Larry David Talks New ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Season's Handling of Pandemic, Future of Show

This Sunday, the healing will truly begin by way of the Season 11 premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Ahead of the latest round of his rightfully celebrated HBO opus, creator and star Larry David has made good use of a string of promo appearances, including a recent Kimmel one in which he and the talk show host came to an agreement that Richard Lewis is one of the all-time greats.

Now, during a red carpet chat excerpted and shared by the Associated Press Wednesday evening, David has spoken briefly on how the new episodes approach the omnipresent real-world topic of the COVID-19 pandemic. As David explained, while the show has directly addressed current topics in previous seasons (including the MAGA hat in Season 10), a decision was made this go-around to not focus on the pandemic because—in the Seinfeld co-creator’s opinion—the benchmark of “funny” wouldn’t have been able to be met.

“We’re not in a bubble,” David said. “We use, you know, sometimes political things things pop up. Things pop up from the world, current events, that we use. We didn’t really focus on COVID. We chose to live in a non-COVID world this season. I didn’t want everybody walking around with masks on and social distancing and things like that. I don’t think it would have been funny.”

Elsewhere, per the Hollywood Reporter, David noted “there are references to COVID” in the new season but overall “it’s the same as a pre-COVID world.”

“Oh god, Rich,” he said around the 3:42 mark in the clip below. “Don’t do this to me now. It’s too soon. It’s way too soon. I need to see how I feel, you know. It’s a huge mountain to climb to—first of all—to write it, to shoot it, to edit. It’s about 18 months from beginning to end. So it’s a big obligation.”

David added that he isn’t being “coy” when declining to provide an update. “I really don’t know the answer,” he said.