Ted Danson sighs. “Larry David? Now he is not funny.” The actor best known as Sam in Cheers plays himself as a regular character in Larry David’s offbeat sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. “He is manipulative, does not even write the scripts — he’s the laziest human being on the planet. He stayed in our guesthouse when he was getting divorced two years ago and we could not get rid of him. Literally. We used to call him Larry the Lodger.”

Ten minutes later, Larry David stumbles over in person, dressed in black and looking exactly as he does on screen — a groovy rabbi. “Danson says you’re the laziest man in the world,” I say. “That bum,” David barks. “He’s not with me when all these scripts are prepared. I’m the guy who makes him look good.” But he says you stayed over when divorcing from your committed environmentalist wife, Laurie? “Yeah, but first I went home and turned all the lights on,” he grins.

Of course, Danson is wrong — deliberately so. C’mon, this is Hollywood. He was ribbing. David may actually be the funniest man on the planet. He is, at least, a comedy master. (“Master?” He looks scornful when I say this. “I am not a comedy master.”) With Jerry Seinfeld, he devised, wrote and produced Seinfeld — still the most successful sitcom in history, famously based on the concept of “a show about nothing”. Of the show’s four regulars, the smart Seinfeld fan always loved George, the atavistic, solipsistic and egotistic version of Larry David.

After the series finished in 1998, David wrote and directed the movie Sour Grapes, then — initially as a one-off stand-up special — created Curb Your Enthusiasm for HBO, in which he seems to play himself, a retired sitcom millionaire coping with the eccentricities of LA life. David’s character, confusingly called Larry David, is the human id fully grown. What he wants, he tries to take. What he thinks, he says. And what he doesn’t like, he pretty much makes plain — although he attempts the occasional awkward evasion to fit in with social convention, which always leads to fresh nail-biting humiliation. Meeting a deaf woman, for instance, he accidentally signs vicious insults to her. Then, when attempting to make up with her, he happens to have his neighbour’s pest exterminator with him — it’s a long story —­ and the man mistakes her chihuahua for a rat, bludgeoning it to death in front of her horrified, screaming face. Later, walking down Sunset Boulevard, a beautiful woman tells him: “Hey, smile!” “Hey, mind your own business,” he replies. “How about that?”

“That’s based on real life,” he nods. “When I was walking around New York in a foul mood, people would always say, ‘Cheer up.’ Why would you say that to someone? What if I yelled, ‘I just found out I’ve got cancer’?” For a second, he looks regretful. “I should have put that in the show.”

David’s delight in the minutiae of embarrassment and the epic, insensate fury the tiniest irritations can produce in all of us has shaped modern comedy perhaps more than any other single influence. With Seinfeld and Curb, he begat everything from American shows such as Friends, Everybody Hates Chris and Sex and the City to British offerings such as The Office, Marion and Geoff, Peep Show and even Outnumbered. Ricky Gervais, Ben Stiller, Steve Coogan and Woody Allen are professed fans; Stiller, Mel Brooks, Shelley Berman, David Schwimmer, Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen have appeared in Curb. Woody Allen has even cast David as the lead in his latest movie, Whatever Works, because he loved the show so much.

Is there any difference between the real-life Larry and the on-screen Larry?

A: He’s a person I would like to be.

Q: How’s that?

A: Well, he’s honest; he’s not shackled by all these social conventions like the rest of us are. He says what he thinks. I don’t think he’s a mean person, or even a curmudgeon. In fact, I am sort of melding with the character as time goes on.

Q: The character is changing you?

A: Yes. The character is changing me.

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