Happiness Quote by Larry David

It sounds almost embarrassingly modest, which is exactly the point. Larry David’s line pretends to be a shrug - no mission statement, no moral uplift, no grand theory of comedy - just laughs. Coming from a guy whose work has practically become a secular scripture for social discomfort, the understatement is the joke and the defense. By lowering the stakes, he dodges the expectation that comedy must justify itself as “important,” even as his humor keeps landing on the most contentious terrain: etiquette, ego, money, identity, status.

The intent is blunt craft talk: laughter as the metric, the only one he trusts. The subtext is more strategic. “I was after” frames laughs like a target, a heist, something you earn through precision and stubbornness. It also functions as a kind of alibi. If people get offended by a Curb episode or a Seinfeld premise, the line implies, don’t prosecute me for ideology; I’m a worker in the laughter mines.

Context matters: David came up in an era when stand-up and sitcom writing were less interested in sincerity than in stress-testing social rules. His characters rarely learn; they expose. So the “just” is doing heavy lifting - a self-deprecating mask for an artist who knows that laughs often arrive via cruelty, pettiness, and the thin line between honesty and being a jerk. David’s genius is that he treats laughter as both the goal and the evidence: if you’re laughing, you’re implicated.