My dinner with Funkhouser

Q&A with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s golf-loving, joke-telling scene stealer

“Let’s get dinner,” Bob Einstein wheezed in his famously squeaky, rusty-fence voice. “I know this place—the tostada will knock you out!” Einstein, 67, is better known as Marty Funkhouser, Larry David’s golf buddy and comedic foil on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which ended its seventh season Sunday. Yesterday, I found myself in Palm Springs, California, not far from his home. Tostadas with Funkhouser? Sounds like a Curb episode. It didn’t take an Einstein to say yes.

We grabbed a corner table at Armando's, a dark, noisy Mexican joint where everybody knows his name. Or names. Einstein, older brother to Albert Brooks, has donned many alter egos over his 40-year TV and film career: Funkhouser, Evel Knievel-esque daredevil Super Dave Osborne, Officer Judy from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the controversial Vietnam-War-era variety show. We clicked glasses, and Einstein talked golf, Larry David, the cult of Funkhouser, his new Super Dave show—and the dirty joke that became an instant Curb classic. (I’ll insert a blanket [laughs] here, to cover the entire margarita-fueled sit-down.)

Let’s get the Funk out!

CONNELL BARRETT: Bob, I’ve interviewed Arnold Palmer, Robert Duvall, Roger Federer—some big names. But today I texted almost everyone I know: “I’m meeting Funkhouser!” Three people begged me for your autograph. Why do people love the character?
BOB EINSTEIN: I think it’s the show. It’s just f----ing funny. My whole life, I’ve had fans yell out “Super Dave!” Now, it’s “Funkhouser!” People have taken to the character. Why? Maybe they feel for him, when they think of what’s happened to him, what Larry’s done to the poor guy, to me. Larry steals a golf club from my dead father’s casket; my mother’s hit by a wheelchair, dies, and Larry steals her flowers so he can give them to his wife and get laid; my sister Bam-Bam is mentally ill and Larry’s manager screws her. I've been through a lot as Funkhouser. I’m amazed I'm still friends with Larry! By the way, I’m 6’4’’. My father on the show was 5’2’’. You figure that out.

CB: I loved the Bam-Bam episode.
BE: I gave her that name! I named her Bam-Bam.

CB: You were only in three of this year’s 10 episodes, but they were memorable. We’re partial to “The Black Swan,” which plays out at Larry’s golf club. A lot happens—Larry kills the course mascot, a club member dies, guest star Richard Kind won’t finish his meal fast enough.
BE: What a group of winners! To me, that was funny because when you play, your foursome makes so much bull---t small-talk before playing because you’re nervous and excited about the golf. Not us. We’re miserable! We just want this guy to finish his food. I love that I say, “When are you gonna finish shoveling that s--- in your face?” Then, we’re the only ones on the course because everyone else is honoring a member who we had a hand in killing [in the previous round.]

CB: Larry likes weaving golf into the plot, like in the episode a few years back when he tries to pass himself off as non-Jewish to two WASPs to get into a country club.
BE: Larry loves golf. Just loves it. That’s the [storyline] where he goes to the Dodgers game with the prostitute, because he wants to use the diamond lane.

CB: Right! And the country-club guys see him with the prostitute. Goodbye, golf membership.
BE: Funny story about that episode. The show isn’t scripted, of course. It’s all improvised. Larry doesn’t know what I’m going to say until I say it. My goal in any scene is to make Larry laugh. If I make him laugh, I’m doing my job, even though that means another take. So Larry’s at the Dodgers game with the hooker. Their seats are terrible. He comes down to try to sit with me in a good seat. I’m next to the seat that my late father used. It's empty, in his honor. We shot this at an actual game, so we didn’t have a lot of takes. Larry said to me, “When you do your lines, don’t look at me.” He didn’t want to laugh. We roll. He comes down and says, “Can I sit here, Marty?” Without looking at him, I say, “Why don’t you back up. You’re blocking my dead father’s vision.” He lost it. He walked away saying, “You m----- f-----, you m----- f-----!” 

CB: That leads us to “The Table Read” from this year's Seinfeld-themed season. You’re on the set of the Seinfeld reunion, and you tell Larry and Jerry an X-rated joke. We can’t print it. We can't even link to it, it's so offensive. But it involves a husband, wife and raw liver. It became an instant classic. That was your joke, right?
BE: I’ve had that joke a long time. It’s not a joke you can tell in any situation. There’s no dialogue in the script. There are only “points.” In that episode, the point said, “Funkhouser shows up uninvited, Larry goes nuts, Funkhouser tells Jerry off-color joke.” That's it. The rest is up to us. In the scene, Larry’s is annoyed that I’m there, so he can't laugh. So Larry made me tell him the joke four or five times [before shooting] so he could keep a straight face. But everyone else is hearing it for the first time. Watch Jerry’s reaction. He’d never heard it until the scene. It’s a genuine reaction. And Jerry's laugh is only half of how much he really laughed. We had to cut it. Everyone had snot coming out of their nose. I love that joke!

CB: You’re friends in real life, but you and Larry have a love-hate relationship on the show.
BE: My favorite is the episode where my mother dies, and Larry steals her funeral flowers. I’m really upset. I say to Larry, “If you weren’t my best friend, I’d pop your head off your neck,” and I walk away. Larry says, “I’m not his best friend!”

CB: Back to the episode at Dodger Stadium. I read about a man who was wrongly convicted of murder, and that episode became his alibi and set him free.
BE: About six weeks after it aired [in 2004], I get a call from an attorney. He said he had a client in jail for murder. His client said he was innocent and was at Dodger Stadium when we shot that episode [at the time of the killing]. It was a one-in-a-million shot that we'd find video of him in a huge stadium, but HBO looked at the crowd shots, and sure enough, there's the guy with his kid! He was innocent and was released from jail.

CB: Marty Funkhouser: crusader for justice.
BE: I went on Good Morning America with the guy, after he was released. I said, “Congratulations—but there’s still an hour unaccounted for.”

IN THE NEXT FLYERS: It's Funkhouser, part 2. Einstein on: Why he can’t break 80, his salad days working with a young Steve Martin, what Larry David’s really like, and why his new Super Dave show (9pm Tuesdays, on Spike) is the greatest television event since Roots. (He made me write that.)