The other day, my friend Martin brought round an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm — the American comedy series written by and starring the Seinfeld-creator Larry David — on DVD. It’s called The Ski Lift. In The Ski Lift, Larry, a Jew, wants to avoid having to donate a kidney to his dying friend Richard Lewis, a Jew, and so fabricates a friendship with the head of the “Kidney Consortium”, Ben Heineman, a Jew, but in this case an orthodox Jew: a frummer. In order to butter up Ben, Larry pretends to be an orthodox Jew himself, and because Cheryl, his regular wife, is blonde and clearly not Jewish, he gets his agent Jeff’s wife, a Jew, to pretend to be his wife, and wear a sheitel (a wig that orthodox Jewish married women wear). He then invites Ben and his very frum daughter, Rachel (who is suspicious of Larry’s motives), to a ski weekend. While at the lodge, Ben says of Larry/Jeff’s wife, “Ah, you remind me of my dear wife, Alav ha-shalom.” Larry says: “Really? I’d love to meet her.” Rachel looks askance at Larry.

Now I assume most of you didn’t get that. Alav ha-shalom is what orthodox Jews say after speaking of someone who’s died: it means “may they rest in peace”. Thus Larry, who up to this point has been feigning ultra-familiarity with Yiddish and Hebrew, is blowing his cover. Later on, in the same episode, there is a whole bit — it goes on for about three minutes — about how Ben’s daughter wants to go and bury a plate on which Cheryl has inadvertently mixed dairy and meat products (making it unkosher). This is apparently what frummers do to plates that have crossed milch and fleisch — they bury them. Even I didn’t know about that.

How can this be? How can it all be so Jewish? Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO, not JBO. Well, two reasons. The first is that, despite the fact that between the coasts, most people have never seen a Jew, but remain on the lookout for them via their horns, American popular culture has always been incredibly Jew-literate. Culturally, there is no gap between Jews and America. Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Michael Chabon are not, principally, great Jewish writers, but great American ones; Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen (who cast Larry David in his latest film, Whatever Works), these are great American comedians.

The other is that Larry David is allowed to do exactly what he wants. Years of continued success — “$275 million from the syndication of Seinfeld” to quote from another episode of Curb — have allowed the real Larry as well as the semi-fictional one to behave as they like. If Larry David wants not to do a Seinfeld reunion, despite being pressured for years by networks to do so, he won’t; if he suddenly changes his mind, but decides that that reunion should be ironic, distanced through the lens of Curb, he will. Traditional wisdom would suggest that this kind of power spells the beginning of the end for most artists: what creative types do, given the enormous licence that follows enormous success, is make Neither Fish nor Flesh (Terence Trent D’Arby’s follow-up to his top-selling debut , which killed his career), or Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino’s follow-up to The Deer Hunter, which . . . you get the idea). But David is the exception that either proves the rule, or proves that the rule is wrong; and he has proved it, paradoxically, by self-indulgence. The character of Larry in Curb Your Enthusiasm is often seen as selfish, but a more correct description would be self-driven: he is always wholly and completely himself. T. S. Eliot said that we all prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet, but then he’d never seen Curb Your Enthusiasm.

This — combined with his extreme gift for structure, for overlapping comic narrative — is at the heart of what is great about Larry David. As time has gone on, there has been less and less need to compromise himself. To take the Jewish thing as a barometer: George, in Seinfeld, who is basically Larry, is Italian — George Costanza. This is clearly because someone at NBC said, early on, “Look, Jerry’s Jewish, Elaine seems to be Jewish, we can’t have another one — write him Jewish, give him the parents, whatever, but just say he’s, I dunno, Italian or something.”

By the time we get to Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, Larry David can make his stuff as Jewish as he wants. Which he does not do to make any kind of religious or racial point; he does it because, in this episode, that’s what chimes with his own highly developed, conviction-led sense of funny.

And here’s the thing. My friend Martin isn’t Jewish. He has watched The Ski Lift five times and never even picked up on that alav ha-shalom gag. But it doesn’t matter; he still loves the episode. There’s just something really funny about seeing Larry being so totally Larry; in fact, it’s part of seeing Larry being so totally Larry that there might be bits you don’t get. Why should you care? One thing you know for sure is that he really doesn’t.

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