“Thank you, thank you, you’re going to be so disappointed!” Larry David said to a standing ovation Tuesday night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
With less than two weeks to go until the premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s highly anticipated 11th season, David joined Jimmy Kimmel to reminisce about the time he accidentally showed up to the host’s house for dinner a week early and explain why he’s not “temperamentally suited” for stand-up comedy.
But perhaps the most important question Kimmel asked his guest was about those perfect photos that were captured of him at last month’s New York Fashion Week. “You don’t seem to be having a great time,” the host said. “You actually seem to be scared and plugging your ears.”
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“It was very noisy,” David replied. “Let me explain how I wound up there.” He said it was his friend’s fiancée’s fashion show and the friend told him that his “presence would be helpful” so he reluctantly agreed to go. “I said, ‘My presence has never been helpful anywhere!’” he continued. “‘Everything is better if I’m not there, believe me.’”
He admitted that he was “a little out of place, like Steve Bannon at a seder, it doesn’t really work.”
Earlier in the interview, David revealed a handful of details about the new season of Curb, which was shot entirely during the pandemic over the past year. And while there has been no indication that COVID plays into the show itself, it did have a major impact behind the scenes.
“We shot the whole season and everybody had masks on,” David explained. “I didn’t see one face—other than the actors who were in the scenes with me—I didn’t see one person’s face all year, the whole year.” But then, it was the last day of filming and they were outside so he decided to defy the “COVID police.”
“I didn’t care anymore,” he told Kimmel “I said, ‘OK, take them off, get these masks off, I’m sick of this! I want to see what you look like.’” When the crew all removed their masks, he looked around and said, “OK, put them back on.”
David also shared a clip from a new episode in which he’s bickering back and forth with his old friend and fellow comedian Richard Lewis when he turns to him and improvises the line, “When are you going to die?” That moment comes after the health issues that nearly prevented Lewis from appearing at all in the new batch of episodes.
“He’s the only person in the world I could say that line to,” David said. “The only person in the world. Our friendship is so strong and it goes back so far that I could say anything I want to him and vice versa.” But he wouldn’t go so far as to call him his “best friend” when Kimmel asked.
“That’s a dumb question for a host to ask,” David told him. “Stupid question. You know I’d get in trouble for that.”
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