Cazzie David has a long list of accomplishments. The 30-year-old daughter of legendary Jewish comedian Larry David co-created and co-starred in the 2017 web series “Eighty-Sixed.” She released a collection of essays in 2020 entitled “No One Asked For This.” She dated comedian Pete Davidson before it was cool. And she just co-wrote, co-directed and starred in the indie movie “I Love You Forever.”
Yesterday, however, she added a very important item to the list: a solid impression of her dad.
On last night’s episode of “Late Night” Cazzie joined host Seth Meyers to discuss “I Love You Forever,” but the conversation immediately turned toward the very Jewish topics of shame and anxiety. “I’m so happy to be here. And I’m not scared of any of you,” Cazzie greeted the audience. Seth proceeded to ask her about the last time she was on the show, saying, “You had some shame about something that happened?”
“Always, yeah,” Cazzie responded. “But there’s always something that’s going to go wrong.” Seth then rolled the tape, which revealed Cazzie’s awkwardly gripping Seth’s wrist instead of his hand to climb the two stairs from the studio floor to the stage.
“It was like an alien was pretending to be a human on late night,” Cazzie joked.
Then the conversation turned towards her father, Larry David. Seth asked Cazzie if she had received any advice on how to be less anxious during a TV appearance. Cazzie relayed that she had asked her dad, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, his advice was “the worst.” “He was like, ‘Don’t prepare anything. You don’t want to prepare anything, everyone’s going to know you came up with some quirky story. It’s performative,'” Cazzie explained. She then launched into an impression of her dad.
“If you’ve seen him on late night, like, he spends the entire time, like, he’ll sit down. He’ll just be like, ‘This is a nice chair. You ever sit in these chairs?’” Cazzie joked. “‘Do you do this with the legs?’” she said as she crossed her legs. Cazzie then patted the empty chair next to her, “Or, you know, ‘Anyone ever lie down on this one?’”
Seth complimented her impression and I have to agree. What makes her imitation so good, in my opinion, is that she actually didn’t replicate her father’s hoarse voice and thick, Yiddishkeit Brooklyn accent. She didn’t need to. Rather, Cazzie perfectly replicated the cadence of his speech and his point of view, imagining a lackluster Larry David late night performance that could easily be a scenario on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
For all the nepo babies lacking talent, Cazzie David is certainly not one of them.
