Imagine Larry Happy

I am not an especially consistent, enthusiastic follower of any team in the NBA. As a greying, Canadian "academic," my first allegiance has always been to the winter warriors of the NHL. I'm an Oilers fan. Rumors of a Darnell Nurse trade conjure complex feelings for me.

You see where I'm coming from when it comes to the New York Knicks' astonishing victory.

I understand how contemptible the bandwagon fan can be. Such people pretend to be connoisseurs while dining exclusively on hors d’oeuvres and desserts. Pompous dilletantes are they. I am not one of their number, rest assured.

However, when it comes to what is written, produced, directed and even acted with a kind of awkward genius by Larry David, I am a devotee. You see, most of existence is disgusting and absurd. Many people are annoying. Telling the unvarnished, bitter truth is seldom socially acceptable, and often hazardous to one's health. Larry, and his principle collaborator, Jerry Seinfeld, have been mining this rich vein of insight for many years. They are very different characters, however.

They both relish the silly magic of words. Jerry is confident, smooth and self-assured. He is as relaxed and smiling at the wheel of great wealth and acclaim, as he is at the wheel of any number of antique sports cars. In order to understand the difference between his persona and that of Larry David, you need only consider the following:

Larry never gets excited. To him, life is a Beckett play: no joyful hugs exchanged, no lessons learned. It's funny, sure, but the laughs are a thin meniscus with a seething morass of darkness and misery roiling underneath.

Jerry loves cartoons and cereal. Larry likes it dark. He cannot understand how people can enjoy steaming, syrup dappled mounds of pastry on a gloomy, Wednesday morning. Making fun of the ambient nonsense is lucrative and amusing, but reality is grim, make no mistake. As a writer, his favorite themes include spite, grudges, and the impenetrable complexity of contemporary, commercial packaging:

I empathize and identify with this character. Inanimate objects seem to enjoy making me feel stupid. I understand that he and Larry are by no means identical: stage Larry is a distillation of some of the elements of his creator's psyche, a kind of free range Larry stripped of social niceties and obligatory adaptations. He does what Larry imagines doing, had he the chance and willing accomplices.

Stage Larry is occasionally pleased or vindicated, but because he is not an ordinary person behaving in acceptable ways most of the time, he is bound to suffer. Importantly, offstage Larry writes it that way. He understands the inexorable, moral logic that undergirds reality. The bitter, mischievous crank gets his comeuppance in the end.

Therefore, when I see offstage Larry erupt with delirious joy, I am delighted. I do not pretend to know or admire individual members of the New York Knicks. I do not pretend to be part of that vast, diverse galaxy of sincere and dedicated Knicks fanatics. Nor do I know anything more about offstage Larry than any reader of Johnathan Swift or Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams can claim to know about their favorite, clown prince, save what is tantalizingly revealed by a skilled artist to a careful reader.

In his exceptional, absurdist text, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus included these lines (they are translated from the French here, of course):

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Now that the Knicks have won, I can imagine Larry happy. Leave Jerry to his Porsches and his pop tarts and his bees. He's fine. You are both impossibly affluent. You need nothing more. But Larry, beside himself with glee?

Pretty, pretty, pretty good. I thought it was impossible. He knows that life is absurd. He expects monstrous calamities and petty, humiliating injustices to proliferate. To him, every parker has the potential to prove him or her or themselves to be a pig, indifferent to the lines between spaces. If he can sound his barbaric yawp in Madison Square Garden because the New York Knicks have bested every adversary with skill and style, I can warm my nerdy heart by that same, brief candle in the gathering night.

Isn't that part of the weird, professional sports excitement? Isn't that allowed?