Long live Curb Your Enthusiasm

PL on the death of an iconic series

Sorry I’m a bit late with this, but it’s been a tough few weeks accepting that there will be no more Curb.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is dead. Long live Curb Your Enthusiasm. Twenty four years after the first episode was aired, one of televisions most unique programs has run its race. It was time, beloved characters were dying and old themes were reappearing, but I have to admit to choking up a little as the last farcical plot line played itself out.

This was the program everybody in American comedy and actor wanted a part of, the quintessential marriage of the stand up and television series. The adult extension of Seinfeld was also the logical conclusion of Seinfeld in more ways than one.

Some say Better Call Saul surpassed the program it spun from, Breaking Bad. For me Curb lapped Seinfeld.

Jerry Seinfeld, who appears in the shows conclusion, told Vanity Fair the final episode of Curb was a joke 25 years in the making. If you have seen it you will know what he is talking about, if not I’ll try not to spoil it for your,

It was hard to miss the recent Arj Barker she-was-not-breastfeeding brouhaha and not to acknowledge that the comedian claimed to have woken up in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Curb’s like that. The program gets in your head, life begins to resemble it, you find yourself seeing situations through Larry’s eyes and asking yourself what Larry would do. David’s character (he plays “himself”, bringing another level of verisimilitude to the character George played in Seinfeld) mocks us prisoners of politeness, Larry says the quiet things out loud, never bites his lip or keeps his opinions to himself. If there is a bear he will poke it. He is a male hero, the one who dares speak the unspeakable, do the unthinkable, unbound by society’s expectations.

In 2011 David explained that his character on screen was the man he wanted to be if he were brave enough.

"The character really is me, but I just couldn't possibly behave like that," David told Rolling Stone. "If I had my druthers, that would be me all the time, but you can't do that.

"We're always doing things we don't want to do, we never say what we really feel, and so this is an idealised version of how I want to be. As crazy as this person is, I could step into those shoes right now, but I would be arrested or I'd be hit or whatever."

Some clown at the New York Times had said in a preview of the final season that it struggled to live up to the brilliance of its 11 previous seasons, but file that piece next to the newspaper’s reporting on Iraq’s WMD back in the day.

Curb’s final series is a tortured triumph in the mischievous manner of those it followed. It may also have stuck the perfect landing. Something television generally fails to do. Think Seinfeld, think Sopranos, Breaking Bad, maybe even Better Call Saul …

The ending is David’s final fuck you to expectation.

Throughout there are passing references to his roll in the controversial final episode of Seinfeld _ his creation _back in 1998. Every time he scowls, stares and moves on without a word. It was pretty clear what he had in store and the closer the final episode got the more expectations grew. 

“We were talking that day a lot about who has the best series finale episode,” Jerry Seinfeld told Vanity Fair this week. “I personally favor the Mad Men one. I thought The Sopranos was great. Bob Newhart was great. And ours was not thought of as great. But I think now we’re in the conversation because we connected the two TV series 25 years apart. And to do that, you have to have two people playing themselves. I played myself in my show and he played himself in his show. And then you need 25 years separation. I think we’re in the conversation now for one of the better ones, when we used to be for one of the not-so-good ones.”

The contrarian David doubles down on the Seinfeld “failure” by creating an almost identical court room ending to the one from that series that upset so many.

Norm MacDonald, to my mind the greatest comedian of our era, had a similar bloody mindedness. It was said that if a joke fell flat in rehearsals MacDonald ensured he kept it. You could almost see the real Norm looking out through the carapace of his creation, half a smile on his face, actually enjoying the discomfort of an audience in these moments when the discomfort should have been all his.

Curb brought so much joy over the years. On bad days I can rewind highlights and old episodes and almost immediately find myself weeping with laughter. Who needs anti depressants? I had to make sure never to watch it when Sue was asleep because I’d always wake her.

There was literally nowhere the show would not go in search of offence. Larry offended the handicapped, adoptive parents, survivors, kids on Halloween, kids with big penises, kids, friends wives, friends, the deaf, the blind, Michael J Fox’s MS, mourners at funerals, women with big vaginas, homosexuals, lesbians, Catholics, Jews, blacks … he indulged sex offenders, stole shoes from a holocaust memorial and in one of the most iconic episodes turned his back on his fellow Jews because he was having great sex with a Palestinian woman.

And somehow he did it without offending sensibilities. This was, despite the above checklist, no tawdry attack on political correctness, Curb’s farcical approach defused the most sensitive of topics. One plot line about Larry’s dog, Sheriff, which barks at his wife’s African American friend, Wanda, who announces it is a “racist dog”. When it barks at Rosie O’Donnell it becomes clear it is also homophobic.

The Palestinian Chicken episode was peak Curb.

It is hard to imagine any television program, let alone one made by a Jewish man _ and there in lies the only reason he can get away with it _ with this dialogue in a sex scene:

“Fuck me you fucking Jew! You Zionist pig. You occupying fuck. Occupy this. I'm going to going to fuck the Jew out of you. You want to fuck me like Israel fucks my country? Fuck me you Jew bastard! Fuck me like Israel fucks my people! Show me the promised land. You circumcised fuck!”

All while his observant friends listen with a horror downstairs.

Larry muses at one point that it’s great having sex with someone who doesn’t respect your right to exist.

Perhaps some of the comedy of that episode has been lost by the horror of the current situation in the Middle East, but it is generally considered the greatest of all Curb episodes. A fraught political situation is rendered ridiculous in a turf war between a Jewish deli and a Palestinian kebab restaurant. Sex, a sister and good chicken thrown in for a bit of spice.

The late Bob Einstein, formerly Super Dave but playing Marty Funkhouser in Curb, told perhaps the most risqué joke ever aired on television in an exchange with Jerry Seinfeld in Season 7 whose plot lines were based around a Seinfeld reunion. All that cast were reassembled for the Curb revisit.

Funkhouser, who plays the temporarily observant Jew in the Chicken episode, tests the comic limits in the company of comic peers, in particular Jerry.

You can hear it here, but be warned.

It is as close as television ever gets to the infamous, go there if you dare, Aristocrats joke. A joke so dirty I won’t even post a link and one so notorious there has been a documentary made on its telling.

Curb’s take on MAGA was unique, Larry discovering that the best way to be left alone was to wear a red Trump hat. You would never accuse David of being woke. Race based jokes were a staple, but he was always adroit enough to get away with it. Who else could get away with dating a woman in a wheel chair because of the parking benefits? Or locking one wheelchair date in a closet so she doesn’t meet his other wheelchair date _ an incident which devolves into a spectacular fight with Rosie O’Donnell.

As noted, Jerry Seinfeld is back in the final episode and critical to its success. Have you heard about the Seinfeld Fuck Tapes? What a concept.

Leon Black (JD Smooth) was sure Jerry was _ to borrow one of Leon’s phrases _ “tapping the arse” of every guest star on the show. Jerry humours him by saying there is “thirteen unbelievable hours”, but any hope of seeing them is dashed because they were apparently stored on laser disc.

You notice how many series these days are about comedians? Seinfeld, Curb, the creepy Little Reindeer, Crashing, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, etc.

There was, to give the New York Times review some credit, a little weariness in the last series, but it wasn’t so much the material was worn out as the characters _ real people playing themselves _ were advancing in years.

Poor Richard Lewis, Larry’s best frenemy on screen and one of his closest friends off it, looked so sick in the early episodes and was dead before the series had concluded. He rarely stands in a scene, he and Larry struggle to reach the high points they have so often reached when arguing in previous shows, but there’s something quite touching about seeing the two old men together.

“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” David wrote on Lewis’s death. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”

Lewis called the years on Seinfeld _ the series began soon after the lifelong drug abuser became sober _ the best of his life and his life provided some great material for the show.

Part of the program’s strength was that it is not scripted and the characters are often taken aback by what has just come out of their co-stars mouth. In one of the later series Larry asks Lewis, whose health has been poor for some time, when he was going to die? The pair have been making themselves laugh through a series of escalating insults and when that unexpected line comes you can see both pause before continuing. Only best friends could have such an exchange.

@jkiddmdWhen are you going to die? Rest in peace Richard Lewis. ##curbyourenthusiasm##richardlewis##fyp

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The final series sees them riffing about who or what will be left for each other in their various wills.

One of the constant highlights of Curb was his relationship with his manager’s wife, Susie Green (Susie Essman), a delightfully foul mouthed and exotically attired woman.

 Susie angrily ordering Larry from her house for various crimes, including getting her daughter drunk, was always wonderful and her description of him as a “cold hearted covid carrying cock sucker”. Susie’s insults of the “four eyed fuck” are legion.

I’m going to LA next month and hoping that the billboard of Susie featured in the final series is still there _ the city left it up. If not I hear the Cheese Shop of Beverley Hills is stocking “vonderdonk” cheese which did not exist until it became part of another complicated plot line in the same series.

Maybe I’ll seek out a spite store or two.