Purge Your Enthusiasm: The Life-Changing Legacy of America’s Greatest Post-Seinfeld Comedy Series

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s hilarious and highly admired follow-up to Seinfeld, has wrapped up its twelfth and final season. Throughout this last season of what has perhaps been the greatest American comedy series since Seinfeld, we Curb fans were savoring every remaining Larry-and-Leon exchange and every last Larry-vs.-Susie standoff. 

When we know how limited our time is in a certain important place or with certain beloved people, we tend to begin to try to maximize the remaining time that we have, no matter how little left of it there might be. But what if we didn’t wait until we saw the clock running out in order to start living this way? What if we always tried to make the best use of every moment that we have, no matter how many moments we know we have left? 

 This, intriguingly, was precisely the lesson that Larry David was attempting to convey in one of the final Curb episodes. It is intriguing, because Larry David is usually thought of as a comedian, not as a wise sage or motivational life coach—and also because in conveying this lesson, David was aligning himself with someone who is often viewed in these ways: Dante Alighieri. With the airing of PBS’s Dante: From Inferno to Paradise documentary (directed by Ric Burns, the younger brother of Ken Burns), it is fascinating to consider that Curb may not just have been a smartphone-age continuation of Seinfeld’s close observations about trivial interpersonal annoyances. It also, at times, was an inquiry into the deeper motivations for why we live as we do that echoes a great (perhaps the greatest) work of world literature that had this very same goal—Dante’s Divine Comedy.

 In episode six of this twelfth and final season of Curb, Larry is having one of his seemingly absurd yet simultaneously perceptive conversations about an almost entirely overlooked aspect of human life. In this case, while sitting at a restaurant with Leon, he brings up a thought that he appears to have been pondering over for quite some time but had yet to discuss with anyone: “Let me ask you a question,” Larry says to Leon. “Have you ever considered how much time you’ve wasted in your life urinating? Hundreds of hours.” “You’re @#$%ing right,” Leon replies. “I mean, you could be learning something in that time, you know?” “Mm-hmm...” “Yeah. You know what?” “No more time wasted.” “Now that idiotic brain of yours has finally…You’ve landed on something. Yeah.”

Larry takes up his own suggestion and hangs up a copy of the Gettysburg Address on his bathroom wall above his toilet so that every time he goes to pee he can set his mind on something worthwhile. Larry genuinely commits himself to this endeavor. He not only keeps the copy of the address up on his bathroom wall; he also brings a copy with him wherever he goes. Wherever he is and whenever he needs to go to the bathroom—at Jeff and Susie’s house; at the movies; at a Lakers game—he can pull out his copy of Lincoln’s great speech, stick it on the wall above the toilet, and read something edifying while he waits for his bladder to empty itself. Larry ends up memorizing the entire Gettysburg Address. Of course, because it’s Larry David, something happens that wrecks (albeit in hilarious fashion) his enterprising initiative. (No one has ever been more of a master at—or should I say “sucker for”?—getting hoisted on his own petard than Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.) Still, though, what Larry accomplished can’t be taken away from him. Just by using only a few more minutes of each day than he normally would have, Larry managed to learn by heart one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in human history. Through reflecting on his life and thinking about where he had room for improvement, Larry discovered that he could do something enlivening and constructive with what would otherwise be hollow time.

 What Larry does in that episode of Curb with the Gettysburg Address is what Dante tries to urge us towards in The Divine Comedy. In Canto XXIII of Purgatorio, Virgil portrays Dante rebuking him for staring at a strange-looking tree for too long. “Come along, my son,” Virgil says to him. “Because the time that is ordained us / More usefully should be apportioned out.” At first blush Virgil’s chiding of Dante for spending too much looking at a very unusual tree might seem a bit excessive. You might think that Dante could be forgiven for stopping and staring at an upside-down tree for a few moments. Why then does Virgil reprimand him for doing so? Is it not okay for him to let his mind wander for just a few moments before he returns to the rather intense nature of his climb upwards along Mount Purgatory? 

Yes, perhaps it wouldn’t be bad to not do something with our minds during each and every moment of the day. But just like Dante’s time with Virgil in the realms of the afterlife, our time during our earthly lives is very short as well. What if, then, instead of thinking, ‘well, it wouldn’t be so bad to watch this video of a piano-playing cat while eating breakfast, would it?’, we thought, ‘what could I be doing while eating breakfast that will not only nourish my body but that will also feed my mind?’ What if, instead of scrolling Instagram during those ten minutes, we read two pages of a book? What if, instead of playing TikTok videos while brushing our teeth, we listened to two minutes of a podcast about a subject in world history that we’d be curious to know more about? And what if, instead of doing nothing while going to the bathroom, we tried to memorize the Gettysburg Address? (Or listened to a few minutes of an audiobook of a classic novel?) And what if we adopted these behaviors for a month? For a year? For five years? What kinds of people would we be at the end of those five years? How much more would we know? How much richer would our minds be? How much more capacious would our spirits be? How many more interesting conversations would we be able to have with a much broader array of people on a much wider range of subjects? How much would our lives be transformed if we follow Dante’s and Larry’s guidance to use every single moment to the fullest? If we do take them up on their advice, although Larry’s adventures in Curb Your Enthusiasm have ended, the adventures of our own lives will only just be beginning.