Larry David‘s single season as a writer on Saturday Night Live has long been the stuff of comedy legend. He struggled to get his sketches on the air, repeatedly clashed with producer Dick Ebersol, and famously quit the show in frustration—only to return the following week and pretend nothing had happened.
In his new biography, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David, author Blake J. Harris revisits that ill-fated 1984–85 season, drawing on interviews with David and his former colleagues. Among the stories he recounts is David’s insistence that fellow writer Andy Breckman star in a sketch called “The Flying Zambonis.” When Ebersol refused, David pulled the sketch rather than compromise.
Harris’s account sheds new light on how the future co-creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm managed to spend a year at SNL with so little to show for it. We spoke with him about David’s clashes with Ebersol, what he makes of that experience today, and a surprising revelation about his connection to the show’s original 1975 cast.
Harris also shared something that isn’t in the book: descriptions of five sketches David wrote during his SNL tenure that didn’t air that season, including one that finally made it onto the show seven years later.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Larry’s stint at SNL has long fascinated me, as I know it has many other SNL die-hards. You devote an entire chapter of the book to that one season. What questions did you have about it going into this book?
I had a million questions because it’s this marriage of two cultural institutions, and there haven’t been that many comedic cultural institutions over the past 50 years. And then they were married for this one year, and it went so poorly.
I talked to Larry about SNL the first time after we talked about Fridays, and Fridays was kind of the one thing he really did not seem to enjoy talking about, as you can see in the book. He just had such negative memories, so I was expecting a similar resistance to talking about Saturday Night Live because it also didn’t go so well.
But that was not the case. He kind of thinks, in retrospect, that experience is funny.
One thing you write about is Larry’s difficulty adapting to the way SNL operated. He didn’t understand why writers were expected to stay up all night on Tuesdays, for instance.
Well, it’s kind of like a lot of his grievances on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he’s actually, on paper, probably more in the right than in the wrong. But the way he handles it is very aggressive and, in this case, unprofessional because it was a workplace thing. I don’t think it’s surprising that we sided with Larry [on Curb] because doing things the way that they’re done is never usually a great answer for why something is done a certain way.
What was the biggest difference between his experience on Fridays and SNL?
I think the main difference that led to his discomfort and dissatisfaction at SNL was that he was not a performer. At Fridays, he was one of the nine performers. He sort of had a lot of sway.
At Saturday Night Live, even under Dick Ebersol, it was very political, and he was just a writer there. Nobody really cared that much about his opinion, and it didn’t help that his stuff—which I do think most of the sketches were funny—was not very commercial.
To the point that Andy Breckman makes in the chapter, I could see why, even as the world’s foremost Larry David historian and arguably the biggest fan, Dick Ebersol turned down a lot of these sketches that seem kind of funny and very Larry.
What was the general consensus among the people you spoke with who worked at SNL that season?
The general consensus was that Larry was just there to self-sabotage. At some point, it stopped being about writing comedy and getting on the air, and more just about arguing with Dick Ebersol, which I can’t say is too shocking.
I would say that as Larry and I talked about it, he definitely told me on multiple occasions that he’s not particularly proud of his behavior at SNL. I don’t think that he thinks Dick Ebersol was necessarily the villain that he believed him to be at that time.
The job is to get the most out of the writers, and there was clearly a genius in Larry that was there that we would later see. So I don’t think he brought the most out of Larry, but I think both could have acted a little bit better in retrospect.
Why do you think Larry ultimately didn’t work out at SNL? Was it simply a matter of timing?
I think the timing, like most things in life, played a key role because, as you see in the chapters that follow in the book, Larry, Mister Uncompromising, actually does start to compromise by writing for the Max Headroom show and doing a pilot with Gilbert Gottfried.
I think that was just him starting to realize, Okay, I have to give up something if I want to make money and not be homeless.
So I think maybe if his SNL season had been two or three years later—even in a hypothetical world where Dick Ebersol was still in charge—it could have worked out better.
One revelation in the book that fascinated me is that Larry actually auditioned for the original cast of SNL back in 1975. How did you discover that?
I didn’t know that either until he threw that out.
Susan Morrison [author of the recent Lorne Michaels biography] tried to help me find the audition tape, but they didn’t seem to keep great records of people who auditioned from back then, so I was never able to get a hold of it.
Another future Seinfeld star, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was an SNL cast member during Larry’s season. Was he writing for her?
He was trying to give Julia more to do on the show. He definitely wanted to write things that would have the world see her as he saw her. I do think she was incredibly underutilized, and he wanted her to appear in more things.
Billy Crystal was another cast member who recognized Larry’s talent and sought him out to collaborate. What did you learn about their relationship?
I think it speaks to a larger, more systemic thing I experienced when researching Larry: there are these other people who we would also consider luminaries of comedy—Billy Crystal or Jerry Seinfeld—and they saw something in Larry at that point in life that he didn’t see in himself.
Billy really did think there was a unique talent there in a way that wasn’t just, “Oh, he can write a few good lines for me,” and obviously the same thing with Jerry.
I can tell you that’s not how Larry saw himself; he didn’t see himself as particularly special.
One of Larry’s rejected sketches that you write about in the book was “Flying Zamboni,” in which he wanted fellow writer Andy Breckman to play the lead. Did Larry ever try to write himself into a sketch?
He didn’t recall any instances where he tried to write himself in. Though I did ask if, had he been successful with Andy getting that part in the flying Zamboni sketch, would that have opened the door for him to write himself in?
And he seemed to think, “Yeah, I could have seen myself doing that—once I got Andy in, maybe start putting myself in.”
But no, he never used the writing as a platform to try to get himself on the show.
Larry eventually found another outlet for some of those rejected SNL sketches, putting them into a live stage show a few years later. How did that come about?
Two years after he left Saturday Night Live, he saw a show of sketches that was put on by his friend Steve Skrovan that he liked and then decided that he wanted to do a similar thing, but with all the sketches that were cut after dress.
Bill Scheft suggested that he call it Cut After Dress, but Larry decided to call it The Bosun’s Mate and Other Stories, which was based on one of the sketches.
I think they did one showing at Who’s On First, and then they did five or six showings on Sunday nights consecutively at Caroline’s. And it was just like an hour and 15 minutes of Larry’s sketches that had been cut from Saturday Night Live.
One of those sketches, “Radio Interview with Superman,” ended up finding its way back to SNL when Jerry Seinfeld hosted in 1992. But Larry apparently had some very specific ideas about how Superman should be portrayed.
Yes! What’s most interesting about it, other than the fact that it’s technically Larry’s second sketch that got on Saturday Night Live, is that back at SNL, it was always a big argument about whether the actor who’s portraying Superman should be wearing the costume or not.
Because for Larry it was so important that he not be wearing the costume, that he sort of just be like a ho-hum Sicilian version of Superman, which I know is kind of confusing because that is usually Clark Kent.
And for him it ruined the joke to have it be Superman, but if you’ll notice when Jerry actually is hosting the episode, he does wear the Superman thing.
And I always just thought that was sort of indicative of the relationship with Jerry, where Jerry did make Larry’s material more mainstream.
Do you think Larry would’ve fared better at SNL under Lorne Michaels?
I think maybe he would have fared worse. Because there are certain things beyond talent that Lorne looks for, and probably for good reason, because talent is not the only quality needed to thrive on SNL.
I think Larry, at that time, did not have any of those qualities, or certainly didn’t have very much of them. So unless for some reason they started off on a good footing—maybe through the help of [Larry’s friend, former SNL writer] Alan Zweibel—I think that Lorne would have quickly grown sick of Larry.
Again, not because Larry wasn’t funny, but because the throughline throughout his career is that he wants to do things his way because he thinks that’s the best way to yield the best comedic results. Lorne also does things his way, and if he were in charge of the show, he would have the right to insist upon things being done his way, and I think Larry would really struggle with that.
Five Rejected Larry David SNL Sketches
In addition to discussing David’s SNL experience, Harris provided LateNighter with the following descriptions of five sketches David wrote during his 1984–85 season that didn’t make it to air at the time.
“Radio Interview with Superman”: The sketch centered around a radio interview with Superman. Jerry Seinfeld eventually performed the sketch when he hosted SNL in 1992.
“The Bosun’s Mate”: In the Navy, a bosun’s mate serves as the backbone and deck expert of a ship’s crew. Larry’s sketch is about someone applying for this position and realizing that being the captain’s “mate” is apparently much more important than nautical expertise.
“6 Miles to Pottersville”: The sketch centered around Abraham Lincoln and his closest friends and colleagues, who all want to go out and spend time with a lady of the night, only to discover that—despite the legendary stories of Lincoln walking great distances to visit libraries in inclement weather—the Great Emancipator is unwilling to make a similar effort for sex.
“The Pope’s Tailor”: A gritty, no-nonsense tailor is unimpressed with his new client: the Pope—and especially unimpressed with the “sloppy work” of the Pope’s current outfit.
“Making Shirley Temple Cry”: The sketch takes us behind the scenes of the making of the 1937 Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie and “reveals” to the audience how the producers were actually able to get Shirley Temple to cry (i.e., “I’m afraid I have some very bad news…your pony’s dead”).
Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David, by Blake J. Harris, was published October 20, 2026, by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. The book is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions.
