Comedy is not pretty
Garry Shandling is the master of the wry wince. As the eponymous TV talk host on HBO’s seminal ‘90s comedy The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling’s character wanders along studio hallways, trying to avoid human contact before airtime. He shies away from fans and network demands, and especially from his ego-sucking sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Because to encounter an unscheduled human being leads to wincing. Much wincing.
Larry Sanders was influential in many ways, chiefly for its many-layered take on Hollywood, television and fame. Credit the early HBO comedy for being there with pseudo-documentary style satire long before The Office, Extras, Arrested Development, Entourage and a host of reality TV enterprises tore down the divider between real and “reel” life. Before people cared to keep up with the Kardashians, or Paris, or Ozzy, there was Shandling’s neurotic Larry Sanders, trying to keep the compartments of his life in place as the camera follows him during late-night monologues, behind the scenes, at home and in the bedroom.
And Shandling looks eternally pained while doing it — like Gregor Samsa given a network suit and a makeup bib and told to go out and do standup shtick.
But he’s funny as hell, in a discomforting sort of way. Younger viewers will probably recognize him as the wiseass Senator Stern from Iron-Man 2, or the whirring alien in What Planet Are You From? But way back when (1992 to 1998, to be precise), Shandling managed to assemble a team of writers and performers on Larry Sanders who would feed easily into the next generation of comedy. Judd Apatow was an early executive producer of the show; Peter Tolan (who scripted Robert Altman’s The Player) wrote a ton of episodes. Performers like Jeremy Piven (later to become HBO’s Ari Gold on Entourage) shows up, balding even then, as a gag writer. Janeane Garafolo is the wisecracking talent coordinator. Sarah Silverman plays a fledgling joke writer in later episodes. Jon Stewart, a newbie talk show host at the time, turns up on occasion, as does Jerry Seinfeld.
Something about the painful nature of comedy and laughter revealed here must have perked up a young Ricky Gervais, living far away across the pond. His later UK show, The Office, takes Larry Sanders’ discomfort level several notches higher, making viewers squirm at every un-PC remark uttered by office manager David Brent. And Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm owes a big debt to Shandling’s inside look at down-to-the-curb celebrity.
Another plus are the musical cameos woven into many episodes. T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Paul Westerberg, Wu-Tang Clan, Tom Petty and They Might Be Giants manage to drop by, among others. Best of all, though, are the Hollywood cameos, and the things they reveal about celebrity and fame. Larry Sanders, in its six-season run, attracted top guest stars, just as crappy network shows would later come to enlist stars to play thinly-veiled versions of themselves (Friends comes to mind). Since it was on HBO, the show had more leeway in its language and situations, stuff network TV couldn’t touch. The episode in which a white-hot Sharon Stone appears on the talk show, then starts dating Larry, is hilarious but also telling: naturally there’s a sex scene, but Stone is shown on top all the time. Alec Baldwin turns up as a guest who, it develops, slept with Larry’s ex-wife. Watch them try to keep the on-air patter focused on celebrity charities and movie promos while Sanders “can’t stop thinking about him screwing my wife.” Repeat appearances by David Duchovny — playing a version of his real-life sex addict self — were classic cable TV moments in the ‘90s. Ellen Degeneres plays herself in season 5, and after Larry tries to get her to “come out” on his show, they end up sleeping together.
Long before reality TV doused us with too much information, Larry Sanders maintained the illusion of showing viewers what really happens behind the scenes. Of course, the show itself was an illusion, but Shandling understood — long before many others — the public interest in pulling back the curtain, seeing how human, or inhuman, people could be away from the spotlight.
The glue in all this is Shandling, playing a personality not far from his own well-reported insecurities and issues. He did date co-star Linda Doucett for a while, as on one episode of the show; it ended badly, and she was written out of the show. Sanders’ neuroses seem rooted in the tradition of Jewish comedy (kvetchers like Richard Lewis, a later Curb Your Enthusiasm staple, turn up on the talk-show couch), but there’s also something canny and egotistical about Shandling’s character that keeps him just shy of completely likeable. The situation of a self-loathing talk show host who doesn’t particularly like talking to people is not far from reality, if you believe the reporting in, say, Bill Carter’s The Late Shift. (In one memorable scene from that nonfiction account of Dave Letterman’s battle with Jay Leno for the Tonight Show slot, Letterman holds up a sign on-air that only guest Teri Garr can see. It reads: “I hate myself.” Reality really is stranger than fiction.)
Groundbreaking, too, was the multilayered world Larry Sanders peeled back for viewers: first you get Sanders on a TV stage, doing a monologue before a studio audience that’s only slightly racier than what network talk show hosts could get away with. Cut to backstage: Sanders is cursing a blue streak to his tireless show coordinator, Arthur (the priceless Rip Torn). Or he’s watching the late-night airing of the show in bed with his wife or girlfriend, making wry comments. And, in the most inspired device, we get to see what hosts and guests actually talk about when a TV talk show cuts to a commercial. Sometimes they just stare off into space, locked in their own thoughts. Sometimes they bullshit one another. Sometimes they get into outrageous arguments. Then the director cues Sanders, the applause lights go up, and when the red light comes on, it’s showtime again. Kind of like real life, only funnier.
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Not Just The Best of The Larry Sanders Show is available on four-DVD box set from Sony Entertainment.
