When Barack and Michelle Obama announced, in 2018, that they were transitioning from politics to showbusiness – pulling a “reverse Trump”, in effect – everyone more or less knew what to expect. Establishing their own media company, Higher Ground Productions, the former president and first lady set about producing exactly the sort of projects you would half-cockedly presume the Obamas would put their name to: sober, fact-based dramas like Worth (about the 9/11 victims’ fund) or Rustin (about underacknowledged civil rights organiser Bayard Rustin), or stately documentaries with titles like Our Great National Parks. So it is slightly out of the blue that we get the latest Obama project – Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, an irreverent sketch show conceived and fronted by famed Curb Your Enthusiasm antisocialite Larry David.
Barack doesn’t just produce but also at one point stars in HBO’s new seven-part series, which takes famous moments from US history (the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party, that sort of thing) and inserts David, playing more or less himself. (A comparison might be something like Mel Brooks’ time-hopping A History of the World, Part I or its dismal streaming follow-up.) Each sketch, largely unscripted, plays out much in the vein of Curb, only here, David’s inane interpersonal quarrels are brought into absurd juxtaposition with momentous historical backdrops. But there’s no getting around it: as a team-up, Larry David and the Obamas are a completely confounding match.
That’s not to say that this odd coupling makes no sense on a contextual level. For one thing, they seem to be politically aligned: David is a longtime and vocal supporter of the Democratic Party, and an untiring critic of Trump – a liberal but not a radical. He is also, thanks to his royalties as co-creator of the sitcom Seinfeld, obscenely wealthy, and, as such, swims in the sort of pools that the Obamas frequent. It was actually Higher Ground that approached him with the idea for the series: David has said, “I know the president a little bit. We played golf together.”
For David, there is obviously a flattering aspect to the collaboration; it probably couldn’t hurt when it came to things like budget, or securing the services of the many celebrity guest stars. (Though most – including Jon Hamm, Vince Vaughan, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Hader, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Isla Fisher – had previously guested on Curb.) Obama has been all over the marketing, and featured personally in the trailers. When David was interviewed after the premiere this week, he praised the president’s “perfect comic timing”. (Asked if he thinks Obama could be in the running for an acting Emmy, he scowled: “I wouldn’t go that far.”)
What, though, is in it for the Obamas? The collab – and perhaps the Obamas’ whole production project – has more than a whiff of the Bill Clinton-playing-saxophone-on-Arsenio about it. They say that all rock stars want to be actors, and all actors want to be rock stars; the same is often true for politicians and showpeople. The Obamas already have all the credibility they’re ever going to get. Now it’s a matter of wanting to stay relevant. To some extent too, David’s sensibility represents a sort of appealing middleground – he’s politically incorrect but never truly scandalous; he’s a known quantity at this point but not entirely without edge.
It is to this show’s credit that it does not feel like a wholly sanitised work of presidentially approved comedy; at times, the sketches needle at parts of American history that are often treated with po-faced reverence. A 78-year-old white man riffing on the civil rights movement is a delicate line to tread: in one sketch, Rosa Parks sits at the front of the segregated bus next to David, only to find him such an obnoxious, irritating seatmate that she gives up and moves to the back. That the Obamas okayed such a premise is probably down to the fact that this is a plainly funny idea for a sketch, good taste aside. (And many of the sketches in this series are very funny – not up there, perhaps, with David’s coruscating best work, but a cut above his non-Curb, non-Seinfeld ephemera (the 2013 TV movie Clear History, or the 1998 film Sour Grapes), and funnier too than many of the later episodes of Curb.
And yet, while Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness never seems to pull its punches, there’s no getting around the dubious power dynamic of it all. Comedy is fundamentally an artform of outsiderdom. When it comes from the establishment – and the Obamas are axiomatically this – its very essence is undermined. (In a sense, David’s Seinfeld millions mean that he has in a sense been part of the establishment for decades, though Curb smartly deflated this by making his character perennially low-status.)
At the very least, this series has cast an intriguing sense of mystery over what comes next for Higher Ground. (Wouldn’t “Let Me Be Clear Productions” have been a much better name?) Maybe the Obamas will go one step further in their pursuit of pop-culture clout and ask Noah Wyle to develop a Pitt-esque medical drama about a White House doctor’s frantic attempts to treat an irascible and physically deteriorating commander-in-chief. (They could call it The Patient.) Or perhaps ink a deal with Quentin Tarantino, to make a gory alternate-history movie about the January 6 insurrection. Or maybe they’ll go back to making civic-minded documentaries and programmes to teach children about the voting process. As post-presidency careers go, you might well question the efficacy of it – but if Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness is anything to go on, the Obamas’ foray into showbusiness might be going the distance.
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‘Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness’ is released weekly in the UK on HBO Max
