Richard Lewis and Larry David were "arch rivals" as teenagers

Like so many of the bits on Curb Your Enthusiasm, it sounds like Larry David and Richard Lewis’ years-long frenemy-ship is only slightly exaggerated. In the tradition of so many surly teens who become lifelong friends (at least in this writer’s experience), David and Lewis’ relationship was initially born out of mutual distaste. “I disliked him intensely. He was cocky, he was arrogant,” Lewis said in a recent interview with The Spectator (via IndieWire).

The two comedians—who were born three days apart in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital (talk about fate)—initially met at summer camp, where Lewis said they were “arch rivals.” “When we played baseball I tried to hit him with the ball… I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry,” he quipped.

It would be eleven years until the two crossed paths again, by then both active members of New York City’s stand-up scene. “I looked at his face and I said, ‘There’s something about you, man, that spooks me,’” Lewis recalled, before saying that “it clicked.” “‘You’re Richard Lewis!’ ‘You’re Larry David!’… I was yelling at him, he was yelling at me.”

Decades, eleven Curb seasons (with a twelfth on the horizon), and a whole lot of love later (Lewis said David has “been there for me in spades” throughout a devastating fall and Parkinson’s diagnosis in recent years), it sounds like the two men’s dynamic hasn’t really changed all that much. “In truth, he loves me and I’m his dearest friend,” Lewis said. “But it would be rare for him to go deep like that. I could blabber about how much I love the guy. In one of my favourite lines from Curb, I told him that I cared about him and he said, ‘You’re a babbling brook of bullshit.’”