Larry David is one of the defining comedic forces in America of the modern era. Starting out as a stand-up comedian and later writer for both Saturday Night Live and its early 1980’s short-lived rival comedy sketch show Fridays, David hit what seemed to be the most unlikely of paydirts as co-creator of the sitcom Seinfeld.

While the series was critically-acclaimed, it struggled to find an audience its first few years, but by the end of the decade, it became inarguably the most successful TV series of the 1990’s. While his partner Jerry Seinfeld has taken a lower profile since, Larry has only continued to be a strong and popular comedic force with his highly improvised HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The now 61 year-old writer and actor has now found himself in the most unlikeliest position yet: as the star in Woody Allen’s newest comedy Whatever Works. However, it’s not the first time David has worked with the legendary writer and filmmaker.

“I had two very small parts,” Larry notes, “One was in Radio Days and the other was in New York Stories, very, very small.”

Larry shared with us his rather animated reaction that came from him when Allen first called him about starring in what had originally conceived in the late 1970’s for the late comic Zero Mostel.

“This is not a good thing,” he recalls saying to Allen, “This is not going to be a very good idea. I was intimidated and I don’t really like challenges. I don’t like to be out of my comfort zone, which is half an inch wide and I called Woody and said I don’t know about this, I don’t know if I can do this.”

We dared to ask David how Allen reacted to all this.

“He said it would be a little bit of a stretch for me, but nothing that I couldn’t handle,” he remembers.

We asked David if he reacted to the film’s producer in the same over-the-top manner.

“No, that was pretend,” he replies.

Noting that David and Allen’s style of comedy are cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways with its neurotic, self-deprecating main characters, we wondered if he considered himself a consistent future vessel for the archetypal Woody Allen character in Allen’s future films.

“It’s funny, we were just talking about that,” Larry says, “I never considered for a second that I would be playing him. I know that’s the part that people would normally see him play. But I never considered that I would play him, nor that he would want me to play him, and it just wasn’t an issue at all. There was only one moment in the movie that I remember I was having trouble with a line and I said, come on, how do you want me to do it? You know, just do it and I’d do it like you. And so he went, the western world! And so, I did that the next take, but he didn’t use that one.”

We also asked whether Larry was any at all concerned about the possibility of his character, misanthropic physicist Boris Yelnikoff, being too similar to his character on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

“No, when I was doing those lines, it felt like Boris,” David answers, “I tried to convince him at some point before we started shooting that he should change the character’s occupation to a former grand master, but… (laughing) Yeah, I didn’t want to be a physicist because I didn’t think I would be able to improvise because the character is so much smarter than I am and I thought I would be able to improvise a chess champion.”

One particularly telling scene in Whatever Works involves a scene in which Boris deals with a panic attack by watching Fred Astaire films. We wondered how David himself would react to being in a panic attack.

“I can’t really say in a G-rated interview,” Larry replies, “I generally stay with the panic. I embrace the panic. I know there’s no getting out of it even if I turn on a ballgame. It wouldn’t make a difference to me. I would still hear that sick, psychotic voice going crazy in my head and there’s nothing I could do.”

While Larry David’s high-brow, neurotic style of comedy has continued to thrive both with Seinfeld’s continued life on syndication as well as Curb Your Enthusiasm, we asked him if he believes his more intellectual style of comedy has been supplanted by the gross-out humor found in today’s more youth-oriented Hollywood comedies.

“I don’t know,” David believes, “I don’t quite agree with that. Well, obviously, comedic styles do change. I mean comedy wasn’t the same now as it was in the fifties or the seventies, I suppose, but it still has to be funny and I guess that’s the bottom line. It’s a little bit grosser now to some degree. Really, you could watch movies now, I’m a little kind of shocked at what I’m hearing, but I suppose that’s the biggest change.”

Considering Seinfeld’s impact on American pop culture has made the series become synonymous with New York City, we asked the New York native if he had any fond memories of growing up there.

“Well, I grew up in Brooklyn,” he replies, “And then, I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen from the time out of college to the time I moved to L.A. in my early forties, so I remember very distinctly the smell of urine as I left my front door.” I remember having to take my shoe off before I came in my apartment to kill the thousands of roaches that were in my bathtub. I have very fond memories of it. Shall I go on? I remember fighting with people everyday because I couldn’t get change for a dollar to get on the bus. Nobody wants to give you their change.”

Despite this admission, we asked Larry if he would ever consider bowing down to the current New York trend of transforming his works, particularly in his case, Curb Your Enthusiasm, for the Broadway stage.

“Oh, sure, yeah, right!” he remarks.