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He weighs 10lbs 3oz and Caroline reckons he's going to be a boxer

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He weighs 10lbs 3oz and Caroline reckons he's going to be a boxer." Not surprisingly, my wife wasn't amused - and neither was my mother-in-law who was standing right behind me.Of course, whenever something like this occurs, I'm not entirely cast down. However, as I walked across the maternity ward I couldn't help noticing an adorable-looking black baby - and that immediately gave me an idea. For instance, I've just written a new memoir about my struggle to be a responsible husband and father in which I describe an incident that occurred the day after my daughter was born. Like most new dads, I arrived at the hospital clutching a digital camera, hoping to take a picture of Caroline and the baby with a view to emailing it to all our friends. He must be the unluckiest person ever to appear on the Forbes list of the top earners in the entertainment industry.

He's a walking illustration of Sod's Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.This, I think, is why I identify so strongly with Larry David and his various creations: I seem to be cursed by the same malignant god. I think this is because it adheres to an even more important rule, namely, that the universe the protagonist finds himself in must be unremittingly hostile. (In this respect Curb has a lot in common with Fawlty Towers - Larry David is the Basil Fawlty of the Billionaire Boys Club.) Larry may spend his time "living in a luxurious house, eating at expensive restaurants, hanging with the rich and the famous, rambling around Santa Monica and Malibu and Beverly Hills", to quote Seigel, but he's dogged by misfortune wherever he goes. It set the spiritual order right by turning the social order upside down. But Larry David has returned the social order to its upright position by standing comedy on its head.

For perhaps the first time in the history of the genre, he has put comedy on the side of the big guy."I have some sympathy with this point of view - like Lee Siegel, I don't have $200 million - but, in spite of this, Curb works. In Season Four of Seinfeld, Kramer sets off to make his fortune in LA and, in a sense, Curb is about the continuing adventures of George after he's moved to the West Coast and actually made it. What we're witnessing is George cut off from his support network - an unbalanced, disorientated George who finds success even harder to cope with than failure.In theory, this should have a strong whiff of bad faith about it. After all, just how miserable can a guy with $200m be? In a bad-tempered essay in The New Republic, a critic named Lee Siegel complained that, in asking us to sympathise with a put-upon tycoon, Curb was breaking one of the fundamental rules of the genre: "Comedy used to be about the iron, the ancient Greek word for the original little guy, who appeared in classical comedy puncturing the.. pretensions of the big guy.

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