Larry David was at the Knicks’ game 4, seated between David Zaslav and John McEnroe. I want to dunk on Zaslav for being there, but he is from NYC, so he gets a pass on this and this alone. He’s not a fair-weather fan, he’s a lifer. Still. Bummer to get stuck next to Zaz.

Larry David has a Zaz connection, though, as he has a new show coming to HBO, and Zaz is still, technically, for now, in charge of HBO via Warner Bros. Larry’s new show is called Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. It’s a sketch comedy limited series about American history, and it’s produced by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions. Barack is even doing promotion for the series:

The actual trailer for the series gives me Drunk History vibes, except no one is drunk. This is actually too bad, because for most of human history, until we got on board with public sanitation and clean water projects, people drank ale and mead more than they drank water. Fermenting ale made it safer to drink, and if you start digging into American history, you will find plenty of instances in which very large figures in history were very drunk during very critical moments and we act like they weren’t, but they WERE. Benjamin Franklin is portrayed to us as a Great Thinker and Steward of The American Spirit, but never ever forget he was banging everyone’s wives and published an article called The Drinker’s Dictionary, in which he included over 200 synonyms for “drunk”. This is the spirit I find missing in the trailer for Larry’s history comedy show.

There is definitely room for Larry David-style whinging throughout American history, and I will definitely watch this series, but I am already sort of dreading Larry’s take on the Boston Tea Party. No one gets that sh-t right. We’ve made it too much into a joke about tea, not enough of a monument to “good trouble” and the value of a well-placed, high-dollar property crime. It’s also one of the great conspiracies, a large-scale plan executed so well that we still don’t know all the conspirators. A lot of people took that secret to their literal graves! The Boston Tea Party is the genesis of the American impulse to destroy stuff when we’re mad and also the beginning of our national “no snitching” policy.

American history is so f-cking weird, and Drunk History captured that weirdness so well. I wish they would bring back Drunk History for America’s 250th. Can’t we have both? Larry David complaining his way through history while Derek Waters gets celebrities plastered as they recount oddball moments in history?

Photo credits: Watts/AFF-USA/Shutterstock

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