The opening scene of the pilot episode of Dave on FX is a meeting between Seinfeld, Larry David and something you haven’t quite seen before.

It’s excruciating, embarrassing and very, very funny. It’s also a full five minutes of Dave Burd, also known as rapper Lil Dicky, describing his childhood with a micropenis and why he looks the way he does now to his doctor during a herpes scare.  It’s also a great season opener that does its best to set up the show. You’re going to watch an entire season about a guy who is striving to make a living by being comfortable with the uncomfortable — for better or for worse. 

It’s not surprising that a white Jewish rapper who rose to fame with songs called Lemme Freak, White Dude and Jewish Flow teamed up with Curb Your Enthusiasm writer-producer Jeff Schaffer to take his personal stories about chasing an impossible dream to be a world-famous rapper to television screens. Schaffer told The New York Times that Burd “has a lot of Larry David in him.” Dave also borrows from Larry David in that showrunners allowed actors, having never acted before, to improvise to help achieve naturalism.

That said, the show does have a tight comedic structure. According to Schaffer, season one tracks the arc of going from having people view your video to being viewed as an actual rap artist. More deeply, the season arc tracks Burd’s struggle with identity as he tries to reconcile his rap personality with his nice-Jewish-guy persona in both real life and as his Internet fame starts to soar. 

Episode 1, “The Gander,” sets up this identity theme perfectly. Emblematic of the rest of the season’s structure, the story follows Burd’s rap struggles. In this episode Burd meets GaTa, a dude who lives on the fringe of the rap world. GaTa convinces Burd he can help him score a rap verse from YG for the small, small price of $10,000. (GaTa is also Burd’s real-life friend and hype man, not to mention a constant scene stealer). Burd decides he can’t pass up the opportunity and uses his bar mitzvah money to make it happen. (In real life, Burd used his bar mitzvah money to make his first rap video. It went viral overnight.) 

Needless to say Burd worries both GaTa and YG took him for a ride. Lucky for us, as Burd worries we get to know his girlfriend, Ally, and his best friend, Mike (the latter played by the excellent Andrew Santino). Both characters usually anchor the B and C storylines, grounding Dave in life in a mediocre L.A. apartment, where Mike still washes Burd’s backne. Meanwhile, preschool teacher Ally struggles with her own identity crisis as the girlfriend of an aspiring rapper who constantly makes choices that could get her fired from her job. Anyone with a penchant for equality will cringe at some of what Ally has to put up with, but both Burd and actress Taylor Misiak manage to assuage the cringe with their chemistry and Burd’s constant genuine praise (and seeming surprise at the fact he even has a girlfriend at all). 

In the pilot episode of Dave, GaTa verbalizes Burd’s constant identity struggle with the following great line: “The swag is not on you, it’s in you.” As a new show, the verdict is still out if audiences will deeply latch onto the awkward audacity of Lil Dicky’s journey through the eyes of his way-less-confident reality, but GaTa’s heartfelt line is a nod to the fact that Burd doesn’t just want to make you laugh, he also wants to make you feel something; an honorable artistic goal, indeed.