How is Larry David doing?

It's a seemingly innocuous question.

"How are you?" Larry David is asked.

But this being the man who stars on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as a kind of professional curmudgeon, the man who co-authored "Seinfeld," the most testy and enigmatic sitcom in television history, the reply that comes firing back is, one might say, refreshingly candid.

"I guess I'm OK, you know?" says David, taking a seat in a Beverly Hills hotel room, in a tone that suggests that, well, frankly, he'd rather be doing something else, somewhere else. Deactivating land mines in the Sahara, perhaps, or herding hungry tenants at an alligator farm.

So, uh, doesn't he enjoy doing publicity interviews, fielding endless, repetitive questions from entertainment reporters about "Whatever Works," the new Woody Allen comedy in which David stars as an almost pathologically cantankerous former Columbia University physicist?

"No, I don't!" David says, breaking loudly into laughter. "It's not the aspect of show business that I love."

Make no mistake, though: David does love show business. And though he insists that he really is the neurotic, obnoxiously outspoken character he plays on the award-winning "Curb," in person David comes across as a decidedly milder, more genteel and more vulnerable human being than his typical on-camera persona.

The thing is, David explains, cranky people are simply funnier than happy people.

"Positive is not funny," he says emphatically. "Nobody laughs at positive, 'What a beautiful day it is!' or how many friends I have, how many people love me. There's nothing funny about that at all. But there's funny in the negative. When you speak in negative terms, the more negative, the funnier it is. Hence, the funny crank."

"Negative" certainly is a fitting description of Boris Yellnikoff, David's character in "Whatever Works," which opens in theaters Friday. A divorced, disgruntled, self-styled genius who once almost won a Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics, Boris revels in believing that he alone can perceive the desolate meaningless of existence. He scorns most ordinary human contact, apart from a few friends who tolerate his ravings, and has withdrawn into a kind of smug loathing of those people he feels don't meet his own superior intellectual standards -- all 7 billion of them.