Larry David's film Clear History is full of explosive laughs

LARRY David has given us a movie-length dose of his lacerating humour.

Larry David

THE best thing about being famous, Larry David, co-creator and executive producer of Seinfeld and the funnier Curb Your Enthusiasm, once said - maybe the only good thing - was that he no longer had to shop for pants.

"I can just call up and they'll bring the pants right over to my house; that's no small thing," he said. "Trying on pants is one of the most humiliating things a man can suffer that doesn't involve a woman."

There's no trying on of trousers in his new HBO TV movie Clear History, which David seems to have made as an alternative to starting production on a ninth - and hugely anticipated - series of Curb. But there's plenty of humiliation, a lot of laughs and, as in Curb, the comedy is largely improvised by David's ensemble of actors.

He's been equivocating for a while about a new series. "I'm just an indecisive fellow," he told a panel of Los Angeles TV writers recently. "You should see me at a restaurant."

If you've never seen Curb, David stars as a fictional version of himself in the series, the rich guy who created Seinfeld. He's a bald, Jewish, abrasive, sardonic and self-absorbed Hollywood writer whose best efforts in life backfire comically; humiliation is usually involved, and sometimes a woman.

The series is usually being repeated at some ungodly hour on Foxtel, but for many of us Curb is up there with TV's greatest shows, by far the most candid human drama you're ever likely to see on the small screen.

As critic Joe Berkowitz wrote about the show: "Some comedians say the things that everyone else is thinking; Larry David says the things that nobody realises they're allowed to think." It's transgressive, challenging comedy, so abrasive you frequently want to look away, but David has been a huge influence on modern TV comedy, even if his tricks go back beyond Moliere.

So this time around we may have preferred Curb because we love it so much, but David's movie is fine. Clear History still features his brand of incisive humour and the celebrated improvisational style is just a bit friendlier and more accessible. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The comic TV movie is an increasingly rare thing, especially for HBO - this is in fact the first for the cable network, which has this year concentrated on stormy dramatic efforts. There was the almost operatic Phil Spector, written and directed by American dramatist David Mamet, a backstage courtroom drama and a cautionary tale for all those who jump to conclusions. And, of course, Philip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn, a lush, epic treatment of this great romantic literary story, featuring a stunning performance from Nicole Kidman.

Clear History, written by David and his Curb team of Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, and directed by Greg Mottola (Superbad, The Daytrippers), is altogether more modest, almost self-effacing. But David again borrows ambitiously from the stage, the vaudeville blackout, the comic postcard, the theatre of cruelty and the comic syntax of TV's own invention, the sitcom. This time though his shape is the conventional movie comedy with a classic farcical structure, and not all tied up with the subtle conventions of the mockumentary. In some ways it's like a longer, less manic version of Curb, with a cast of stars including Jon Hamm, Michael Keaton and Eva Mendes and a narrative journey for its star.

At the start David, in an outrageous, straggly hippie wig, is driving rather joyously across a freeway bridge singing along to Chicago's 25 or 6 to 4, Robert Lamm's song ostensibly about just writing a song, though many feel it's about looking for spiritual revelation, undergoing a mysterious soul-searching journey. This is about to happen to our hero, who is in fact playing Nathan Flomm, a Clio-winning marketing executive with a taste in shirts as woeful as his hairdo. It turns out that like the David of Curb, he's a guy undone by his inability not to say exactly what he believes a situation demands or to concede any point on which he disagrees.

His former boss Will Haney (Jon Hamm in brilliant comic form), has developed an electric car at a small start-up manufacturing company. When he enthusiastically unveils his proposed name for the vehicle - the Howard, after his young son, named for his hero Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead - Flomm ridicules it: "Nobody's going to buy a car named Howard; it's like calling a restaurant Hepatitis."

After arguing with his boss he gives up 10 per cent of his shares, and in attempting to apologise the next day incites a brilliantly incisive and hysterical argument about the notion of sincerity, candour and authenticity. (The film was inspired when David heard about a guy who owned 10 per cent of Apple stock and sold his shares before the company took off.)

The car is an enormous success, the Model T of its time, losing Flomm a billion dollars and turning him into a national laughing stock. His career is ended, his marriage destroyed and his hair falls out.

Ten years later, he's moved to Martha's Vineyard, is now known as Rolly DaVore and looks exactly like Larry David, and while still irascible and truculent is loved in the community. But when Haney and his new wife, Rhonda (Kate Hudson), begin building a monstrous McMansion on the island, Flomm, unable to help himself, plots revenge with some of the locals (played with scabrous energy by Michael Keaton, Danny McBride and Bill Hader.)

David, with a kind of relentless logic, relies again on what comics used to call "the old domino play". That is, you take one incident good enough in itself to set off a laugh - a woman who shampoos only once a week because of her hairdo - and then use it to explode another. And before anybody has recovered from the first, let alone the second, you apply both to setting off a third. David knows how to explode them like a string of firecrackers; few TV comics can get us so off-balance with a first laugh, the second knocking you over altogether, while the third jumps up and down on your chest.

Then there are the trademark obsessions with minutiae and the way he strings together a web of intricate, awkward social circumstances from the tiniest of incidents and observations. Why shouldn't cars have pee flaps? Why can't wall power sockets be higher ("Are outlets like genitals; do we have to hide them?" he asks)? And just what is the etiquette for setting cutlery in a cafe, on or off the napkin?

Because David's style is improvisational, Mottola says filming was almost like shooting a concert movie because there was no script, only what David calls a "scriptment", about 35 pages of paragraph descriptions of what happens in scenes, with an occasional line of dialogue. It works a treat even if it doesn't always make you cringe as Curb does, or want to leave the room.

David was recently asked about the "leaving the room thing" and said he didn't know what they were taking about. "I thought people would want to stay and watch it. Because it's funny. Not that it's so painful to them that they have to leave." He pondered this for a moment. "But, you know, I don't mind that. I kinda like it."

THERE'S something about Larry David that reminds me of Clive James. I think it's that smile, which plays on David's lips with surprising regularity; in fact, if you look closely it's nearly always there. Even when he confronts the most disastrous of social circumstances, it plays on his face, hinting at a certain happy bemusement that he should have ended up where he is today, as if to have done so strikes him as almost slightly fraudulent.

You see it on James's face too in The Kid from Kogarah, a wonderfully elegiac one-off interview, more a beguiling candid conversation really, with Kerry O'Brien. And, like the fictional Larry, the life of critic, poet and TV star James - The New Yorker magazine once called him "a brilliant bunch of guys" - has also been inspired, not by prominence or achievement, but by catastrophe. "My early disasters have always been the bedrock of my writings," he says. "They're funnier."

At several points he catches himself, stares off a little, away from eye contact with his questioner, and repeats as though to himself that he must stay clear of what he calls "personal territory". It doesn't stop him discussing candidly the problems of his publicised separation from his wife of many years, academic Prudence Shaw, and what drove the rift. "Let's say my days of being drunk with the spectacle of female beauty are behind me; and so they should be," he says when coaxed a little. Though when he remembers, his face lights up like the subject of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.

The interview is filmed in the Old Library at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which James attended as a student and of which he is obviously enormously fond. "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library," Borges said. He also wrote that he felt he didn't really exist, that, "I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited." It's a line James might have written; and the muted light and inquiring atmosphere provide the perfect setting for this meeting with O'Brien.

In a way, this fine piece of TV, directed and produced by Ges D'Souza, might be prefaced by two lines of James's poetry from his recent Dante translations, which he reads for O'Brien. "Your future now is to regret the past," he almost hums. "Forget your hopes; they are what brought you here."

James is now 73, obviously very ill, and battling two terminal diseases - leukaemia and emphysema - racing the clock to finish the sixth and final memoir of a heady life. "The truth is I've got almost everything wrong; when you add it all together, I'm in terrible shape," he tells O'Brien of his health.

James once wrote of Andy Warhol: "He expired somewhere in the centre of a tangle of plastic tubes, most of them supplying his body with fluids it had never had in the first place." It isn't the way he said he wants to go: "I want to be knifed to death in an Elle Macpherson lingerie commercial." That seems unlikely these days and he's reconciled to the reality of his ill health; just the way it goes, approaching death a subject, nothing to weep about. "The universe, creation, providence, they're not on your side; it's just luck," he smiles ruefully at one point.

His daughter Claerwen suggested a title for his final memoir, Prelude to the Aftermath, and he seems happy with that, his career he suggests has been a lifetime's reflection on his own existence. He is never maudlin, though occasionally sad, that smile rarely absent for long. He rallies too as the interview proceeds, often amused by O'Brien's gentle probing.

He admits to his own failings as a TV interviewer. "I always found it difficult to ask someone a question they didn't want to answer." O'Brien, though, is quietly relentless, drawing James to reflect on his own written reflections, at one stage catching him out about the women in his life.

"I've always thought the face of a beautiful woman, preferably an intelligent one, was a revelation of God," he says.

Pale, dressed in a long-sleeved black skivvy, he seems frail at the start but rallies once the stories and reflections pour out. One of this county's most persuasive talkers, he gives the impression his primary instinct is still to be funny; comedians - which he has been for his whole career really, one, he once said, "who must bark for his act" - can't stop working even when there's no one there. When he laughs with O'Brien, he relaxes. He seems stronger, his eyes crinkle, his shoulders jostle and he seems less elderly, more like the barking Clive James we loved when he was a TV star.

He once described himself as "some calculating poseur who will do anything to display his erudition, while simultaneously plunging ruthlessly downmarket in search of viewers". How anyone could successfully do both things at once, he suggested, was hard to fathom, but he did it with enormous and enviable skill, especially in his TV writing.

Of his TV criticism he said: "I must strive to express myself in as unadorned a way as possible while being entertaining enough to ram home the message that their lives will be blighted if they don't see the show." He added, "If the flyer is sometimes garish, for the circus I make no excuse."

He still writes his criticism with what - in a different context - he once described as "the easy-seeming colloquial snap", always enamoured of "the immediacy, the quotability, and, of course, the brevity, of the periodical article written to a tight deadline". He's still an inspiration to anyone writing for a living; especially anyone writing about TV at a time when, in some circles, there are still doubts about its cultural legitimacy. A sneering out-of-hand dismissal of TV is the one cultural prejudice that can be readily delivered without inverted commas. But as James says of himself as a critic, "I went for the popular and every time I suspected the creative energies might be there."

At the end of this beguiling and gentle hour, O'Brien asks James how he would like to be remembered. "I won't be buying a ticket to Switzerland so I can book into some clinic and pay people to put me into a long, deep sleep," he says. "I can get that from television here."

Clear History, Monday, 8.30pm, Showcase.

Clive James: The Kid from Kogarah, Tuesday, 8.30pm, ABC1.