America is turning 250. Where’s the party?
In 1976, the Bicentennial played out on TV as a yearslong mass-culture pageant. Networks aired civic services like CBS’s “Bicentennial Minutes,” fast-food joints wrapped their burgers in bunting, and “Maude” and “The Bob Newhart Show” produced holiday-themed episodes. It was commercial and ’70s cheesy, but it was everywhere and it was for everyone.
This year’s festivities feel as if someone forgot to send out the invites and were scrambling for last-minute gifts. There are dutiful historical documentaries but no omnipresence, no sense of a moment sweeping universally through the popular culture. Even the branding terms — “America250,” “Freedom 250” — are bland and uninspired, as if someone looked at the marching syllables in “semiquincentennial” and just surrendered like Cornwallis at Yorktown.
The most public expression of the birthday has been a gaudy, belligerent spectacle befitting the leader whom history put in the Oval Office in time for the odometer to turn over.
The president circumvented a congressional nonprofit and created his own group to engineer a more partisan-tinged celebration. When a list of bygone musical acts quit a planned concert series in Washington, he reimagined it as a “rally” with himself as the headliner. He hulked up the White House grounds with an ultimate-fighting octagon, presiding over a bloody pay-streaming Colosseum where one of his combatants boorishly misgendered the former first lady Michelle Obama.
The whole spectacle feels less like a national birthday than like an expensive midlife crisis. And there is little pretense that this is a party for everyone so much as a chest-thumping bacchanal for conquerors.
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” a seven-episode historical sketch show from Larry David of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” sounds as if it could be if not a corrective then at least counterprogramming. Premiering Friday on HBO and HBO Max, it is produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, whose recent opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago was a conspicuous alternative narrative to President Trump’s cage-match chauvinism.
What we get instead is a kind of “Curb” retread in Americana dress-up — “Curb Your Patriotism,” if you will.
Introducing the first episode, President Obama describes the show’s theme: that throughout history, Americans “can be irascible, petty, selfish, cheap and, let’s face it, some of us will always find something to complain about.” The first sketch demonstrates the thesis, as David’s character tries to hijack the drafting of the Declaration of Independence with a list of gripes. (It should be illegal to share an umbrella!)
This is exactly the kind of material that, on “Curb,” secured David’s place on the comedy Mount Rushmore. But here it’s recycled and mismatched. There are plenty of callbacks and references for “Curb” fans — “chat and cut” here, “pig parking” there — and the gargantuan list of celebrity guests includes many “Curb” alums. But you wonder why David ended that show in 2024 if he was just going to stage a mini-tribute to it two years later.
The natural comparison for “Life” is the “History of the World” satires from Mel Brooks, recently revived on Hulu. The difference is Brooks had ideas about the past — not necessarily partisan or polemical ones, but if you gave him a period, he had a take, whether it was imagining the Spanish Inquisition as a musical spectacular or using the French Revolution to play the movies’ most entitled monarch.
There are flashes of this in “Life,” like a Henry Ford sketch that spoofs the auto mogul’s antisemitism. But the driving idea of most of the sketches is simply: What if Larry David? What if his petty, self-interested character were at the McCarthy hearings, Kitty Hawk, the Donner Party camp, the OK Corral?
This version of history repeats, to diminishing returns, giving everything from the invention of the telephone to Rosa Parks’s bus protest the same treatment. A pair of sketches featuring David as a crotchety aide to Abraham Lincoln seem to last fourscore and seven years.
That same sort of character was a delight on “Curb” for years. And in fact, the funniest sketches in “Life” reunite him with his “Curb” co-stars Susie Essman and J.B. Smoove, not because of anything they have to say about the topics (women’s suffrage and slavery, respectively), but for how they instantly re-create the chops-busting dynamics David developed with his collaborators. (A reunion with Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, seems to have been more fun to make than it is to watch.)
The handful of sketches that will probably get the most attention make feisty if heavy-handed points about Trump-era politics. One suggests that if the founding fathers had a little more Larry Davidian cynicism about human nature, they might have future-proofed the government better; another sneaks in a spoof of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which hits hard partly for its two-degrees-of-separation connection. (The health secretary is married to David’s “Curb” co-star Cheryl Hines.)
Elsewhere, David gamely glues on his mutton chops and jumps into his period roles with gusto. (One of his best performances is as a disappointed presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, ranting against the injustice of the Electoral College.) It’s just that his comedy doesn’t fit the format — he’s better at farce than at sketches — or the moment.
“Seinfeld” and “Curb” were perfect matches for their times. “Seinfeld” was a low-stakes “show about nothing” (in its own words) for the comfortable, ironic ’90s; “Curb” was a blistering comedy of ill-manners that embodied the abrasive spirit of the social-media era.
Years ago, a Twitter account called “Seinfeld Today” tried to imagine what it would be like to move that period-perfect sitcom into the day of iPads and Instagram. “Life” does the reverse. The repeating joke is transplanting the 21st-century spleen of “Curb” to every era of America’s past, and the transplant is not an improvement.
“Curb” could make Larry’s indecisiveness over a Palestinian chicken restaurant into a stand-in for a grand global drama. “Life” somehow does the opposite: It manages to turn great events of history into mundane observational comedy, even as the country is embattled over which parts of the past to remember, which to suppress and which to tear down for new construction.
“Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” plays like a document from an alternative timeline, a light laugh about America that might have played better had the Obama presidency not been followed by a decade of recrimination and ugliness. But as the president-producer noted at the opening of the Obama Center — where he warned of the dangers of politicizing the military and urged the peaceful transfer of power — we don’t live in that universe.
If only our current moment were about nothing! You can understand why HBO signed up Larry David for this star-spangled special; the pursuit of unhappiness is his comedic life’s work. But it feels a little redundant after the country has already pursued unhappiness, and caught it.
