Larry David is a Godsend

From the Slate article, The Year in Culture 2005.

Stephen J. Dubner, co-author, Freakonomics
I am grateful, nearly every day, for Larry David. (It should also be said that HBO's best show of any given season is reliably better, by a factor of at least five, than anything else coming out of that noisy box on my dresser.) At long last, we have been given a suitable replacement for the Woody Allen who made us laugh. And that would have been enough. But David is even better than that. A lot of the Freakonomics work that Steve Levitt and I do is about abritraging the gap between people's declared preferences and their expressed preferences—that is, the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do. Larry David simply eliminates that gap. He says what he thinks and does what he wants. He makes the rest of us look like a bunch of phonies.