"I had a job as a paralegal. I drove a cab"

Larry David’s offhand listing of his work history, paralegal and cab driver, reflects more than a simple recounting of jobs. It encapsulates both an ordinary struggle for purpose and the peculiar journey of someone who never fit squarely within the societal template of “success.” As a paralegal, one imagines him in the sterile world of legal documents, rigid hierarchy, and structured argument, reflective of a system obsessed with clarity, procedure, and precision. The paralegal’s seat is on the periphery of power: present at the scene of action, but not the actor; informed on nuance, but not in control. It’s clerical, essential, but rarely celebrated.

Driving a cab occupies a different social stratum and cultural meaning in America. Unlike the careful sterility of legal work, cab driving is saturated with unpredictability and direct human engagement. The cab driver moves literally through the city, witnessing people at their rawest, drunk, hurried, anxious, lost. There’s an outsider quality here too: service, mobility, invisibility. The cab driver is both background and occasional confidante, receiver of stray fragments from a city’s private dramas.

Larry David’s juxtaposition jokes about incongruity but also exposes a unifying thread: the experience of being on the edge. Both jobs demand adaptability, observation, an ability to read people, and a sensitivity to timing, a dry run for comedy, where the successful delivery depends on anticipating reactions and riding the moment. In recounting these humbled roles, David slyly alludes to the unpredictability of creative paths and undermines the cliché of the artist’s meteoric rise. There’s a quiet celebration of the bumpy, often aimless-seeming detours; David’s list resists pretension, underlines the dignity of unglamorous work, and signals to outsiders, of profession or personality, that sometimes the awkward zig-zag is the route, not the deviation.