new york   |   Three adjectives are often used to describe Larry David, the star and creator of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which recently premiered its eighth season after two excruciating Curb-less years.

One is “bespectacled,” which is fair enough. Another is “bald,” a signifier that David’s television alter ego regards as a traditionally oppressed tribal identity (which the imagined fraternity of the hairless attempt to “pass” under the camouflage of a baseball cap or, God forbid, a toupee). Finally, and most ubiquitously, he is described as “neurotic.”

Larry David

I can’t speak to the inner tumult of the real Larry David, the writer and actor behind the bald, bespectacled mask. I’ve never met the man. Yet by any measure —and certainly compared with his Jewish comedic contemporaries — the character Larry David is remarkably free of the internal conflict that defines neurosis. He has no internal conflicts; he’s difficult, but he’s content.

Not for him the unrelenting angst of Albert Brooks or the comically tattered sense of self-esteem of Richard Lewis. As for the Grand Emperor of Neurotics, Woody Allen, the two men’s public personas could hardly be more different. Apart from the glasses, the Brooklyn accent and their Jewishness, David is, in effect, the anti-Allen.

Skeptical? Consider, for a start, their attitudes toward women. A defining theme in Allen’s oeuvre, women are no more than an afterthought in David’s. Unlike Allen, David is no romantic; he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with a whimsical naif like Annie Hall.

In the first episode of “Curb’s” current season, David’s divorce from Cheryl is finalized. First, though, there is a possibility of reconciliation, which David characteristically bungles. Cheryl leaves and then David just cuts to his divorce lawyer one year later. One can imagine Allen commemorating this event with a sentimental montage of happier times; Larry is more concerned with Dodgers tickets and whether his divorce lawyer is pretending to be Jewish.

Nor does sex hold him in any particular thrall. In a recent episode, as Jeff, Leon and Marty Funkhauser are rendered all but catatonic by the bodacious ta-tas on Richard Lewis’ burlesque-dancer girlfriend, Larry calmly slurps his drink and later informs her that she has a mole on the underside of her right breast that she really ought to get checked out.

Allen’s and David’s relationships with technology are also at odds. Compare Allen’s famous war with machines to Larry’s primal rage at vacuum packaging. Allen blames himself for his difficulties. With Larry, it’s the package’s fault. For David, the conflict is always external, and this lack of introspection characterizes virtually all of his interpersonal actions.

When David refuses to add an additional tip for the servers at the country club, the problem isn’t his parsimony, it’s the servers’  greed. He feels similarly in the right when he tries to rescind his order for Girl Scout cookies or screams at the neighborhood kids for serving him subpar lemonade. Why should he allow himself to be taken advantage of?

I propose his bizarre self-confidence comes not from his wealth, which is alluded to, but from another, deeper source: Virtually alone among his peers, Larry David has absolutely no ambivalence about being a Jew.

From his disgust at Cheryl’s enormous Christmas tree, to the glee with which he hangs a mezuzah with his father-in-law’s special Christ Nail, to his inadvertent rescue of a Jewish man from a mildly coerced baptism, David’s outlook is essentially tribal. To him, a Jew trying to pass as a gentile is as ridiculous as a bald man in a toupee. David’s comic pose is less that of the anxious assimilationist eager to fit in than that of the clueless greenhorn in a world to which he’s not sure he cares to belong.

Or perhaps he’s even more atavistic than that. Neurosis is often defined as a focus on behavioral minutiae that can border on the obsessive-compulsive, but Larry’s many preoccupations, from the unwritten laws of dry cleaning, to the proper way to treat chauffeurs, gardeners and other laborers, to the irrevocable uncleanness of certain objects, recall another endless litany of unbending edicts: the Book of Leviticus. Larry David isn’t a neurotic; he’s just demanding. Like the God of the Hebrews.

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” airs at 10 p.m. Sundays on HBO.