there’s no fairness-based reason for Larry to make an exception for himself in this case. So I must admit that in “The Korean Bookie,” Larry’s behavior is inconsistent with that of a good rule-follower.
We should keep in mind, however, that this is just one misstep in eight seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. For the full run of the show Larry has consistently followed the rules he finds legitimate—with only one exception. So Larry deserves the commendation of rule-followers everywhere. Say what you want about Larry: he’s a bad friend; he’s selfish and blasphemous; he’s a bald asshole, and so on. Whatever bothers you most. But one thing none of us can deny is that he’s a dedicated rule-follower!
This is as instructive as it is surprising. Although it’s easy to assume that Larry’s general uncooperativeness and continued questioning of others’ rules renders him a rule-breaker, after careful philosophical investigation of the nature of rule-following we can now see that Larry is actually a very good rule-follower. . . . Given his careful consideration of the reasons supporting the rules he follows, he’s quite likely an even better rule-follower than those who simply follow rules without considering their merit! And not only does this shed light on Larry’s character, it’s also helpful to those of us who wish to be good rule-followers ourselves.
Do you, like Larry, consider whether rules are legitimate before following them? If not, given our conclusions about rule-following, it looks as if Larry’s quite right to ask: “Then why are you following them, blindly like that?”
1 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press), pp. 10–11.
2 “Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism,” The Philosophical Quarterly 6:25 (October 1956).