I think we’re all in agreement that the casting of Larry David in the lead of Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works is pure gold, Jerry. Well, maybe everyone aside from Larry David. “I’d always been a fan. … I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,’” Allen told Sara Vilkomerson of the New York Observer. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it.”

It’s not that David leapt at the chance. “I gave him every opportunity to get someone else. I was kind of uncomfortable. I was out of my comfort zone,” he said. Then he laughed. “Of course, the comfort zone is not very big! I take one step to the right and I’m out of my comfort zone.”

As Vilkomerson notes in her lengthy but thoroughly entertaining piece The Unshine Boys, Allen and David are responsible for two of the most indelibly neurotic portraits of New York City in pop culture history – Allen through dozens of movies over the past few decades, most notably Annie Hall and Manhattan, and David through the classic sitcom of the ‘90s he co-created, Seinfeld. (Unlike Allen, who has always loathed the place, David has moved on to skewering Los Angeles in his current HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm.) The similarities between the two aren’t hard to spot, but David reluctantly admits he may have a slightly less bleak view of the world. “I think [Woody’s] probably more of a pessimist about the big picture,” Mr. David said. “The hopelessness, meaninglessness of it all—the blackness of eternity—those questions. Whereas I suspect I’m probably more pessimistic about the smaller things: The relationship won’t work out, Obama will lose, the Yankees will lose, the movie will bomb—things like that. People won’t watch ball games with me because I’m so pessimistic. I’m no fun to be around.”

As for Allen, he insists he’s not “cynical and misanthropic and nihilistic,” just realistic. And there’s not much chance he’ll be seeing this post anytime soon. “It’s gone past me,” he said, of the Internet age. “I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a word processor or any of that stuff… I know I’m missing something. I know when friends Google instant information or things”—he keeps a Webster’s dictionary close by—“it just seems so futuristic to me! I’m still plodding and doing it the other way. I don’t say that proudly, or like it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I’ve just never been able to make the transition.”  Hey, whatever works.

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