100 Favorite Shows: #33 — Curb Your Enthusiasm
“Flowers, balloons, Larry David. What could be better?”
In 1999, just one year after writing the series finale of Seinfeld, Larry David took his talents to HBO for a one-hour mockumentary special, Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. The special, in which he played a fictionalized version of himself thrust into self-inflicted social faux pas, was such a hit that it spawned a comedy series the next year. Curb Your Enthusiasm came to HBO in October of 2000 and it’s been on the air ever since, just reaching its tenth season and one hundredth episode last year. With long gaps in between production of seasons (the lengthiest being the six year span between seasons eight and nine), David has harnessed Curb as a vehicle for his thoughts on the world and has never felt the need to bring the show to an end. It’ll always be relevant, even in spite of his eye-rolling at HBO’s recent eleventh season renewal of the series, to which he replied, “Believe me, I’m as upset about this as you are. One day I can only hope that HBO will come to their senses and grant me the cancellation I so richly deserve.” May we never live to see it.
(This essay contains spoilers for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The second one should be a given.)
In the second episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s tenth season, “Side Sitting,” Larry David asks his lawyer’s assistant, Rita (Teri Polo), how long it took her take the gorgeous view from her desk for granted. She replies that it didn’t take her long and Larry begins thinking aloud. “It would take me about a day. Maybe less. Maybe a half an hour. And then, I would never look out the window again and go, ‘Oh, look at that view.’” Even a half an hour would be a generous estimate for Larry David, a man who could probably find faults in Australia’s Yarra Valley. However, the moment remains an impressive distillation of both his and Curb’s essence. He’s striking up a random conversation with a woman who expresses, at best, disinterest in him; he’s self-aware enough to recognize his own take-for-granted mentality; he’s positively hilarious doing it.
What’s more is that Larry managed to include a funny, but inconsequential, scene like this in the tenth season/twentieth year of his show. He still has his fastball of self-deprecation in his seventies! It’s a testament to the generational comedic brilliance David possesses that he was able to infuse moments like these into a tenth season, which came after a bloated (but still engaging) ninth. It felt like classic Curb! He was biting artificial fruit, ruining weddings, navigating the “ugly section” of a restaurant. How fortunate it felt to have at least one semblance of consistency during 2020 — the reassurance that Curb was back and of course it was funny.
My favorite installment of the tenth season was the eighth episode, “Elizabeth, Margaret, and Larry.” This presented another arc that deconstructed the formula of Curb and the persona of Larry David by presenting Jon Hamm (portraying himself with expertly wholesome precision) as an actor studying Larry for a part in a new movie. Over the course of the episode, Larry’s misanthropic behavior rubs off on Jon to the point where he’s described as “Larry David, Jr.”
At first, Hamm cringes at Larry stretching across a Chinese restaurant to ask a Chinese family what they would recommend ordering, but soon, the lack of sensitivity for proper decorum begins to imprint. Jon Hamm is more than happy to cover Larry’s shift for “Gotta Go,” an app that allows independent workers to take bathroom breaks, because — for some reason — he gravitates towards Larry’s social courage. This courage can manifest in Larry asking two black airport travelers if they’re together and then defending himself by saying he’d ask the same thing of a “man wearing a yarmulke” and a “woman wearing a kerchief and carrying a mahjong set.” Or it can manifest in Larry sleeping with his ex-wife Cheryl’s (Cheryl Hines) sister, Becky (Kaitlin Olson).
Larry and Jon Hamm’s bond begins when they build a running joke together over the socialized importance of the word, “appreciate.” The bond continues to build when Jon Hamm chimes in during an argument at Susie’s (Susie Essman) house that The Crown is an excellent series and that Larry sleeping with Becky is the same thing as Cheryl dating Ted Danson. And it culminates in a rogue Lazy Susan splattering sauce on a white chair (not Larry’s fault, mind you), prompting David and Hamm to be kicked out of a dinner party, which they treat as a badge of honor.
The reason why Hamm is so instantly game to mirror Larry’s way of navigating the world around him is because there is an inherent appeal to the lifestyle, even if we don’t want to admit it. On the surface, Larry David is far from a role model, but he does embody (deep within him) the base wish we all have to say what we’re thinking at any moment, call people out on their bullshit, and feel completely comfortable in our own skin — even if there is absolutely no reason we should.
The many isolating quirks of Larry David are made vividly apparent throughout the run of Curb. For example, for the most part, Larry is honest about his behavior because he never acts with malicious intent. In some instances when he does plan to lie (like about his sexual relationship with Becky), he’s returned immediately to honesty with nothing more than an “Eh, okay” after Cheryl confronts him by saying Becky asked her, “Guess who I fucked?” There’s no way to lie about it, so Larry doesn’t even bother to try. What’s more, he’s entirely unbothered about the situation to begin with. A lie would have only served to protect himself, not Cheryl’s feelings.
That’s how Larry spends most his days. Big picture concepts and highly meaningful life moments don’t matter nearly as much to him as his sense of entitlement in regards to the petty squabbles that pile up during the day. In season seven’s “Officer Krupke,” Larry is forced to abandon his personal pair of pants at the mall and leave with the pair he was trying on (security tag included) after a fire alarm forces him to evacuate and Officer Krupke (Michael Coleman) refuses to make conversation about West Side Story. When he eventually returns to the store to swap the pants, only to be told that his pants are gone, a massive argument unfolds with the salesman (Mitch Silpa).
Salesman: “We have a sign in the fitting room that says that we’re not responsible for any lost items.”
Larry: “Good for you. I got a sign at my house, okay? It says, ‘If somebody takes your pants, you take theirs.’ That’s my sign.”
Salesman: “That’s a stupid, made-up sign. That doesn’t exist. Nobody has a sign like that.”
Larry: “Of course I don’t have a sign like that. I just made it up for the purposes of this discussion! It’s obvious I made it up!”
Salesman: “I don’t know what you believe! You might believe these things you say.”
Silpa’s delivery is just impeccable. He perfectly embodies the average store employee who would be utterly baffled by how to deal with the bluster of perceived fairness, sociological enormity, and Nathaniel Hawthorne allusions that is Larry David, a man who just doesn’t give a fuck. Larry has no filter and it matters not that he is rich beyond belief from Seinfeld alone. The issue of pants was an issue of fairness and Larry felt that he’d been wronged. Money changed absolutely nothing for him. Larry wants to fly first class only because he appreciates the leg room, not because he needs to feel superior to others. He was as content to yell at salespeople as he was to spend his day chasing down dolls, pursuing savory chicken, and getting high with his father (Shelley Berman, who boasts an analog timbre in his voice) and a prostitute (Kym Whitley), who impressed him with her rate of “four blowjobs per hour.”
The way he exists in the Curb world is often like Seinfeld never existed. Not many celebrities would make such a big deal over pants with a security tag and a Sondheim-inspired cop, but Larry traipses around Susie’s living room, singing the “Officer Krupke” song and loudly recounting his story, even when Susie is clearly disgusted by the display. That’s just the Curb depiction of Larry David: a man who spent decades coming to terms with exactly the kind of person he is.
Following his display in the presence of Susie and her friend, Virginia (Elisabeth Shue), the dominance of the conversation is wrestled back away from Larry with Virginia’s story of how she met Dennis (John Schneider). Larry’s unwillingness to go along with social norms returns when he dismisses any potential interest in a “how we met” story — recklessly uncaring about whether or not he offends the couple — and is instead prompted by Susie to take a walk around the block just so she can get him out of her and Jeff’s (Jeff Garlin) house. Of course, we knew by season seven that Larry wreaks trouble wherever he goes and the outcome of an interaction with children running a lemonade stand has been telegraphed over the past seasons of the series.
Disgusted by the improper mix of ingredients in the lemonade, Larry enters into a screaming match with the children, unwilling to provide them the leeway that typically comes with underage entrepreneurs. His incessant need to be right all the time results in a ton of “you’re making a scene” reactions from his companions (the inability to let things go also persists in “The Doll” when he argues with a busybody who refuses to let him drink water in a theater), but he’s not always in the wrong. Yes, the response to the lemonade was the response of a “bald asshole,” as one child spits. However, the aforementioned “The Doll” episode points out a moment where Larry’s behavior is perfectly founded.
While at a get together hosted by ABC producers and the mainly featured Anne (Rita Wilson), Larry ends up interacting with her daughter, Tara (Bailey Thompson), who is playing with a Judy doll. When Tara asks for Larry to give the doll a haircut, he obliges, only to be cursed out by Anne and met with screams and tears from Tara. “I thought it was understood!” he protests, when Anne harps on his lack of realization to tell Tara that the doll’s hair wouldn’t grow back. Just like with the sauce from the Lazy Susan, I’m inclined to side with Larry on this one. He’s just going along affably with a child’s imagination and the others are acting extremely irrationally. Granted, he did yell at children who served him lemonade, so maybe he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Tara seemed old enough to understand object permanence with her toys.
That being said, Larry could have just not indulged her. When he first converses with Tara, he makes a Cary Grant reference to her doll by enunciating, “Judy! Judy, Judy!” There isn’t a chance that Tara would understand what he’s alluding to, so it does beg the question of why he feels the need to initiate a conversation in such an eccentric way. He has no filter, but he also has no radar for his audience.
Larry treats everyone as his equal until they give him a reason not to, but sometimes, he could clearly use some semblance of restraint. Why loudly sing the “Office Krupke” song while rolling past a home of people who hate you? Why make a big deal about a cop who hasn’t seen a Robert Wise musical? Why stick your nose in a cup of coffee to prove its temperature? Just why, man? It’s not that Larry’s wrong in his social foibles; rather, it’s just that many of his problems are highly preventable.
To be fair, sometimes the situations Larry finds himself embroiled in are a bit on the absurd side. In season three’s “The Nanny from Hell,” Susie is thrown to, presumably, her death when she is instead rescued by sponge cakes accumulated below. A heightened reality exists on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In this reality, episode plot lines frequently converge in an immaculately-plotted, bow-on-top series of events. (To use a familiar example, “Office Krupke” climaxes with Larry returning his pants to Officer Krupke, sent to Jeff and Susie’s (currently pretending that Larry wears women’s underwear) house after the lemonade stand family called him on Larry, revealing a pair of panties beneath.) It’s the kind of reality where stars like Hamm and Lin-Manuel Miranda can lean into the most stereotypical perceptions that others (or even just Larry) have of them. It’s the kind where Susie doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s fame (unless it’s Clive Owen, for some reason) and treats Larry with vitriolic abhorrence, but forgives him just an episode later. It’s the kind where a neck injury from Virginia is deemed by Larry to be the result of either a car accident or cunnilingus.
When learning of Virginia’s ailment, Larry becomes convinced that she suffered the injury after going down on Cheryl in a ménage à trois. We’ve seen him discuss the possibility with Jeff and come to the conclusion that oral sex is the only natural possibility. When Larry invites Cheryl to lunch, a conniving glint enters his eye and we, the audience, know he’s about to broach the subject of a threesome with Cheryl. There’s almost a sense of horror beyond the cringe, as we know Larry is so misguided to assume that a neck injury was from cunnilingus, but we also know him well enough to understand that he’s barreling ahead with his theory — regardless of its status as appropriate mealtime chatter.
Fortunately, Cheryl also knows Larry well and she is hardly offended by his insinuation. However, there is plenty of room for horror throughout other episodic endings in Curb’s annals. Take “The Doll,” for one. At the end, Larry subverts the theater’s rules of no food or drink by inserting a water bottle into his pants. Of course, he just so happens to do so in the women’s bathroom, throwing his hands up in revulsion for the state of the men’s bathroom. In there, Tara returns and thanks Larry for rescuing the haircut on her Judy doll, giving him a big hug and then recoiling. She flees quickly and exclaims, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! That bald man is in the bathroom and there’s something hard in his pants!”
Typically, Larry wouldn’t care about others’ accusations that he’s a pervert because he has no actual bad intentions with his actions. (Take his carpooling with a prostitute for example. It’s an obvious set-up for an impending mishap, but Larry only sees it as an ingenious scheme.) But with a statement like that from a little girl exiting the women’s bathroom, there’s really nothing he can do but take a few seconds to stare, mouth agape, in shock — and then bolt for the window. Seeing Larry stick the water bottle in his pants, we know it will only end poorly for him. It remains Curb’s greatest masterstroke of episode-ending terror.
Quickly, the theater’s lobby devolves into a cacophony of screams, insults, and threats, but that’s how most Curb episodes transpire. The figures in Larry’s orbit (from Danson to Cousin Andy (Richard Kind) to Wanda Sykes to Mocha Joe (Saverio Guerra)) are frequently only a part of his life out of obligation. Most of the time, they’re the ones demolishing him with viscous cursing and shockingly foul-mouthed tongue when the shoddy scaffolding of Larry’s weekly plate-spinning comes crashing down like the Cat in the Hat on the ball. For all the scorched earth that Larry leaves behind (ranging from people who hate him to those loyal to him, like the short-tempered Susie and the consistently-fucked-over Richard Lewis), he hardly receives much comeuppance, save for verbal degradation. Typically, Larry just moves onto the next damning situation, avoiding the scant consequences thrown his way and devolving readily into yelling and sparring right along with his enemies. For a pantheon comedy writer, Larry never really had a clever comeback.
The brilliance of many of these Curb episodes, however, is that they transpire during seasons built around major arcs. Season three focuses on Larry starting a restaurant business with Danson and Michael York. Season four emphasized Larry’s love of Broadway by casting him alongside Ben Stiller and David Schwimmer in a revival of The Producers. And “Office Krupke” came smack in the middle of an inventive storyline built around a Seinfeld reunion.
There’s a great deal of overlap (obviously) between Curb and Seinfeld. For one, the reunion episode of the NBC sitcom is built around George Costanza acting out a Curb episode (Larry ignoring Cheryl’s plane crash phone call in favor of the TiVo guy in “The TiVo Guy”) with his fictional wife serving as a Cheryl surrogate because most plots on Curb could just as well be a Seinfeld story. However, Curb Your Enthusiasm does have the benefit of being on HBO, allowing Seinfeld sensibilities to be fulfilled to their most naturalistic degree. (Misspelling “beloved aunt” in an obituary would have only been winkingly alluded to in the ’90s on NBC.) On HBO, Curb was uncensored — and so was Larry.
Everyone in the cast comes back for the Seinfeld reunion (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander appeared on Curb in mini-arcs before, but Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Richards stopped by for the season) and it allows us a peek into David and Seinfeld’s creative process. They’re constantly in sync and understanding one another (Jerry is immediately on Larry’s side about wearing pants with a security tag on them). At times, they even sound exactly like one another. What we see is a “real world” George and Jerry friendship, where Jerry wields most of the power as the “face” of the series (Larry can’t convince him to cast Cheryl over Virginia for the part of George’s wife) and Larry is reduced to cute impressions of the characters. They do make for such a dynamite, natural comedic collaboration — even all these years later.
The reunion is never quite Seinfeld exactly because that’s not a route Larry David would necessarily be interested in exploring. The arc itself unfolds through the lens of Larry trying to win back Cheryl anyway because Curb is not Seinfeld. Curb is like if Seinfeld was all about George, who just surrounded himself with other Georges (Jeff exists to feed Larry’s schemes, for example). Like Seinfeld, standard music cues set the tone for scenes on Curb, but unlike Seinfeld, improvisation was always encouraged on Curb, where actors (like Lauren Graham in her book, Talking as Fast as I Can, for example) remark on how fun it is to hang out with Larry, Jeff, Cheryl, and Susie and just play. The free-flowing, conversational nature of Curb never took away from its tight plotting, but it did give it a more open sensibility than Seinfeld.
The one character who seems to have the most fun with this improv style on Curb is also the one character who is decidedly not a George Costanza-esque figure. Instead, Leon Black (J.B. Smoove) is essentially the Kramer of Curb (what with his offbeat takes on society and his seeming disinterest in holding down a job), but Smoove is so funny with the ideas he brings to the set that it made Leon one of the all-time best mid-series additions to the show.
Just as Susie Essman told Seth Meyers that she felt liberated when Larry encouraged her to call Jeff a “fat fuck,” J.B. Smoove has spoken many times about how his skills as an actor were unleashed through hysterical non sequiturs, like his confusion that Moby Dick is actually “Mopey Dick” and his insistence that a woman from the 1940s saying “boop boop ba doop” would have been the most attractive sentiment in the world at the time. Throughout Curb, misanthropic George figures played off of one another to extreme degrees. It resulted in myriad classic episodes, but by adding Leon to the mix, it was an incalculable shift in dynamics that elevated Curb to another level that many — including myself — never expected it actually had the capacity to reach.
Much like Seinfeld, though, characters on Curb seemed to never care for one another’s well-being. When Marty Funkhouser’s (Bob Einstein) father died, Larry and Jeff saw it solely as an opportunity to score Dodger tickets from him, their “friend” (Marty confuses Larry by referring to him as his best friend), rather than console him. By the end of “The Car Pool Lane,” when Marty is arrested for marijuana possession (which was actually Larry’s, for his own dad), there is a blank, emotionless reaction on Larry’s face, resembling the one George had when he learned of Susan’s death. He just doesn’t care about Marty’s life, safety, or health.
The same is true of Larry and Jeff’s friendship, though. When Larry presses Jeff on whether or not he’d change out of sweats to save Larry’s life from a car accident, Jeff is only concerned with how Larry got into a car accident (and why he was hypothetically picking up cheese from a pizza in the middle of the street in the first place). When Larry thinks he might be diagnosed with cancer, his friends immediately make a pact to cut ties with any friend who has such an illness, citing that they’re just not equipped to be there for one another. At least they’re honest?
The most honest friendship in the series is the one between Larry and Richard Lewis. They have a dynamic that resembles many elderly companions (especially the kind who will curse one another’s name and then become best friends again three years later just because one showed up and demanded they go to lunch together, never addressing the past quarrel), even though Larry is constantly ruining Richard’s life. This ranges from the small things (“You gotta have some trust in people,” Lewis remarks when Larry tells him to clean the rind of a lime) to the bigger things (“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Larry asks when Lewis says he used a “bleeding rectum” as an excuse for why Larry didn’t want to get lunch with his new girlfriend). Throughout it all, though, Larry and Lewis never cut ties. With personalities like theirs, they’re really all they have.
That kind of personality is also why Larry’s marriage with Cheryl could never work, especially for as long as it seemed to in the series, even in spite of his Adam Sandler-esque ability to date anyone (from Vivica A. Fox to Gina Gershon) on screen. He knows exactly the kind of person he is and while that self-awareness is endearing to Cheryl (who smiles when he asks if his latest slip-up is grounds for divorce), it’s what mostly gets him into danger because he assumes that everyone acts the same way he does. (For example, he immediately becomes suspicious of Julia Louis-Dreyfus when she uses “pink eye” as an excuse for avoiding the premiere of a Harriet Beecher Stowe miniseries, solely because it’s the exact type of lie he would use.) Cheryl insists they’re better off as friends who don’t see each other very much and even though Larry goes to great lengths to woo and renew her affections, he would never choose her over his own pride.
That’s ultimately what I wonder about Curb, specifically in “The Car Pool Lane” episode, which culminates in Larry asking Cheryl for the two hundred dollars owed to the prostitute. In real life, this episode served as a crucial piece of evidence for exonerating a man charged with murder by providing an alibi for him in the form of background footage. (The story is documented in the Netflix short film, Long Shot.)
In our plane of reality, Larry David is a decent man with whom many people love to work. But in the world of Curb, he’s a sycophant who charges through politeness barriers like a balding rhinoceros. What if this story of a man on trial for murder with only Larry David to save him was an episode of Curb? In all likelihood, the accused would probably be a man who sweat in Larry’s soup or slept with Cheryl or refused to return a lost pair of pants. We know Curb well enough to know that, in that world, Larry wouldn’t turn over the footage. The man facing death row would need to take a cue from the title and curb his enthusiasm, waiting for a few beating tuba notes and the small slice of karma — coming ‘round again — to the man with no censor.
