Curb Your Enthusiasm
Sky Atlantic/Now
He has prised a golf club from a dead man’s hand, he brought a sex offender to a Passover Seder, urinated on a portrait of Jesus, stolen shoes from a Holocaust museum and, in this final series, spoilt Bruce Springsteen’s farewell concert. Does Larry David, we were asked during his trial for electoral law violations, deserve the right to “walk among decent, respectable people”? Long may he walk, I say.
“I’m 76 years old and I have never learnt a lesson in my life,” he told a child (and how many children has he traumatised or upset in his life?) at the start of what we have been assured will be the last episode of his fearless, brilliant comedy. And he was certainly true to his word in a send-off that wrapped up 12 series of one of the best comedy shows by unrepentantly riffing off another — spoilers ahead.
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We will allow David his slightly self-indulgent reference to the long-debated Seinfeld final episode, which he wrote and which aired 26 years ago. That too was a courtroom special in which many sins were chronicled. Just as it was prison for Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George, here Larry was sent down after an endless-seeming cast of characters from the Curb-iverse took the stand to remind us of his faults. And why no one has been quite so funny in the same grotesque, painful and cringe-inducing way.
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It was important that Larry’s friend Leon (the superb JB Smoove) had only recently watched the Seinfeld series, despite living with “La” for so long. For him Seinfeld was a show in which the central character got “weekly ass”. Leon showed how a sitcom that was famously about nothing could be whatever you wanted it to be. Curb invites a similar leeway, indulgence even.
Yes, Larry has picked at and prodded social convention and landed in a heap of trouble, but who among us can say they haven’t usually felt that, yes, he has a point, whether bickering with waiters or querying pettifogging rules at his golf club? And who wouldn’t have rooted for Larry as he faced trial for a piffling crime? All, of course, while failing to build on the goodwill he had generated in liberal America and giving his ex-wife’s beau, Ted Danson, the chance to take his glory?
Even Larry’s adversary, foul-mouthed Susie (Susie Essman), the wife of his agent and best friend Jeff (Jeff Garlin), was there for him, turning up in court in a wheelchair and pretending to be a girlfriend whose life he had saved before it went predictably south. And Larry got a Prince Andrew joke in, telling the jury that he doesn’t sweat (except, of course, horrified jurors were told, when he’s enjoying “intercourse”).
Every Curb episode plants the seeds of Larry’s downfall, and here his fate was sealed when his main witness — Ellia English’s Auntie Rae, to whom Larry gave water while she was queuing to vote, breaking the law in Georgia — turned on him after she found out that he had stolen her special vinaigrette recipe. In the finale the sense of cosmic justice, of chickens coming home to roost, was writ small and large. The fowls flapped in from everywhere.
The observant Jew who jumped off a ski lift to stop herself being with Larry after sunset, Larry’s foe Mocha Joe and the little girl he scared in the toilet after hugging her with a bottle of water down his trousers: Larry could be visited by a thousand ghosts of Curb past and there would be no danger of Scrooge-like conversion or an admission of wrongdoing.
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And while an incarcerated Larry enjoyed a final twist when Jerry had him freed on a technicality, he didn’t seem too repentant about not giving Seinfeld a similar ending. He was simply at liberty to join the old gang and have a good sweary bicker on the plane back. It’s how we would want to leave him. And remember him.
★★★★★
