Television's favourite neurotic, short-tempered and politically incorrect character is back after HBO announced Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm was returning for a ninth season.

The Emmy Award and Golden Globe-winning sitcom starring the Seinfeld creator had been on a five-year hiatus after a critically-acclaimed run spanning from 2000 to 2011.

Making the announcement on Wednesday, HBO programming chief Casey Bloys said the network was "thrilled" David had decided to do another season.

Advertisement

Curb Your Enthusiasm stars David as a highly-fictionalised version of himself and is mostly improvised. As with Seinfeld, the show follows the minutiae of David's day-to-day life as a semi-retired television writer and centres on his endless social faux pas and run-ins with both friends and strangers.

"In the immortal words of Julius Caesar, 'I left, I did nothing, I returned'," David said in a true-to-form statement about his return to the hit series.

The 68-year-old Jewish comedian had probably been considering his next move after eccentric Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was knocked-out of the US presidential race.

David recently found success giving uncanny impersonations of Sanders in his first Saturday Night Live skit in more than 30 years, with the two men bearing unnatural similarities.

In 2013, David wrote and starred in HBO film Clear History, which received mixed reviews from critics despite an all-star cast featuring Kate Hudson, Jon Hamm, Michael Keaton and Eva Mendes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is the longest-running show in HBO history. David reportedly had an open-door policy with the network which gave him the option of resurrecting it at any time. No premiere date has been set.

The announcement was described by some fans as their 'prayers being answered' after David continually said the show wouldn't be coming back.

"I'm so attached to the show that I can't bring myself to say that there won't be; I'd say that the odds are against it," David told Howard Stern in 2015.

"HBO knows the odds are against it. I'm not ruling it out. I mean, it's been a while. I don't want to go back to the show and look 10 years older than I did in the last episode."

'Curb' fans should expect great things from season 9, with David vowing not to return unless he had good material.

"After eight seasons on Curb, I'm just not sure my ideas are gonna be good enough for a whole season," he said in an interview in 2014.

This will be pretty, pretty, pre-tay good.