“I never thought of myself as being funny,” says Larry David, in the trailer for HBO’s original new two-part documentary, The Larry David Story. “Anything I could be associated with that was successful was a shock.”
“Twenty-five years old, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” David continues to the camera crew. “Well, what do you do when you’re talking, and people are laughing? You do comedy. So, I thought, why not me?”
The first part, titled “American Jewboy,” will ostensibly delve into David’s early life, while the second part, “The Jewish Fountainhead,” will likely focus on the 74-year-old’s decades-spanning career. David started out doing standup comedy in the late ’70s. After a turn as a television writer — including a short-lived gig at Saturday Night Live, where he met Julia Louis-Dreyfus — he eventually teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“I’m a total fraud,” David says of his long-running HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which just wrapped up its 10th season late last year. “And the Curb outlet for me is this guy I wanna be, and he’s completely honest, just the opposite of who I am, and it’s a thrill. I got lucky, and I’ll leave it at that.”
Hopefully, he’ll elaborate slightly more since they’ve got two hours to fill. The two-part doc, airing back to back, will premiere on HBO on March 1.