Backstage Details From 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' That Put The Show In A Whole New Light

Curb Your Enthusiasm was renewed for season 11 in June 2020, and David’s reaction was 100 percent grumpy perfection. He complained to Variety magazine, “Believe me, I’m as upset about this as you are. One day I can only hope that HBO will come to their senses and grant me the cancellation I so richly deserve.” Wonderful stuff.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a highly unusual TV comedy in that none of its dialog is scripted. The actors are given a vague description of where David wants a scene to go, but then they completely improvize all their lines. It lends an unpredictable, spontaneous feel, as none of the actors actually know what their co-stars are going to say before it comes out of their mouths.

The ad hoc dialog may give some people the wrong impression of the show. The spontaneous nature of its scenes can only thrive because of the meticulous plot framework underpinning them. David and his writing collaborators create an outline for each season, so they know exactly which lines and plot points need to be addressed in order to move things forward. So it’s spontaneous, but still structured.

The gap between seasons eight and nine of Curb was six years. One reason for this is that the show takes a long time to put together, precisely because of the singular way in which it is created. When editing episodes, there is simply a ton of footage to work through. Each scene will have multiple different versions, and it’s therefore a tall order for the editor to wrangle everything into a coherent narrative. 

You may think David would be the most stone-faced professional on the Curb set, but you’d be wrong – he cracks up more than anyone else, and the thing that reportedly gets him the most is when his co-stars insult him. Director Robert B. Weide told newspaper The New York Times, “Sometimes I’ve had times where I’ve said, ‘Let’s just shoot over Larry’s shoulder until he gets this out of his system.”

Jason Alexander played George Costanza on Seinfeld: a compulsively self-hating, inherently selfish and paranoid bald guy. Does this remind you of anyone? Well, it should, because Costanza was indeed a fictionalized version of David. Some of the events Costanza experienced in the show, such as being fired but returning to work like nothing happened, were even based on real things that happened to David. 

When she auditioned for the role of Cheryl David, Cheryl Hines was part of the improv comedy troupe The Groundlings, but she had very little screen experience. She therefore didn’t stress too much, as she believed she had little to no chance of winning the role. It turned out the show was specifically looking for an unknown actress, though, and she found out she’d bagged the part a mere four hours after her audition.

Richard Lewis and David’s friendly rivalry goes back long before Curb Your Enthusiasm. In fact, it even goes back long before their days as stand-up comedians. Amazingly, the two men knew each other when they were 12-year-olds at a sports camp. Naturally, as Lewis revealed to OC Weekly newspaper, “I despised the guy and he hated me.” It was only in their early 20s that they realized they’d crossed paths as kids. Crazy.

Susie Essman is nothing like her character Susie Greene in real life. But that doesn’t stop fans from approaching her with requests to cuss them out like she does David and husband Jeff Greene on the show. She usually obliges, even if she’s not in the mood, but she did tell Esquire magazine, “People are visibly disappointed that when they meet me, I’m not this screaming, yelling crazy person.”

When J.B. Smoove auditioned to play Leon, he had been released from his SNL contract in New York and had returned to being a touring stand-up comic. Around this time his good friend Oji Pierce died, and he traveled to L.A. for the funeral. While in town, his agent got him the audition, and he nailed it by appearing in character as soon as he walked through the door. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!

Jeff Garlin doesn’t have a lot of time for his character, Jeff Greene. During a Paley Center Q&A, he lambasted his fictional counterpart by saying, “He’s an idiot. He’s not a good guy.” The star of The Goldbergs added, “I’m a decent guy so there’s some niceness underneath. I have no respect for this guy. He’s a buffoon, that’s all.” We hope this at least makes Greene fun for Garlin to play, though.

The iconic Curb theme song is now synonymous with internet fails and embarrassing moments. It is called “Frolic” and was written by Italian composer Luciano Michelini for the 1974 film La Bellissima Estate. David first heard it in a bank commercial, though, which is hilarious. On the Origins podcast, he revealed, “There was something circusy about it.” He added, “It tells the audience: don’t take this seriously, it’s just funny.”

Even though the actors are on a need-to-know basis regarding Curb’s plot, it stands to reason that Hines needs to know more than most. She’s playing David’s wife, after all. During a panel discussion, though, she once revealed, “I didn’t get to see a story outline for the first two seasons. I’d just drive to whatever address they gave me; I didn’t know what the show was about, I didn’t know what the scene was about.” Oh.

When Curb Your Enthusiasm debuted, the title was Larry’s wry way of telling Seinfeld fans to manage their expectations. It wasn’t going to be Seinfeld 2.0, so he wanted them to react accordingly. But in 2011 he told Time magazine that it also had another meaning. He said, “People should keep enthusiasm curbed in their lives. Always keep it. To not is unattractive. It’s unseemly.” Oh, Larry. Never, ever change.

During the Paley Center Q&A, David revealed his fitting outlook on the depiction of his marriage in Curb. He said, “I want people to think we’re happy but not that happy. I don’t want to see anybody that happy because it makes me a little sick. I’m trying to strike the balance that you believe the marriage, that they really like each other, but he’s really not that happy.” 

In 2011 David confessed to Rolling Stone magazine that his on-screen persona is how he’d like to act in real-life. If he could get away with it, that is. He said, “The character really is me, but I just couldn’t possibly behave like that.” He added, “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.” 

In 2007 David and real-life wife Laurie got a divorce. This led to the fictional David and his on-screen wife Cheryl going through a divorce in seasons Seven and Eight. Essman told Rolling Stone, “Larry works on a very deeply unconscious level that even he’s not aware of.” She added, “That if he’s not married, he doesn’t want to be married fictitiously, either.”

It might be fun to believe David is as rude as his TV alter ego in real life, but that’s not quite the case. He is, in fact, actually quite sensitive when it comes to his on-screen insults. For example, he won’t make fun of any actor’s physical appearance unless given the green light to do so; Garlin, for instance, said David could tease him about his weight. See? He’s a nice guy, really...

The show started life as a one-hour HBO special focusing on David’s real-life return to stand-up comedy. The idea was to film two-thirds of his stand-up act, but also a third as a mockumentary that took fans behind the scenes. Everyone soon realized this fictional aspect was working out funnier than the stand-up, and David enjoyed making it a lot more as well. And that’s how Curb Your Enthusiasm was born. 

Soon after shooting wrapped on the Curb Your Enthusiasm pilot, Garlin suffered a stroke. Incredibly, though, he now credits working on the show with aiding him in his recovery. He told The Guardian newspaper in 2011, “If you watch the first season, I am so strokey.” He added, “But Curb was the best rehab I could have had.” It seems the constant improvising helped him to sharpen his mind again.

There are three things you can count on in this life: death, taxes, and David moving house unusually often in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The reason for this is hilarious – HBO rents houses for the production to shoot in, and the real-life neighbors always wind up lodging noise complaints. Why? Because the actors are constantly yelling at each other while shooting scenes. When these inevitable beefs emerge, HBO just rents a new house!

Jorge Garcia became an icon in the mid-2000s when he played Hugo “Hurley” Reyes on Lost. Amazingly, he was only cast in that show because creator J.J. Abrams was watching Curb Your Enthusiasm the night before auditions began. He saw Garcia playing a drug dealer who sold David some pot and knew he wanted him in the show. The role of Hurley was then crafted specifically for Garcia.

In 2015 Ted Danson told website The A.V. Club that he only suggested appearing on Curb, along with wife Mary Steenburgen, because he felt sorry for David. He had screened a cut of the pilot to friends at his house in Martha’s Vineyard, and several people fell asleep. Wanting to be supportive, Danson half-heartedly said, “Hey Larry, if you ever need anybody, please call us.” A year later, David took him up on the offer.

On the Origins podcast, Essman spilled the beans on the show’s low budget in its early days. She revealed, “We didn’t have our own dressing-room trailers. We were all running around whatever house we were in finding a bathroom and changing and getting makeup done in the half-dark.” It took until season three or four for the show to be allocated one trailer, which the core cast shared.

On the Origins podcast, Smoove revealed, “When I worked for Saturday Night Live, everybody loved the show. We would come in on write days and spend the first 15 minutes talking about Curb.” In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he told his wife he’d love to be on the show some day. She responded, “You know what, you’re going to be on that show one day.” Her prediction was 100 percent correct.

In season six, David decides to donate his kidney to his frenemy Richard Lewis. Amusingly for Lewis, though, when he went to get a real-life colonoscopy, the valets at the medical center believed this show storyline had been genuine. On the Origins podcast, Lewis laughed, “It gets to the point where, because we’re playing our own names and our own people, our own persons, people do believe it.”

In 2020 Judge Judy told The New York Times that, when she guest-starred on Curb, she did the impossible – she left David speechless. She revealed, “They said, ‘Be you,’ so I was me. I grabbed Larry’s eyes and said, ‘I don’t want to hear from you again!’ And there was dead silence.” David had been supposed to argue with her, and when the director asked what happened, he allegedly replied, “She frightened me.”

In the early days of Curb, it was difficult for the production to get certain celebrity guest stars to appear. Despite David being so well known for Seinfeld, the likes of Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg, and Dustin Hoffman all reportedly said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Even Spin City star Richard Kind, who did agree to appear, wasn’t convinced the show would be any good. Of course, these days he’s happy to admit just how far wide of the mark that assessment proved to be.

As the show became more and more successful, though, the creative team had their pick of famous guest stars. Ben Stiller, Ricky Gervais, Elizabeth Banks, Michael J. Fox, Shaquille O’Neal, John McEnroe... it’s a veritable Who’s Who. Naturally, as this is Curb, most of the celebs commit with gusto to playing comically despicable versions of themselves. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Most celebrities find their way onto Curb playing distorted versions of themselves. But some, such as Bryan Cranston, Steve Coogan and Vince Vaughn, have played brand new characters in the show. They will all have gone to an audition with David in which they were given a super-loose description of a scene, before being thrown into the improv deep end. Sink or swim!

Maniacal hip-hop star Krazee-Eyez Killa was played on Curb by Dodgeball star Chris Williams, who admitted to The New York Times that he only had a two-line description of the character to work with in his audition. He decided to go hell for leather, wearing brown contact lenses and a silver grill on his teeth. He also entered the audition fully in character. Obviously, it worked a treat.

It might sound intimidating to guest-star in Curb, especially if you aren’t well-versed in improv, but the show won’t let you fall flat on your face. Lucy Lawless told The New York Times that she had producer Jeff Schaffer and writer Alec Berg feeding her line readings and ideas between takes. She revealed, “They would say, ‘Change that word to this. And instead of saying you don’t like Ted Danson this time play that you do.’”

Lawless also revealed to The New York Times that, when she found herself detained in a Mexican airport due to a passport problem, she tried to tell the staff who she was. She went through her extensive TV career. Nothing. Then someone recognized her from Curb. Lawless laughed, “I spent six years riding horses over burning freaking houses as Xena, but one day on Curb Your Enthusiasm! Thank you, Larry David.”

In 2003 Juan Catalan was arrested for the murder of a 16-year-old girl in Sun Valley, California. He spent five months in jail, despite telling the police he had been at an L.A. Dodgers baseball game at the time of the killing. Incredibly, he was exonerated and awarded $320,000 in compensation because his alibi was proved true by footage filmed by the Curb crew, who had been at the game that night shooting an episode.

In “Mary, Joseph, and Larry,” David spends Christmas with Cheryl’s family and eats a baby Jesus cookie that is part of a manger scene. Chaos ensues. It was all based on Hines’ real family, who had the very same manger scene and had warned her, “Don’t eat baby Jesus.” She phoned David and said, “If you were at my house right now, you would eat baby Jesus and my family would go crazy.”

During a 2014 interview with Bill Simmons of pop-culture blog Grantland, David revealed that he’s unlikely to ever give the show a true finale. He said, “Well, you know, I got so much grief from the Seinfeld finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up.” He might have the right idea – no one can debate the merits or demerits of a finale if you don’t give them one!

Curb Your Enthusiasm has been used as a teaching tool in therapy sessions with schizophrenic patients. Wait, what? David Roberts, a clinical psychology student, began showing patients clips of David’s on-screen social snafus in order to help them decipher what to do and, more importantly, what not to do in their own interactions. Soon he had developed a technique known as Social Cognition and Interaction Training. 

If you work in Starbucks and any customer has ever said, “Just give me one of the vanilla things,” with pantomime disdain, you have David to thank for it. It’s a reference to a moment in a classic season two Curb episode and it has since inspired innumerable internet memes and real-life wannabe comedians. It was also bestowed the honor of an Urban Dictionary definition. Whoa. 

In 2013 Garlin launched his own podcast, By The Way, on the Earwolf network. His first guest was David, and they had an hour-long conversation about nothing overly important. It was delightful. Our favorite bit was when Garlin revealed how he knew the famously cranky David liked him – he didn’t display obvious contempt. In David’s world, that’s as good as telling someone you’re their best pal.

In 2009 there was a Seinfeld reunion, of sorts. It took place on Curb Your Enthusiasm and saw the cast reunite to play fictionalized versions of themselves filming a reunion of the hit show. David told USA Today that it “was a perfect way to do something like that, but not to do it. Under the guise of doing the Curb show, it was very relaxed and loose and easy.” Arguably, Seinfeld could not have gotten off the ground without both David and Jerry at the helm — but not for lack of Jerry trying. He took a lot of risks to reach the top, nearly derailing his career in the process.

During an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Seinfeld revealed his first joke. To him, it all came together from realizing that the word "left" has many negative attributes attached to it. What's the deal with that?

Seinfeld described the anti-leftism as, "Left feet. Left-handed compliment. ‘What are we having for dinner? Leftovers.’ You go to a party there is nobody there. ‘Where did everybody go?’ ‘They left!’”

The way Seinfeld saw it, the power of the joke stemmed from its pacing. Everything had to be deliberately plotted out for the joke to work for the audience. Besides being the first joke he wrote, it opened the door for an incredible career.

Seinfeld always loved jokes, and from the moment he started hitting open mics in 1976, the New Yorker had stars in his eyes. Looking at his idols, he saw that his career as a comic depended on getting some TV exposure. That was easier said than done.

Seinfeld hit a ton of road bumps on his way to fame. Early in Jerry's career, he secured a small role as a mailman on the sitcom Benson. Unfortunately, the creators didn't see Jerry's character going too far, so they fired him.

Before his iconic sitcom took off, Jerry Seinfeld had the opportunity for another TV show. He could have been a host on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000, an oddball 1980s comedy series. But he turned it down.

Of the many important decisions to make in a career like Seinfeld's, perhaps the most important is who you decide to work with. When it came time for Seinfeld to choose a business manager, he choose someone very familiar: his sister, Carolyn Liebling. The Seinfeld name also extended to his most famous creation.

When Jerry created his self-titled sitcom with Larry David, he never expected the enormous success it would usher in. Least of all would he have predicted that his net worth would continue to grow tremendously after Seinfeld ended.

For season one, Seinfeld earned Jerry $20,000 per episode. With only five episodes making up its freshman outing, the comedian still made $100,000 in the end. However, the entire cast and crew expected to be cancelled, as they just weren't finding an audience.

But by the 9th and final season, Jerry made $1 million per episode. He became the first TV actor to snatch such a cash prize, and that wasn't even the end to his financial success. It seems Seinfeld is just as savvy as a businessman as he is a comic.

Thanks to DVD sales, broadcast syndication, and even board games, Jerry has enjoyed more riches. It all added up to increase his net worth to over $900 million. It might have taken him a while, but he earned his success. Money isn't everything to him either.

NBC got so desperate for another season of Seinfeld to be made that they offered Jerry $5 million per episode. But at that point, Jerry really didn't need to worry too much about money. So he rejected the offer.

Naturally, he's still asked about the show all the time. Responding to fans on Reddit, Seinfeld revealed a favorite episode of his was "The Marble Rye," where his character stole bread from an old lady. Yet it was not so much what the episode was about, but where it was filmed, that meant something.

The exterior scenes for the episode were filmed in a different location, the Paramount Studio in Los Angeles. It convinced him of the show's success. "We felt like we were a weird little orphan show. So that was a big deal for us," Jerry revealed. The cast also had a blast playing with the fake snow.

From there, Jerry kept evolving. In 2002, the funnyman became a children's book author. Halloween revolved around memories of Seinfeld's childhood and the October season. Featuring drawings of little Jerry, his observational comedy was adjusted for younger readers.

In 2007, Bee Movie was released. It had Seinfeld voice a bee who sues the human race for exploiting his species. The odd concept didn't lead to box office gold, though it earned Jerry a passionate film fan base. But don't think that's the end to the story.

The only thing more outrageous than the plot might be how the creators decided to advertise. Over at the posh Cannes Film Festival in 2007, Jerry donned a puffy costume and "flew" on a zip line to promote his animated flick.

During the years, Bee Movie has found a surge of popularity online by fans with their own unique brand of humor. Jerry's bee character was even edited into an episode of Seinfeld.

The recent rise in popularity, made Jerry consider a sequel...for only six hours. After that, he came to realize acting wasn't nearly as satisfying as his stand-up. Once Seinfeld wrapped, he threw himself back into his original passion. He just hoped he still had it.

But that was never in doubt, as shown by sold-out theaters and a juicy Netflix deal. It's the world he loves, and paired up with Seinfeld legacy, it's safe to say the comedian won't become irrelevant anytime soon. He's also still good friends with his closest collaborator.