To some, he’s Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Marty Funkhouser. Others know him as Super Dave Osborne, late-night television’s accident-prone stunt comedian. To others, he’s Larry the Middleman, the guy who acted as a stand-in for George Bluth Sr. in Arrested Development. However, the late Bob Einstein, who passed away in early 2019, was so much more. His career began in the 1960s, when he was a member of The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour’s legendary writing crew, alongside Steve Martin. And now, at long last, he’s getting the HBO documentary treatment he so richly deserves.
It’s called The Super Bob Einstein Movie, of course, and it features a trove of colleagues/friends — Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Rob Reiner, Susie Essman, JB Smoove, as well as Albert Brooks, his brother (yes, Albert Brooks’ birthname is Albert Einstein) — gushing about a guy who miraculously combined nice guy vibes with edgy, even life-threatening humor. Or as Sarah Silverman puts it, “The straight man’s usually what the funny man bounces off of. But he’s both.”
In the trailer, there are a lot of Curb clips, mostly of him blowing off on Larry. (What there isn’t is his incredible scene as a predatory sporting good salesman who all but robs Brooks’ new single sadsack in his brother’s 1981 anti-romantic comedy Modern Romance.) But it will also give the young’uns a chance to see Einstein’s Super Dave Osborne — a staple of Late Night with David Letterman and tons of other late night shows, which aired clips in which, long before 50-something Tom Cruise, he almost
