Jeff Schaffer learned from Larry David how to build a comedy out of a small grievance and has spent thirty years running the method. When the scene is allowed to stay untidy it is painfully funny; put it in costume and it starts to repeat itself.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in every Jeff Schaffer scene there is a man who has stopped listening. Something large is being discussed, a marriage, a funeral, in the latest case one of the moments America likes to tell stories about, and he is preoccupied with how the thing is being done, who was not thanked, whether the sandwich was cut properly. On Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) Schaffer directs those quarrels so that they look like real ones. People appear to be working out what they mean while they say it, the camera stays close and slightly untidy, and the offence lands before anyone on screen has seen it coming.
He learned the trade on Seinfeld, joining the writing staff in the mid-1990s with Alec Berg and David Mandel, his colleagues from the Harvard Lampoon, and rising to executive producer by its ninth season; the Festivus pole is credited to him. He moved to Curb from its fifth season as writer, director and executive producer, and directed the 2009 episode that reunited the Seinfeld cast. In between there were films, The Cat in the Hat (2003) and EuroTrip (2004), the latter his only feature as director, co-written with Berg and Mandel, which some reviews found crude and which we have not sat down with. With his wife Jackie Schaffer he made The League (2009–2015), seven seasons of semi-improvised comedy about fantasy football friends, and he co-created Dave (2020) with Dave Burd.
The method is the same across all of it. Schaffer works from an outline rather than a script, rewrites on set, shapes the performances in the edit, and likes to direct what he writes so that nobody else can smooth it out. On Curb, with Robert B. Weide directing alongside him and Patrick Alexander Stewart's watchful cameras, the method produces arguments about nothing that are painfully funny. Its weakness is built in: the quarrels repeat, and a full season taken at once can wear you down.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness (2026), which Schaffer created, wrote and directed with David, shows what happens when the method is asked to carry a premise instead of a life. David is dropped into the moments America likes to tell stories about and behaves as he would at a table for four in Los Angeles. Two or three sketches an episode made us laugh as hard as anything the pair have done; then the same sketch would go on, having made its point, and we found ourselves waiting for the costume to come off. A sketch does not forgive the looseness that a half-hour of Curb thrives on, and now and then the show stops to lecture, which David has never needed to do.
Schaffer has said that until you can walk outside and not be annoyed by your fellow man, he and David will have a job. We believe him. The job goes best when the man is annoyed about the sandwich, not about history.
Biography
Jeff Schaffer is an American television and film writer, director and producer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised in Warren, Ohio, graduated from Western Reserve Academy and attended Harvard College, where he contributed to the Harvard Lampoon.
After college, Schaffer wrote episodes of Seinfeld (1989) alongside fellow Lampoon alumni Alec Berg and David Mandel; he later served as executive producer on its ninth season. He has directed and written episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000), including the seventh-season finale featuring a Seinfeld cast reunion, and co-created and produced The League (2009) with his wife Jackie Schaffer. His film credits include co-writing EuroTrip (2004), which he also directed, and The Cat in the Hat (2003).
