Curb You

A few years ago I (probably sexily) mused:

During a conversation about great sitcom characters yesterday, I was asked how I could think George Costanza was a better character than Larry David, since David was the "real" George.  I'd never thought about it, but it occurred to me that George was always bubbling with anger and paranoia, about to blow at any moment.  There was always a desperation about George, whereas David, even though he gets people pissed off and gets in shouting matches, can always just shrug it off "fuck it" since he's a gazillionaire and, in spite of his "neurotic Jewishness", has already had a wildly successful life.  I understand some of the shows humor comes from the absurdness of such a guy getting in the situations he does, but, in the end, there's really nothing at stake for Larry.

The Onion AV Club wondered the same thing, kind of:

Here’s something I’ve been wondering: would Curb Your Enthusiasm be as funny as it is if Larry David weren’t an extraordinarily wealthy man? 

If he were a janitor, or even a chemistry teacher, rather than the executive producer of one of the most successful TV shows of all time, would Curb be as great as he is? I doubt it. Part of what makes Larry so hilarious, at least in the context of Curb, is how infinitesimally tiny his problems are; it's the contrast between the volume of his moaning and the scale of the injustices he faces. Larry's enemies are the small-time evildoers of the world, the “pig parkers” and “chat-n’-cutters,” not the drug dealers or human traffickers. The conventional wisdom about comedians is that they are tortured souls who use comedy to cope with the pain of adversity, but Larry David provides solid evidence to the contrary: that extraordinary privilege and material comfort can actually make you pretty funny, too.