PRETTY, PRETTY, PRETTY GOOD

Larry David and the making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm

Josh Levine

ECW Press

ECW Press

Copyright © Josh Levine, 2010

Published by ECW Press

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library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

Levine, Josh

Pretty, pretty, pretty good : Larry David and the making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm / Josh Levine.

ISBN 978-1-55022-947-9

1. David, Larry. 2. Curb your enthusiasm (Television program).

3. Seinfeld (Television program). 4. Comedians—United States—Biography.

5. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. i. Title.

PN1992.4.D39L49 2010 791.4502'32092 C2010-901398-0

Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan

Cover Image Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic

Typesetting: Mary Bowness

Production: Troy Cunningham

Printing: Easy ePub / Easy Press

This book is set in Bembo and Interstate.

The publication of Pretty Pretty Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm has been generously supported by the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Photo Section Credits:

1: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images; 2: Dennis Plehn/ABC via Getty Images; 3: Bob D’Amico/ABC via Getty Images; 4: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images, Joseph Del Valle/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images; 5: Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images; 6: Richard Corkery/NY Daily News; 7: Archive via Getty Images, AP Photo/Matt Sayles; 8: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images, AP Photo/Chris Polk

PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES

For Yoyo,

the other fan in the house

Introduction

The Near Failure

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show that divides people. There are those who love it, find it excruciatingly funny, and revel in its taboo-breaking humor, in the aggressive outbursts of its characters, in its depiction of social, moral, physical, and sexual humiliations. They see Larry David as a Freudian id out of control, unable to conjure up the social restraints that stop the rest of us from saying what we really think and feel. And yet they appreciate that Larry, for all his selfishness, his childlike and neurotic behavior, is a man who enjoys and even embraces life.

These fans see the show as a step up from the more conventionally framed Seinfeld, with its traditional set, three-camera shooting, punch lines, and laugh track. They consider Curb a far less comfortable show: darker, edgier, and more honest. They appreciate its use of improvisation and handheld camera work, the result of which is rougher and gives a more “real” feel to the show, despite the often-complicated plotlines. They appreciate its fearless examination of cultural attitudes to religion, race, physical disabilities, and sex — in a manner that, while highly politically incorrect, is in no way conservative or right-wing. They see it as just as funny as Seinfeld but in a more painful way.

And then there are those who can’t stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, who have tried to watch it and find themselves unable to sit through its excruciating social embarrassments, its scenes of characters almost apoplectic with rage, saying things that should never be said, and its relentless references to sex acts, sex parts, rashes, bruises, injuries, urination, and defecation. What, they say, is enjoyable about any of that?

What’s amazing is that the descriptions given by both sides are totally accurate. The show is all these things. And it is these things because of one man and his skewed, dark, hilarious, distressingly honest revelations of human behavior. Larry David.

As the co-creator of Seinfeld and the author of nearly sixty of its scripts, Larry David was already one of the most successful television creator/writers of all time before Curb Your Enthusiasm. His wealth has been estimated at somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million and even as you read this it is growing rapidly from Seinfeld’s syndication rights. Now, as the creator, writer, and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm — a show with a large, cultlike following compared with the blockbuster Seinfeld — he has become one of the most innovative artists of the small screen.

When someone is rich and famous it seems to the world to have been inevitable. But with Larry David, success was no sure thing. In his early forties, he was a little-known, modestly successful comic, receiving muted responses from audiences and low pay for his gigs. He had a crummy apartment and sometimes made barely enough money for food. He had tried some television writing, making money for short periods, but had made no impression on the shows he worked for. He was frustrated and even angry, not only by the lack of success but by the lack of understanding and interest from the comedy-club audiences. In fact, he didn’t like the audience much, which may be why they, in turn, didn’t like him.

Larry David looked, in fact, like he was headed for failure. But even so, he refused to compromise, to change his act or his comic approach in order to pander to an audience that he considered to have grown soft and complacent from watching Tonight Show–style comics. He had a fresh, unusual view, not always a pleasant one, and though he was no intellectual (he didn’t much like reading books) he had insights into ordinary, seemingly trivial aspects of human behavior that others had missed.

These innovations did not come from nowhere. They were rooted in his Brooklyn Jewish middle-class upbringing. They were rooted most particularly in Jewish comedy, a humor descended from the Jewish tummler, the comic figure who would joke and ridicule and tease guests at traditional Jewish weddings back in the shtetls of Europe. It was a humor that found its way into American vaudeville and then into the mouths of the great Jewish comedians of the past (Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Shelley Berman, Don Rickles, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen), a dark comedy of cynicism, complaint, aggravation, aggression, humiliation, neediness, and restless energy — an insider kind of humor that by some miracle became popular with the larger American audience.

When his mother would phone Larry to ask how he was doing, Larry wouldn’t want to tell her the truth. “Pretty, pretty, pretty good,” he would say, each “pretty” qualifying the one before. It is very possible that Larry David could have continued to travel the small New York comedy-club circuit, scraping by, becoming ever more disgusted and bitter. Or he might have finally quit, to take on the kind of low-level job that he had worked in after college. But another comedian, an infinitely more successful one, as much a professional colleague as a friend, asked Larry for help. A television network had asked him to develop a show, and the comic, Jerry Seinfeld, had a hunch that Larry might be able to help him.

It was a good hunch.

CHAPTER 1

The End of the Beginning,

or Farewell to Seinfeld

Each member of the audience, even family members, had to go through a metal detector to ensure that there were no secret recording devices hidden under shirts or in pockets. Each had to sign a confidentiality agreement; nothing of what was seen or heard would be told to anyone before the broadcast. They sat on bleachers before the stage.

This was the taping of the final episode of Seinfeld, the last before it went off the air forever (except, of course, in endless reruns). By this time the entire nation was addicted to the show, and its ending, at the height of its popularity, had been major news ever since the announcement. Coming out to warm up the audience, Jerry Seinfeld — the star, co-creator, and sometime writer of the show, who was most associated with its success — joked that the audience members, who had actually managed to acquire tickets, thought they were “hot shit.” He compared it to having seats on the Grassy Knoll for the Kennedy assassination. It was a cocky, even arrogant thing to say, but Seinfeld could easily get away with it. The show had made him the most popular comic on the planet.

He asked whether he ought to say something to make everyone cry. Actually, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was already crying.

Seinfeld reiterated to the audience the need not to tell people about the show before it aired. Jon Lovitz, one of the celebrities in the audience, yelled out, “Do you have any hush money?”

The taping was long and arduous; it didn’t end until 2 a.m. The ostensible director was Andy Ackerman, a veteran of the show. But there was another man moving about the set, helping actors with their line readings, deciding whether a take was good enough or had to be done over. Tall and lanky, balding and bespectacled, he gestured broadly with his hands stretched out, hummed under his breath, broke up laughing, or consulted the script in his hands. It was his script after all. He, Larry David, had been tapped to write the very last episode of the country’s most popular sitcom. And he had been given twice the airtime, an hour.

The television audience was not familiar with Larry David. Most did not know his name. Few knew what he looked like. They did not realize that he was as responsible — perhaps even more responsible — for the success of Seinfeld as Jerry was. He had written its most famous episode, “The Contest,” and many other great episodes, and he had presided over the first seven seasons of the show. He had come up with the idea that it would be about “nothing.” That it would break the conventional sitcom rules. That there would be “no learning, no hugging.” The character of George was based on him. Kramer was based on a man who had lived next door to him. Jerry’s parents were modelled on Larry David’s parents. Many of the story lines came from Larry’s own life. The show had made him very, very rich, but not famous the way that Jerry and the other actors on the show were.

If Larry David was frustrated by the lack of recognition, he kept it to himself. But the press had written extensively about his writing the script as part of the lead-up to the airdate. The pressure had been on him to end the show on an appropriately high note.

Jerry had been running the show without his co-creator since Larry had quit in 1996 after seven seasons. But before the ninth began to film, he met with Larry to tell him he thought this would be the show’s last. The characters, he thought, were getting too old to keep acting so immaturely. As Larry later put it, “All the dating would have been unseemly.” Jerry asked Larry to come back and write the last episode. Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, which owned NBC, personally offered Jerry $100 million to keep the show on the air for another season. But Jerry, already rich beyond his wildest dreams, said no.

Even though Larry had wanted the show to end when he himself quit, the thought of it actually finishing made him feel quite depressed. He had been thinking about the last episode ever since he himself contemplated leaving. His first idea was a show without any story lines at all but just conversation about the usual little things that obsessed the characters. But after a few pages of writing, he found it boring and gave up. He also considered bringing Jerry and Elaine together romantically, but Jerry, on one of his off-season tours, had asked audiences about the possibility and the responses had been mostly negative. Julia had long harbored the idea that they drive off a cliff. Larry David’s mother, who didn’t like the episode in which Susan dies, begged her son not to kill off the characters.

Strangers offered Larry suggestions in the street. So did friends and people on TV talk shows. Larry himself told one of the reporters who began to call regularly, “I haven’t really thought about it too much. It’s a difficult show to write a final episode for. The nature of final episodes is ‘big ideas.’ People get married, they go to Europe. It’s a big thing. So I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” He also said, “I would say that, knowing George, you know more about me than you do if you speak to me. Because I feel like I’m the phony. I’m the fake. People who are talking to me, they’re not getting sincerity, for the most part. . . . I think George is much more real than I am.” It was the sort of ruminating that would eventually lead to Larry playing Larry on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

More articles appeared, raising the stakes. The New York Times Magazine asked, “Can the last episode ever do justice to the dozens that preceded it?” Larry took his time writing it. Or even starting. But one morning he woke at 3 a.m., heart pounding. He realized he had to get on with it. He gave it a code name title, “A Hard Nut to Crack,” and began.

The script that Larry finally sat down and wrote was possibly the least sentimental of any Seinfeld show. It begins with a new head of NBC giving a green light to the television show that George and Jerry had come up with years before. NBC loans its private jet to them, and they take Elaine and Kramer to Paris. Except that the plane has engine trouble and needs to land almost immediately. While walking in town, the foursome witnesses a very fat man being mugged. Instead of helping, they comment and laugh, and Kramer even videotapes the crime. The four are charged by a cop for breaking the new “good Samaritan law” and are put in jail.

There are several moments in the last show that anticipate Curb Your Enthusiasm. The meeting with the NBC executives is a precursor to several network pitch meetings from the second season of Curb. The expression “walk and talk” will be rewritten as the more memorable “stop and chat.” The intention of Jerry and George to move to California to do the show anticipates the L.A. setting of Curb. There are several jokes about Ted Danson, a friend of Larry’s who will become a recurring character on the latter show. Even the plane getting into trouble is an earlier version of the plane ride that Cheryl takes in season six of Curb, which results in her decision to leave Larry.

But all that was in the future and totally unknown and undreamed of. A trial follows in which Larry brings many old characters to the witness stand — the Low-Talker, the Soup Nazi, Babu Bhatt — reminding the audience of past episodes. Despite the histrionics of the attorney, the characters are convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. Jerry gives a poorly received stand-up show to the other inmates. Our last view of them is sitting in a cell talking, as always, about nothing.

When Larry finished the last page of the script, page 152, he actually choked up.

When the show aired, on May 14, 1998, 76 million people tuned in. Advertisers paid NBC up to $20 million for a twenty-second spot. And in the opinion of most viewers, and the newspaper reviews that came out the next day, the show was . . . a stinker. The last episode was a flat, dull disappointment. Or as the Houston Chronicle put it, “. . . one of the least loved conclusions in the history of television.”

It was not Larry David’s finest hour.

In 1995, during the seventh season of Seinfeld, Larry decided that he wanted out. Each year he had felt more pressure to produce great scripts and now, with the show at number one, the pressure was even worse. He had been grumbling about the show from its earliest days, claiming he wanted it to be cancelled, but this time he really meant it. In 1993 he had married a television producer named Laurie Lennard; they were expecting their second child. He wanted to spend more time with the kids. Television, of course, works on a brutal schedule of days, nights, and weekends. So he wrote one last episode, a particularly edgy one in which George’s girlfriend Susan dies from licking bad envelopes, and then he quit.

Jerry too had been thinking that the show ought to end. And the stars — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards — knew that its creators wanted to finish on a high note and not wait until the show was losing steam. In fact, Larry assumed that if he quit Jerry would too, ending the show. After all, it was their mutual creation; it couldn’t possibly go on without him.

But like an angry employee who made a pact with his fellow workers to hand in their resignations only to discover that only he is without a job, Larry found himself alone. Jerry, it turned out, wanted to keep going. And the actors, who were making a small fortune per episode, didn’t want to leave either. And so Jerry decided to run the show without Larry. Larry wasn’t at all happy about it, but there wasn’t anything he could do. “I can’t stop them from doing the show,” he said. “I probably won’t watch it.”

It was perhaps an odd comment from the co-creator of a hit show. But then, Larry David wasn’t like other people. Seinfeld had brought him from obscurity and near poverty to the pinnacle of show business success. But it hadn’t changed him, not in any substantial way. And it hadn’t made him any happier. He was still the same Larry.

CHAPTER 2

An Unfunny Kid

“I never thought I would be involved in anything successful,” Larry David once said. “My plan was to try and get by. Maybe at some point I’d get involved in a bank robbery or something.”

Born on July 2, 1947, he was the second son of Morty David, a Brooklyn clothier who would later retire and become president of his condo association, like Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld. Larry’s mother went to work for the Bureau of Child Guidance. Later she wanted Larry to take the civil service test, figuring that he better get himself a secure job — postal worker, teacher — with good benefits. (On Seinfeld, when George moves back into his parents’ house, his mother has the same idea.) His parents were both Democrats, sharing their values and eventually turning Larry into one too.

Larry shared a room with his older brother, Ken, who would later move to Oregon and give advice on computers and investments. Larry went to P.S. 52 and then Sheepshead Bay High School where his report card was filled with average marks because he didn’t much care. (Later an obnoxious comic in a Seinfeld episode would come from Sheepshead Bay. “We were right on the water. The whole atmosphere stank of fish.”) There was always a lot of yelling — between his aunts and uncles, the families of his friends, and in the apartments next to their own. In just the same way, yelling would be a major form of communication on Curb. Larry liked sports and was considered a good athlete by other kids. His parents also forced him to go to Hebrew school, which he detested. He didn’t much hide his feelings and got kicked out for laughing at the rabbi who was telling him off for some infraction. (Even now, when someone is yelling at Larry on Curb he can barely keep himself from laughing.) But his parents, horrified that he wouldn’t be able to have a bar mitzvah, talked him back in.

“We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn,” said Larry Charles, who would become a producer, writer, and director on both Seinfeld and Curb. “You know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks. We both understand that sort of Lord of the Flies sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways a very cruel and sadistic environment.”

He was never known as funny, not by his family and not by his friends. But he liked to laugh, and he was a fan of Abbott and Costello, Bob and Ray, and especially the Jewish comic actor Phil Silvers. The Phil Silvers Show ran from 1955 through 1959. Later called Sergeant Bilko in reruns, it was also known as You’ll Never Get Rich. It featured Silvers — the bald, glasses-wearing actor from Brooklyn — as Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko, head of the motor pool at a U.S. military base in Kansas. In episode after episode, Bilko worked to attain more creature comforts for himself and make life in the army easier. Often as not he would end up making things harder, not unlike the future star of Curb. The dialogue was sharp, and the multiple plots, though wild and fanciful, were always plausible and carefully worked out to resolve in the end, in a manner similar to Seinfeld and Curb. There was also a good dose of physical comedy. It had a quiet, strong presence behind it in the creator, producer, writer, and director Nat Hiken. It would make a lasting impression on Larry. “I just thought that it was head and shoulders above any other show I had seen,” Larry said later. “You know, in analyzing it now, you could see that Bilko was a manipulative character who did a lot of unlikeable, despicable things. But because he was so funny doing it, it all just worked.”

With no sense of direction, Larry enrolled at the University of Maryland for a degree in history. “You never know when you might run into a discussion of the Franco-Prussian War,” he joked, indicating what he thought of its usefulness. The late sixties were in full swing but Larry hated the hippie era and felt alienated by it. He eyed the long hair, beads, and Grateful Dead T-shirts skeptically, believing them to make up another kind of conformity. He looked clean-cut and decent, a model young man in a suit and tie for his college portrait. Drug-taking scared him. He didn’t even manage to get any of that supposed free love available for the asking. (Later he would wear his hair long, in what is now called a Jewfro.)

But it was at university that Larry made a discovery: he could be funny. He began entertaining his friends with humor, recounting his disastrous dates in humiliating detail to heighten the comic effect. Very early on he learned to sacrifice his dignity for a laugh.

After graduation, Larry headed back to Brooklyn. He got a two-bedroom apartment, which he shared with a couple of others, and hit the pavement looking for work. Employment agencies found him several jobs, none of which lasted long. He worked for a bra wholesaler called E.D. Grandmont, selling “defective bras” as he put it. He claimed that he never sold one. (In the 1993–1994 season George sells bras on Seinfeld.) Then he worked in a law office. After that he was a cab driver and finally a private chauffeur. For the latter job he had to wear a uniform and he would be highly embarrassed to be seen by someone he knew, waiting by the car for some rich woman to come out of a store on Fifth Avenue. But he claimed to like this job, especially when he worked for an elderly woman with poor vision who couldn’t tell when he didn’t wear the uniform. Later, he used it as the basis for a screenplay that went unproduced. Between jobs he collected unemployment insurance. He even joined the army reserves, a fact the fictional Larry would tell to his rather surprised manager in Curb.

It was back in New York that Larry got the idea to take an acting class in the city. He participated in class but never found himself particularly comfortable acting. Then one session the instructor gave the students the assignment of acting a monologue, but doing it in their own words — really a kind of improvisation based on specified material. Larry found this a lot more enjoyable than reciting lines and, even better, he managed to make the rest of the class laugh. “And I thought, hey, that’s for me. That’s what I want. I want a laugh,” Larry has said.

Once when he was in a play his parents came to see him. His father kept his opinion to himself; he didn’t think his son had a chance of success.

It was shortly after returning to New York in 1970 that Larry went to a comedy club. As he watched the comics onstage, it came to him that he could do it too. But he didn’t try it until four years later. He knew someone from college who was doing stand-up and asked him to have lunch in exchange for some advice on how to start. That’s where he heard about the open mike nights at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. More famous for being the site of Bob Dylan’s first professional gig and for other music acts, the club on West Third Street (which closed in 1987) can also claim to be the spot where Larry David first got in front of a mike. At this time, he was tall and thin, ill kempt, and wore very big glasses. He had rather wild curly hair, already substantially thinning up top. He had written some material that included an imitation of Rod Steiger, an actor whose best films were several years behind him, and although the reception wasn’t particularly warm the experience made Larry want to try again.

Larry’s second try was a large step downward — to a lounge stage in the Gil Hodges Lanes, a bowling alley in Brooklyn where he tried some new material. But the third time was an even bigger step up, to Catch a Rising Star, the place where television scouts went looking for talent. Not that Larry was discovered that night. The place was glamorous and popular; people lined up to get in. It was rather intimidating for someone who still had no idea what he was doing. Again, he tried out new material, including a routine about a telethon to raise money for people out of work. Management asked him to come back the next week, and this time he felt the pressure to write new stuff — a pressure he would later come to know and dislike while writing for television. He came up with a routine about a kid masturbating who is caught by his mother (a topic he would return to many times). A trial is held, the kid is put on the stand, and so is his mother, who is accused of not supporting Israel. Larry was still not really connecting with the audience, or even being fully aware of their presence, but he got some real laughs, an experience that he found exhilarating. The club gave him a regular spot.

And so Larry began working the clubs, usually in late-night weekday slots. Eventually he got to work the more crowded weekends. From the beginning he wanted to tell the audience the truth about how he felt about things, especially what he couldn’t say in regular life. Over time he worked up an act that, in his words, “I could do, and enjoy, and kill with on a Saturday night. But it still was difficult going on. Because I was taking my life in my hands.”

He also played the Improv and the Comic Strip. He began to make friends with other comics and to hang around with them in the clubs even when he wasn’t performing. Richard Belzer, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Carol Leifer (later a writer for Seinfeld and the model for Elaine), Gilbert Gottfried — all were struggling to make names for themselves and move up the comedy food chain. What Larry loved about hanging with them was that he didn’t need to censor himself. He could say whatever he wanted. He even played on a comedians’ softball team.

The David family had already started to worry about Larry, whose working life didn’t seem to be going anywhere. They were, to say the least, surprised by this new career move, and dismayed. But Larry never asked for money. He scraped by on what he could make.

Larry often wore an old army jacket while performing. His hair, as Richard Lewis reported, looked like a combination of “Bozo” and “Einstein.” The person in the audience he aimed for was “the lonely guy, the frustrated guy, the guy with no money — this is the guy who needs to laugh.” But Larry David didn’t try to win the audience’s affection by acting as confidant, or best friend, or by making them feel good about themselves. His style was “willfully uningratiating” in the words of a later New Yorker writer. Some of his routines were obscure. For example, he might open by thanking God that he wasn’t born a Spanish landowner. Because if he had been, he wouldn’t know whether to use the formal or informal “you” when talking to people. “I don’t want them to feel so familiar that they can just help themselves to anything in the refrigerator.”

He might address his Jewishness in an unconventional manner, for example by saying that he would have made friends with a Nazi if the man had complimented his hair. “You know, if he’d given me a compliment, Josef Mengele and I could have been friends.” (This was later refined as Jerry’s remark on Seinfeld that he would have been friends with Himmler if the man had owned a ping-pong table.) Or Larry would say, “You know what I really admire about Hitler? He didn’t take any shit from magicians.” Then he dramatized how Hitler would have forced a magician to reveal the secret of his trick. And of course there were masturbation jokes. He imagined being a professional masturbator. People would ask his advice and he would say, “You must practice!”

Larry would make fun of his poor skills with women. “They say that if you’re over forty and haven’t gotten married, you’re either gay or there’s something wrong. And I’m here to tell people tonight that there’s something wrong.” But his favorite opening, the one he came to use most often, was: “I’ll tell you something about good-looking people. We’re not well liked.”

Not only did the audiences often not get Larry, they simply didn’t like him. “I was in fear every night of going onstage in front of these audiences,” he said. “I knew I had to go on, but I really didn’t want to. It was bad. There were some bad nights.” And despite his unwillingness to compromise his material, he had no plan of how to make it work. “I was hoping that somehow I could get some kind of cult following, and get by with that. And you know what? That would have been fine with me. I just wanted laughs — that’s what I was after. I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.”

But what Larry found night after night was that audiences wanted the sort of easy, mainstream comedy that they saw on television. One incident during his time as a stand-up would become a famous and often-told story; he once got up onstage, looked out at the audience, decided that they were not going to appreciate him, and simply walked off again. Yet while the audiences weren’t taking to him, other comics thought Larry was great, a rare, unique voice. One of them was Jerry Seinfeld. The two comedians met in 1976, when Larry David had been doing stand-up for a couple of years. Seven years younger, Seinfeld was just starting out. There was no sign yet of the sensation that he was going to become. They weren’t exactly close friends, but they admired each other’s work and that was enough to bring them together.

“Our brains had a comedic connection,” Jerry said. “Larry was a guy open to discussing virtually any human dilemma, as long as it was something that not a lot of other people were interested in. I was exactly the same way. We weren’t interested in what was on the front page of the newspaper.” They began to help each other develop material. They would walk through Central Park or sit in coffee shops working on their stuff.

At this time, Seinfeld too was struggling, and he would continue to struggle until at least 1981, when he had his first appearance on The Tonight Show. He sold lightbulbs, waited tables, and even sold jewelry from a cart outside Bloomingdale’s. Eventually he moved to Los Angeles hoping to do better, only to land a role on the sitcom Benson where his character was dropped after three episodes. But Jerry didn’t suffer the feelings of frustration and anger that Larry did when he went onstage. Larry got angry when the audience wasn’t listening. Comedy club-goers were usually young, noisy, and often semi-inebriated. Seinfeld has said, “A night club is a place where drinks and food are served; a comedian is not automatically the audience’s focal point. You have to fight for their attention. And that’s not easy to get. Larry had the material, but he never had what you would call the temperament for stand-up.” Another time he remembered, “I was a huge fan. Most of the comedians were. [But] it wasn’t easy in those days. It was just a matter of how much you could take, and he could take less than most.”

A lot of people without the right temperament would have quit. Most did. But Larry persisted, a kind of self-torture but the only outlet he had for his form of comedy.

And then came television.

CHAPTER 3

Larry’s Corner

One of the factors that kept Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld friends was that they both moved to Los Angeles at about the same time. Larry moved for the most basic of migratory reasons: a job. He’d been offered a writing and performing role on the ABC sketch-comedy series Fridays.

A live late-night show, Fridays (1980–1982) was an unabashed rip-off of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which, now several years old, was beginning a period of low creativity and falling ratings. Fridays too had musical acts and, starting in its second season, guest hosts. It had a fake news show and commercial spoofs. But it was also different from SNL, darker and edgier. Some of the sketches were not even intended to be funny. It took greater risks, such as a sketch with comic Andy Kaufman and Michael Richards during which a fight broke out. The incident was later revealed to be one of Kaufman’s hoaxes.

It was on the show that Larry David first met Michael Richards, whom he would later think of for the role of Kramer on Seinfeld. Richards’s own comic talent was still in its early stages, although he already had the habit of scratching the nest of hair on his head and looking confused. Larry David also met Larry Charles, who would come to write for Seinfeld and be a significant force on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as Bryan Gordon, a future Curb director. Larry would also use several cast members — Melanie Chartoff, Bruce Mahler, and Maryedith Burrell — to fill guest roles on Seinfeld.

Besides writing, Larry made his first television appearances in various skits that he no doubt had a hand in writing. The Fridays show being live, none of the actors looked extraordinarily comfortable (certainly not as at ease as SNL veterans would become), and Larry was no exception. He tended to keep his head slightly down, and with his bush of hair — a bald strip clearly visible down the middle — and his enormous glasses he did not always make the clearest impression. In one sketch, two couples spend the night comparing childhood games they know, giving each other “Indian sunburns,” “noogies,” “Uncle Wigglys,” and other painful pinches and knocks. It’s a rather good idea poorly executed. In another, Larry comes on during a news program to telephone his old friend “Moe Gaddafi.” As he starts shouting, he sounds like the Larry who will one day be seen on Curb. A third skit prefigures the episode “Mary, Joseph & Larry” from season three of Curb in which Larry hires a group of performers to act out the nativity scene on his front lawn. In the Fridays skit, Larry plays one of the three wise men on their way to see the baby Jesus. “Gold makes a nice gift,” Larry says, complimenting one of the other wise men.

For the first time in his life, Larry was making a good living. He even bought his first car; unlike many New Yorkers, he has a fondness for cars that would later make his permanent transition to California a lot easier. But despite this relative success, Larry decided to return to New York. The reason he gave was that, in the stand-up appearances that he made in the L.A. comedy clubs, he could not understand the audiences. Leaving Fridays obviously had something to do with it as well.

In New York, things didn’t exactly take off for him. He returned to working in the clubs and picking up any writing jobs he could. Meanwhile, Jerry Seinfeld’s career was starting to get hot. A talent scout spotted him in a Los Angeles club and booked him on the one television show famous for being able to make a comic’s career, The Tonight Show. The higher profile turned Seinfeld into a headliner at the clubs, and he began touring regularly as well as making more appearances on The Tonight Show, along with Late Night with David Letterman and The Merv Griffin Show. He was starting to get recognized on the street, he was making good money, he was becoming a star. It wasn’t long before he was pulling in $25,000 for a week’s run at a club. The critics, including Time magazine, were hailing him as one of the best of the current comics, a master of “observational” comedy.

As for Larry, he had far more modest ambitions. “It would be to be able to live in an apartment, no matter how small it was, so I could pay the rent, go to the movies once or twice a week, play golf once in a while, be able to take a cab. . . . That’s all I wanted.” Modest though the goal was, he was having trouble reaching it. Instead of a cab, he would have to walk all the way from First Avenue to the West Side after a show because he had no money. He ate Chef Boyardee. He saved his change in a glass jar and took it to the store to buy groceries.

But he did have one better year — financially if not creatively — when he got a spot as a writer on Saturday Night Live for the 1984–1985 season. Presumably his time on Fridays gave him the qualifications, but Larry found himself far more frustrated. The workload wasn’t onerous — he had to produce one sketch and one piece for the news each week, and he had no performing duties. The problem was, despite his skits going over well in the cast read-throughs, they never made it onto the show. In the entire season only one skit got picked. A writer/performer on the show, Gary Kroeger had his office next to Larry’s. Kroeger saw Larry as someone with more than his share of demons. He couldn’t imagine what would become of Larry. (He certainly couldn’t have imagined that Larry would cast him in the role of the weatherman in season four, episode four of Curb.)

In retrospect the most important and lasting event on the SNL show was Larry David’s meeting Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She had joined as a performer in 1981, at the time the youngest member ever at twenty-one. She was going out with a writer/performer named Brad Hall who would later become her husband (and would appear, along with her, on Curb). A year before Larry arrived, Brad had a major argument with Dick Ebersol, the show’s producer. Seeing Larry David also getting into arguments with Ebersol endeared him to Louis-Dreyfus.

Fed up with never getting anything on the show, Larry stormed in one day and told Ebersol that he was quitting. But almost immediately afterward he regretted the move. For one thing, he actually had a decent salary. For another, he had no other options. He moaned to his friend Kenny Kramer who lived across the hall. Kramer told him to go in the next day and pretend it never happened, and that’s just what Larry did. Later Larry used the same events for a story line with George in episode two, season two of Seinfeld. Except, unlike Larry, George gets humiliated. (It was the first episode that Larry wrote without Jerry’s help. It was also the first time Newman’s voice was heard, on the telephone — only the voice was Larry’s. The actor Wayne Knight had not yet been cast in the role. Later Larry’s voice would be dubbed over by Knight for reruns and the DVD release.) But Larry didn’t last much longer on Saturday Night Live, and when the season was over so was he.

Work life was slow for a while. He continued to work on screenplays (he wrote one called Prognosis Negative) and to appear in the clubs. He was looking for writing work too and managed to get a job as co-writer for a television pilot called Norman’s Corner. This forgotten and rarely mentioned single episode was Larry’s real introduction to writing situation comedy, a warm-up for Seinfeld.

In fact, it had much in common with Seinfeld. The main character, played by the comedian Gilbert Gottfried, one of Larry’s friends from the clubs, goes on about nothing, talking as if he’s doing stand-up. (In fact, like Seinfeld, it used Gottfried’s stand-up material.) There was nothing warm and fuzzy about the show either. Gottfried played a bad-tempered newsstand owner and the show had a strong New York flavor. The plan was for celebrities to come by the newsstand, perhaps something like the parade of celebrities who would appear on Curb, but the show was not picked up. Instead, the pilot aired as a comedy special on the cable network Cinemax.

No success, but Larry David was at least getting work. In 1987, the same year that Norman’s Corner aired, he was hired to write for a Lifetime show called Way Off Broadway. A combination of talk show and comedy with music, it was hosted by Joy Behar. Larry both wrote and got to perform on it. As part of the show’s opening, he got to improvise being a network executive. Network executives would become favorite characters for Larry on both Seinfeld and Curb. But what Larry remembered most about the show was coming into meetings with a stack of notes and ideas and getting excited when they got to order in food.

Larry even got a few bit parts in movies. He’d already had a small part in Henry Jaglom’s 1983 low-budget anti-romantic comedy, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? And now he had his first encounter with one of his heroes, Woody Allen. He got a very small part in Radio Days (1987) and in 1988 he shot a scene for Woody Allen’s third of the trilogy New York Stories. Larry played a stage manager and got to act with Allen backstage at a magic show. He put on a heavier than usual Brooklyn accent, stuttered his lines quite realistically, and used his characteristic wide hand motions. He could not have thought for a single moment that he might one day actually star in a Woody Allen picture.

CHAPTER 4

The Real Seinfeld

By 1988, Larry David was living in New York, performing stand-up, and getting the occasional writing or acting gig. He was living without any major responsibilities. During the day he could even play golf, the sport that he had fallen for at summer camp. And then one day Jerry Seinfeld came looking for him.

Brandon Tartikoff, then head of NBC, had approached Seinfeld. Tartikoff had been the youngest person ever to be named president of an NBC division. He shared much of the credit for the creation of such shows as Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, and Miami Vice. Would Seinfeld, he wanted to know, be interested in creating and starring in a situation comedy for NBC?

The sitcom form is a genre as old as television itself. Its origins go back even farther, to the pre-television radio shows whose approach to humor was in turn adapted from vaudeville theater (where many of the comedians were Jewish). From the beginning it was a broadly based comedy with a wide appeal and no great intellectual demands. Through the years the sitcom evolves to the point where, over and over again, the form seems to have exhausted all possibilities. Then a new show comes along — All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers — to give it new life.

Sitcoms are usually set in a home, whether it be Ralph Kramden’s Spartan apartment in The Honeymooners or the Huxtables’ house of bourgeois comfort in The Cosby Show. Sometimes the setting is a workplace, such as the police station in Barney Miller or the radio station in WKRP in Cincinnati, which functions as a kind of surrogate home, with the people who work there acting like a family. Usually these people drive one another crazy but the audience knows that they really love and care about one another. No matter how vicious the sarcasm, how loud the screaming, in the end the characters learn something about life, kiss, and make up.

Despite the formulaic nature of sitcoms, no television executive has ever come up with a surefire recipe for making a hit. For that reason, the networks commission hundreds of pilots (a single trial episode of a show), often testing them before audiences, hoping that this or that combination of ingredients will strike gold. The network might be attracted to a pitch because of the track record of its creator, but even successful producers have more flops than hits. Norman Lear created All in the Family but who remembers his show The Dumplings? Or they might draw on an audience favorite, but even the beloved Mary Tyler Moore couldn’t find another success. Sometimes an unusual idea with a big hook might perk the network’s interest. Alf (1986–1990) starred a sarcastic but lovable alien, although in every other way it was a standard sitcom. It was a success, but Harry and the Hendersons (1991–1993), whose novel attraction was a seven-foot-high bigfoot, wasn’t.

Then television began to tap the talents of comics in the hope that a strong personality and a natural gift for humor would invigorate a tired sitcom idea. Some comics, such as Richard Lewis in Anything But Love (1989–1992), could hold viewers’ interests for a while, until the comic’s limited style began to grate. Paul Reiser had more audience appeal but couldn’t make a lousy script funny and so moved from one show to another until finally getting the formula — and the casting — right in Mad About You (1992–1999).

Seinfeld himself knew the pitfalls of television. He’d already had a bad experience on Benson. Earlier in 1988 he had received an offer to star in a sitcom that was appealing enough for him to consider for a few weeks. He took some meetings but his reservations grew. “Don’t you feel bad when you see one of your favorite comics doing some [lousy] show?” he asked. He also knew that agreeing to a television show would take away the remarkable freedom and independence that a comic had.

Seinfeld knew that his acting skills were limited; just the idea of acting a love scene or having to show a lot of emotion made him uncomfortable. He was already making more money than he’d ever imagined. Did he really need a sitcom? But on the other hand, a successful television show could thrust him into the top ranks of entertainers rather than just in the specialized field of stand-up comedy. When NBC came calling, his interest was no doubt piqued by the idea of not just starring but creating as well — a show that might be tailored to his talents as a comic and his limitations as an actor. It might even be possible to create something really new.

But Seinfeld didn’t think he could do it on his own. He needed a collaborator. And the person he first thought of wasn’t necessarily his closest friend, but the person he felt most comically attuned to and whose conversation he took the greatest pleasure in — Larry David. “Maybe it’s because I’m a comedian and he’s a comedian, but I don’t see anything in him that seems odd,” Seinfeld has said. “Everybody else is odd. He’s one of my favorite people in life that I’ve ever met.” It didn’t hurt that Larry already had some television-writing experience.

So one night in November, Seinfeld went to Catch a Rising Star to look for Larry. After closing, the two shared a cab to the west end — Larry lived in Manhattan Plaza, a federally funded apartment house at Forty-third and Tenth Avenue where tenants who were in the performing arts did not have to pay more than thirty percent of their income in rent. Jerry told his friend about NBC and said that he would like to brainstorm with him. Along the way they stopped at a Korean deli and began making comments about the products. Seinfeld looked at the unlabelled fig bars and said that it looked like “somebody had made them in their basement.”

Larry looked at Jerry and said, “This is what the show should be. This is the kind of dialogue that we should do on the show.” The light went on for Jerry. This was the kind of talk that he and his friends engaged in every day but that he had never heard on television.

“The essence of the show, originally,” Seinfeld said, “was my desire to transplant the tone and subjects of my conversations with Larry to television.”

The pair ended up at the Westway Diner on Ninth Avenue. Seinfeld said, “The number one question when you’re a stand-up comedian is, ‘Where do you get your material?’”

Larry David responded, “That’s what the show should be. How comedians come up with their material.”

Seinfeld looked at David across the table. “They do this,” he said. “They hang out with their friends.”

From there the two comics began to expand. Comedians found their routines around them, observing their own lives and those of the people they knew. Above all they liked talking, so any show about a comic would have to have conversation at its center. Seinfeld could play the comic and the rest of the cast would be made up of his friends. “The idea [for the pilot] was that Jerry was supposed to do a Tonight Show,” Larry later remembered, “and he didn’t have any new material, so we were going to see how he got the material. At the end, we’d see him doing the material on television.”

The idea was not only original, but it played to Seinfeld’s strengths. He and Larry decided that Seinfeld should play himself rather than some fictional character. There was already a precedent for it in the recent It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. A major difference was that, unlike Shandling, Seinfeld wouldn’t break the illusion of reality by talking to the audience.

Almost everything was unusual about the origin of the show. It was the brainchild of two comics who had never created a program before. As Seinfeld put it, they were rowing a “two-man canoe.” In truth, neither Larry nor Jerry really expected NBC to bite. Seinfeld said, “Every step of the way we were waiting for somebody to come in and say, ‘You can’t do this on network TV.’”

Sure enough, the executives at NBC had some doubts. They wanted a more conventional sitcom and they wanted it filmed with three cameras on a set. Larry’s idea was that there should be only one camera following the characters, as if it were a documentary. (The idea would not come to fruition until Curb.) They also didn’t much like Larry. For one thing, they didn’t know who he was. For another, he seemed aggressive and stubborn. “This is not the show,” Larry kept saying in response to the network’s ideas. Larry thought the executives would have liked to get rid of him but he and Jerry were a package deal. And they had enough faith in Seinfeld to give the pilot a green light. That meant an investment of about a million dollars.

What Jerry Seinfeld brought to the show was first and foremost himself. What Larry David brought was most of the rest. His was the vision that would set the tone and atmosphere: cranky, pessimistic, even dark. It was because of his sensibility that the characters would be unable or unwilling to sustain a real romantic relationship. The show would have a tart, witty, edgy, New York feel. And a vaguely Jewish feel as well, although that would rarely be made obvious. (In fact, NBC worried the show might feel too Jewish, a problem that Larry wouldn’t have at HBO with Curb.)

Most important of all, Larry insisted, the show would be about — well — nothing. By nothing, he meant that the plot of each episode would not really matter. More important were the small daily activities that make up people’s days, the tiny frustrations, the mistakes and absurdities. Most of life, in Larry’s view, was in fact mundane and annoying, like losing your car in the parking lot or having to talk to old friends with whom you no longer have anything in common. Larry wanted to find the funny in those situations. “We want the show to be about the problems no one is trained to handle,” Larry said at the time. “All this education and conversation and parental guidance that you’ve had in your life does not prepare you for a huge number of things that come up. I think that what goes on in people’s lives is that most of their mind, most of the day, is occupied with tiny struggles. That’s what people’s lives are about.”

CHAPTER 5

A Show and a Phenomenon

Jerry Seinfeld would act in the show; Larry David wouldn’t. Probably the two realized that Larry would be far too busy as the show runner, the head writer who was also in charge of all the scripts, making sure that the details, style, and atmosphere were right. Very likely the network wouldn’t have okayed Larry as an actor, given his less than stellar work on Fridays. But there still had to be a Larry on the show, and for that reason George Costanza was created. Despite his Mediterranean name (a disguise really), George was imagined as another thoroughly Jewish New Yorker. Larry made him into an extreme version of himself — angst-ridden, insecure, stingy, emotionally ungenerous, difficult, even explosive. “George is the sickest part of me,” Larry said. “A sick part of my personality — but only one side.” The other sides would have to wait for Curb.

In casting Jason Alexander, Larry chose an actor who was losing his hair — and would lose a lot more by the show’s end. Larry himself had become extremely self-conscious of his baldness. “We [bald people] have to dress a little better, make a little more money, and have a little more charm just to compete,” he would say later. Baldness contributed to his insecurities, especially around women, but with the balding Jason Alexander playing a version of himself, Larry would be able to exploit those feelings on the show.

The pilot episode, titled “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” aired on July 5, 1989, during summer replacement season. It was deliberately low-key, its humor remarkably understated compared to how the show would develop. Not seeing enough potential for ratings and profit, NBC took a pass on turning it into a regular show. Larry wasn’t at all surprised. His previous shot at a pilot didn’t get picked up either. But a few months later Rick Ludwin, at that time head of late-night programming, liked the pilot and offered the two comics a limited run of four shows for the following summer.

Larry thought four shows didn’t sound too “traumatic” to write: “Maybe somehow I could write four shows. Somehow.”

In retrospect, this limited offer proved a good thing. It allowed the show to develop a little more and gave Larry and Jerry a chance to do some writing without being overwhelmed by the obligation of a twenty-two episode season. It also gave them a chance, at the urging of NBC, to add a female character, who turned out to be Elaine. The episodes ran and once more the show came to a halt. “That’s the end of that crap,” said Larry.

But then NBC, like a baseball team calling up a player from the minors when a star gets hurt, scheduled the show as a mid-season replacement. They asked for thirteen episodes.

“All of a sudden I’ve got this huge undertaking that I am emotionally ill-equipped to handle,” Larry said. Besides the workload, doing the show meant leaving New York and moving to Los Angeles. But at least Larry and Jerry were largely able to create the show they wanted.

Larry’s own attitude to the network was made obvious on the day that Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment, first visited the Seinfeld set. Littlefield had the power to kill a show he didn’t like. Executives from NBC and Castle Rock, the production company, crowded into Larry’s office and stood silently as Littlefield told them his ideas for the direction the show should take. Larry listened and then said, “Okay. Now get out of my office.” Jerry was horrified. There was a long pause and then everyone started to laugh. But Larry’s joke was no joke at all. He simply refused to take notes from the network.

Writing a weekly television series meant a workload and a gruelling pressure that Larry had never experienced before. Unlike some, he didn’t thrive on it. In the early days he constantly expressed hope that the show might be cancelled. And yet the show allowed him, for the first time, to express his humor to an appreciative — a wildly appreciative — audience. He could treat the show as a kind of television comedy laboratory, for example, writing with Jerry, in that first mid-season replacement series, an episode set in real time as the characters waited to be seated at a Chinese restaurant.

The next season, Larry was in charge of twenty-two episodes, what seemed to him an impossible number. Even back then, he carried a notebook around to write down his ideas in. Seinfeld said at the time, “Most of the stories are from his life, almost all of it. He just has a tremendous wellspring of ideas. I mean he just fills notebooks with ideas and I try to help him, but Larry is really the designer of the show. There are just some people who literally have funny lives and things happen to them that sound like stories. He has that kind of life.”

Larry put his source of inspiration in a different light. “My life has been pretty depressing, actually. I feel I am completely devoid of experiences. Other people, they travel, they do things, they have a life. My experiences are so minor. I go for acupuncture or I see something strange on the subway. Big deal.”

Larry and Jerry continued to work well together, each filling in what the other lacked. Peter Mehlman, a writer who joined the show, said, “George is the dark side of Larry, and Larry is the dark side of Jerry. Larry is very in tune with his own deepest, darkest, most embarrassing thoughts — and he’s utterly unabashed about sharing them.”

Larry David also brought Larry Charles onto the show as supervising producer. Before that NBC hadn’t let him hire Larry Charles, who had no sitcom experience. Instead, they wanted to assign veteran sitcom writers to the show — none of whom Larry could tolerate. NBC found Larry David stubborn in other ways. He refused to take notes from the network; he didn’t even pretend to listen. Elaine Pope, another writer on the show, later said, “Larry David is basically writing for his own amusement. . . . Larry really has carte blanche to do whatever he wants to do. Nobody’s interfering with his vision at all.”

The show was modestly successful until 1992–1993, its breakout season. That was the year that Larry wrote perhaps the most famous Seinfeld episode, “The Contest,” in which the four friends have a contest of masturbatory restraint. Once again he based it on a real episode that occurred with his friends, but its origin should not mask the inventiveness, artistry, and comic brilliance that Larry brought to the idea. He would win an Emmy Award for writing the show, later joking, “I walk around with the Emmy wherever I go, but I’m very casual about it.”

The show was now a hit and Larry was making a huge paycheck, but it is easy to forget how little he was surviving on just a few years earlier. And how poorly his career had been going. Yet he had the vision, courage, and confidence to insist on writing the show the way he wanted to. For example, it was in season three that the show began to use multiple plotlines. Larry and Larry Charles were talking over a new episode story line involving a library cop. They had two story lines when suddenly others came up and they began weaving them together in a complicated but comically satisfying way that got Larry tremendously excited. It was a structure that he would pursue on the show and continue in Curb.

That was also the year that Larry decided to try a season-long story arc, something not usually done in the sitcom form but a sign of his increasing ambitions. After Jerry performs in a club, two NBC executives approach him to say they are interested in him “doing something” for the network. Back at the coffee shop Jerry talks about the proposal with George, who comes up with the idea of a show about nothing. Although Jerry is skeptical, George, who wants to write it, persists. Jerry asks, “Since when are you a writer?” George answers, “What writer? We’re talking about a sitcom.” The taping of Jerry and George’s pilot occurs in the last episode and the story line, while not dominating the season, flits in here and there. In this season can be found the origins of the show-within-a-show of Curb’s season seven (the Seinfeld reunion) as well as the sitcom pitches in season two. Indeed, it is where Larry learned how to write a season-long story, a skill he would take with him to all but the first of the Curb seasons.

Larry later joked that he found the transition from impoverished comic to rich television writer and producer pretty easy to take. But he himself must have been feeling like it was a half-dream, half-nightmare. Larry’s mother would call him up and say, “Do they like you, Larry? Do they think you’re doing a good job? They must like you, otherwise they would fire you, wouldn’t they?” Mrs. David wasn’t used to her son being a success any more than he was.

At the same time, Larry was finding himself a success in a whole other sphere: romance. Eleven years younger than him, Laurie Ellen Lennard was a talent booker for David Letterman when she first saw Larry doing stand-up at the Duplex in New York. Afterward she went up to him on the street to talk; she wanted to get him on The Late Show. She never did get him on the show but the two became friends. They had a first date in a Mexican restaurant (perhaps giving Larry the idea of the Mexican restaurant hot sauce scene in the fourth season closer of Curb), but it didn’t go much farther. “I never, ever showed up for a date without being in a horrible state of anxiety,” Larry said. “Women will take looks and money over a sense of humor any day. I was such a loser.”

Lennard had begun her career working for Letterman but went on to manage comedy writers and comedians and to produce comedy specials for HBO, Showtime, MTV, and Fox. When Larry David moved to Los Angeles to work on Seinfeld, Laurie Lennard happened to be living there too, working for Fox. They began to date and became serious but Larry took a long time before he was ready to marry. Any time Lennard spoke of marriage he had physical sensations of anxiety — cold feet, hives on his neck. Laurie Lennard (who would become Laurie David) recounted, “He was so panicked. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be funny anymore if he was happy.” At last in March 1993, when Seinfeld had become a definite hit, they took a flight to Las Vegas and got married at a drive-in wedding chapel.

No doubt it was having the security of Larry David’s wealth that helped Laurie David to switch from a career in entertainment to becoming a vocal and highly involved environmental activist, especially around the issue of global warming. She founded the Stop Global Warming Virtual March along with Senator John McCain and Robert F. Kennedy. She wrote a book and was a producer on Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. And she became a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the organization where Larry’s fictional wife Cheryl would work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Laurie David would not go uncriticized by her opponents. Conservatives and gossip bloggers would point to her using private jets to fly to events, to owning houses on both coasts, and to damaging protected wetland by building a tennis court on her and Larry’s Martha’s Vineyard estate.)

Larry left Seinfeld in 1996, after the seventh season. His and Laurie’s first daughter, Cassie, had been born in 1994 and Laurie was pregnant with their second, who would be called Romy. Although some critics believed that the quality of the show declined, Seinfeld would carry on for two more seasons, and then Larry would come back to write the final disappointing episode. Larry, however, was already onto the next stage of his career, or so he hoped. He would become a writer and director of his own films, like his heroes Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. And his first movie was already making it to the big screen.

CHAPTER 6

Sour Reception

Larry David was living the high life. He, Laurie, and their daughters lived in a virtual mansion in Los Angeles. They took vacations on the other side of the country, at their isolated getaway home on Martha’s Vineyard. There they had dinners with celebrity friends like Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen. They sometimes hired a private jet, a cost that for Larry was now equivalent to taking a cab ride, something he once couldn’t even afford to do. He had fallen in love with golf while at summer camp; now he belonged to the Riviera, the most exclusive and expensive golf club in Los Angeles.

Larry preferred that people didn’t know about the Riviera membership. Or talk about his wealth — which grew exponentially as Seinfeld went into syndication. It was hard to turn on the television and not see an episode of the show. Later the DVD releases brought in even more (after a controversy about compensating the actors for their commentary). But Larry had to live with everyone knowing because the media just loved to talk about it. “He has more money than God,” pronounced Esquire.

Later, when Curb Your Enthusiasm was airing, it was reported everywhere that Larry had made over $200 million from syndication revenues. “People would say, ‘You deserve it.’ I’d go, ‘What do you mean, I deserve it? What do I deserve? I don’t deserve anything.’” He found himself apologizing for his success. When people remarked on his splendid house, he would say, “I’m sorry.”

“It feels strange that I have it because I really didn’t feel like I was supposed to have it, and it’s never been anything that I sought to have. I’m not allowed to complain anymore about anything. And I feel very restricted by that,” Larry said. “I mean, I’m a guy who’s complained his whole life, and all of a sudden I can’t say a word. . . . It’s like cutting my arms off.”

Later Larry would bravely allow his vast wealth to be alluded to on Curb Your Enthusiasm, always as a way of attacking him. There is the episode in which Larry accuses an NBC executive (to whom he’s trying to sell a show) of stealing shrimp from his order of Chinese food. “You know what, Larry?” the executive screams. “Take your $475 million and buy yourself some fucking shrimp.” The actor improvised the line — a big risk — but Larry thought it was funny. And then there is the episode where Larry accidentally trips Shaquille O’Neal, causing Jeff to lose his season’s tickets. The only way to make it up, Jeff shouts, would be for Larry to “buy the team!”

The thing was, although Larry was expected to act differently, he didn’t feel any different. And having money did nothing to satisfy his need to work and to be funny. He hadn’t quit Seinfeld to live a life of retired leisure. He’d quit because he feared growing stale. He thought it was time to move into the big leagues of motion pictures.

For years before Seinfeld Larry had been working on movie scripts, but it was only after quitting the show that he was able to get back to them. Before the show he did not have the contacts or the schlep to get a film made, but for the co-creator of Seinfeld it was a different matter. After all, he had made hundreds of millions of dollars for Castle Rock Entertainment, the show’s production company, he still had an office in their building, and it was only right that they back Larry’s first feature film. Considering what he’d made them, what was a few million dollars?

The script that Larry wrote, Sour Grapes, seems to have emerged, at least indirectly, from his own sudden wealth that seemed so unearned. What did a sudden influx of money do to a person? More interestingly, what did it do to his relations with other people? Those were the questions that Larry asked, comically, in his script. Two best friends (not unlike Jerry and George Costanza or, later, Larry and Richard Lewis) decide to go on a weekend gambling trip to Atlantic City with their girlfriends. When Richie runs out of quarters at the slot machine, his doctor-friend Evan gives him two quarters. Richie feeds the machine and comes up with a jackpot of over $400,000. The foursome celebrate Richie’s good luck but Evan nurses a belief that, since the quarters came from him, he deserves half the money. Richie offers him $1,000 and later three percent, resulting in a seemingly unbreachable rift between the two.

Evan decides to get even with his former friend. When some test results come back, he tells Richie that he’s got a terminal illness. Richie takes the news badly, of course, but he also realizes that his doting widowed mother will never be able to deal with the news. So he decides, rather improbably, to have her killed. He hires a homeless person (Larry used homeless people to advance plots in Seinfeld and would use them again in Curb) to go into the house, knowing that his mother’s weak heart would not be able to take the fright. In fact, she ends up in the hospital and Richie has to ask Evan to operate on her.

The problem is that Evan has stopped working. In a subplot similar to those in Seinfeld and later in Curb, the reason is that he has operated on a male television star, accidentally removing the wrong testicle. But finally Evan agrees and when the operation is a success he charges Richie exactly half the amount of the jackpot. Richie is glad to pay him and all’s well that ends well.

Castle Rock must not have had enormous faith in the script because the producer, Laurie Lennard (Larry’s wife, using her maiden name) couldn’t get Larry more than a small budget. So small that no well-known actors who might bring in an audience, could be cast. Nor did any of the important crew members have a track record that made an impression. For the main role of Richie, Larry chose Craig Bierko, an unknown who had won small roles in various television series and small Hollywood films. (He had been offered the role of Chandler in Friends but had turned it down.) For the slightly smaller role of Evan the doctor he went with Steven Weber, who had modest fame from his role in the television series Wings. At least one critic would notice Weber’s resemblance to Jerry Seinfeld. Richie’s stereotyped Jewish mother — the only explicitly Jewish note in the script — was played by Viola Harris, an actress who had been getting small parts for decades. Perhaps the most notable actor was Robyn Peterman in a girlfriend role. Peterman is the daughter of J. Peterman, the clothing catalog businessman whose fictional counterpart was Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld. Even a new soundtrack was out of the question; instead, previously recorded classical music, mostly well-known chestnuts, was used. The film looked cheap too, more like a television special than a feature film, although that was also the fault of first-time director Larry David.

Larry’s direction was dull, stilted, and unimaginative. He got hammy performances from the actors, who overplayed their lines, burying the humor. The story itself might have been enough for a half-hour sitcom but couldn’t sustain a movie. And there just weren’t enough good lines or comic situations. Quite possibly the feature-length form intimidated this writer used to a much more concentrated format.

Yet there are signs in the film of the show that is still to come. For example, Richie develops a suspicious relationship with a hospital secretary, eventually accusing her of stealing his mother’s cookies. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry will have many such encounters with receptionists, secretaries, and restaurant hosts. Then there is the doctor who only pretends to hold an elevator for Richie, resulting in Richie not wanting the man to operate on his mother. This situation prefigures episode five of the first season of Curb. Even the awful soundtrack gives a hint of the much livelier one for Curb, which also uses previously recorded music — but more effectively chosen. Overall, though, there is something bloodless about the film — the acting, the script, the direction. It feels reserved, held back. Even the characters’ unspoken Jewishness seems to drain the film of its possible energy.

Larry must have had an inkling that the film’s reception might not be good. “I wish I had a different name on it,” he said defensively before it came out. He thought that people would have a hard time accepting him as the creator of other characters. “They’re not going to like anybody as much as they like Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer.” The film premiered in 1998 before the last episode of Seinfeld. It was neither widely distributed nor reviewed, although the New York and Californian media took their shots. Actually, Janet Maslin of the New York Times was charitably disposed toward it. “While Seinfeld may be leaving,” she wrote, “the essence of the show is alive, well and funny — if also slightly threadbare — here.” She noted that the cast lacked the spark of the TV show and that the look was “bland and static.” (In fact, Curb also has a bland look to it, but there the uninteresting look and lack of visual texture enhances its comic qualities.) “Mr. David,” Maslin went on, “still invokes the very same spite, pettiness, and scheming . . . expect coffee-shop conversations, escalating wild twists of fate, and a strong sense of déjà vu.”

Larry’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t so kind. Jack Mathews used Seinfeld as a way to swipe at the movie. “Sour Grapes is a ninety-minute sketch, in which the jackpot feud in Atlantic City sets off a chain of increasingly ridiculous events. . . . Some of this is very funny, but it would probably be a lot funnier with a live audience, made up of people who are on the verge of hysterics even before the show begins.” He added, “David’s attempts to flesh it out — with desperate subplots . . . merely amplify the shallowness of the script.” He criticized the direction and concluded that watching the film was “like being stuck in a room with Kramer during one of his manic cycles.”

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Examiner was even more blunt. “Perhaps if people didn’t know that Seinfeld co-creator Larry David wrote and directed Sour Grapes, it would merely be a bad film. Knowing that it was David behind this project [makes] this a horrendous disaster.” Goodman called it “painfully unfunny,” a movie that looks “cheap” and “never feels like more than a bloated TV show.”

And just when the reception couldn’t get any worse, it did. Roger Ebert, perhaps the best-known and most popular movie critic in America, weighed in. In the Chicago Sun-Times he gave it zero stars. “A comedy about things that aren’t funny,” Sour Grapes was “tone-deaf comedy . . . labored and leaden.” Insisting that “I can’t easily remember a film I’ve enjoyed less,” Ebert called it “a dead zone.” This was the review that stung Larry the most.

Because humiliation and failure are always interesting to Larry, it’s not surprising that he went on to mention Sour Grapes on Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is a poster from the film hanging by the receptionist at his office. In episode six of the first season a friend of Cheryl’s borrows a copy of the film and then, struggling to find a compliment, tells Larry that it was just the right length. Larry would find a way to get back at Roger Ebert too — in the guise of thumbs-down restaurant critic Andy Portico during season three.

Between the bad reviews and the quick disappearance of the film, and the heated criticism of the final episode of Seinfeld, Larry must have felt like a king knocked from his throne. One moment he was being lauded as the creator of the greatest television comedy of all time and the next he was being lambasted for his lame writing, unfunny jokes, and bad direction. It could not have felt good. Later Larry would merely say, “I survived it.” Some wondered whether it marked the beginning of the “Seinfeld Curse.”

The Seinfeld Curse meant that nobody associated with the wild success of that show could succeed again, or so the media said. It started with Larry David but it was even more associated with the non-creating actors — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards. First up was Michael Richards with his own The Michael Richards Show on NBC (2000–2001), which did not make it to the end of its first season. Jason Alexander’s ABC show Bob Patterson (2001) lasted only five episodes. In 2002 Louis-Dreyfus got her own post-Seinfeld television show on NBC called Watching Ellie. Ten episodes aired before it was pulled because of low ratings, reassembled as a more conventional sitcom, and put on again to an even lower viewership. Six more episodes later it was gone. In 2004 Alexander tried again, this time on CBS with Listen Up! It did not make it to a second season. Then Michael Richards would damage his career in 2006 by calling some hecklers “niggers” during a stand-up performance in West Hollywood, a meltdown recorded on a cell phone camera. That same year, though, Louis-Dreyfus would finally find a successful home on The New Adventures of Old Christine.

All this bad luck would become interesting material for Larry. First, though, he had to lift his own curse.

CHAPTER 7

The Unspecial

The simple old truth is that money alone doesn’t buy happiness. Many people need to find fulfilment in work, and Larry David is one of them. The minimal budget that Larry could scrounge for Sour Grapes and the dismal reception it received did not exactly encourage him in the direction of more feature films. Instead, it sent him back to his origins: stand-up comedy. Maybe, like his friend Jerry Seinfeld, he thought he should return to the basics of what he did, or wanted to do, which was make people laugh: an empty stage, a microphone, a small audience of half-drunk revellers ready to laugh or jeer.

On the other hand, maybe not. Larry hadn’t exactly been a successful comic before Seinfeld and although the audience would no doubt be far more generous to him, at least at first, he still might not be a hit. The very thought of getting up there brought back the old anxieties. And after Seinfeld would a small audience be enough? Jerry might be able to pack huge halls night after night, but he had already been doing that before the show. Larry would have to go back to the clubs.

There are at least two versions of what happened next. The official one is that Larry decided to talk over the idea of returning to stand-up with his friend Alan Zweibel. In addition to an office next to Larry David’s at Castle Rock, Zweibel had rather a lot in common with the Seinfeld creator. Also a Brooklyn Jew, Zweibel had done time on Saturday Night Live and had written a movie, North, which Roger Ebert hated even more than he hated Sour Grapes. At the time, Zweibel was working on a pilot for the comic and actor Jeff Garlin. Alan Zweibel listened to Larry David talk and then suggested that if he was going to return to the stage he should film it. It could become some kind of television special. (Zweibel would become a consulting producer on the show.)

But as Jeff Garlin and Larry David both remembered it, he was the one who gave Larry the idea — at a Koo-Koo-Roo chicken restaurant in Beverly Hills. According to Garlin, “Larry and I were acquaintances, and one day Larry asked me to lunch and was asking me questions about stand-up comedy, and I was, ‘If you ever want to do an HBO special, I have the perfect idea for you.” It certainly is possible that Jeff Garlin would have thought about a special, for he had already worked on specials for two other comics, Denis Leary and Jon Stewart.

In either case, Larry decided to think it over. He told Laurie, who thought it was a good idea. But the more Larry mulled it over, the more convinced he was that a more-or-less straight concert special would be dull. It’s possible that he also knew that a straight special wouldn’t take advantage of all his comedy strengths, such as creating twisted and unlikely narratives and finding the humor in brief encounters. Maybe, Larry thought, he could create a fictional story around the stand-up, a story about Larry David himself that would be based on his own life (married, co-creator of Seinfeld) but wouldn’t be bound by actuality. There could be other characters — his wife, his agent, etc.

Jeff Garlin said, “I was very specific as to what the special would be because I had just directed Jon and Dennis. The difference was that mine included a lot more stand-up and Larry’s included more behind-the-scenes. He was right. I could have brought the idea to a million other people and we wouldn’t be talking about a great show.”

Larry further developed the idea. It could be a fake documentary about the making of an HBO special. And at its center would be Larry himself, the guy who created Seinfeld. That must have been an appealing idea, for the truth was that, despite all the publicity around the show, Larry David was still far less known than either Jerry or the cast. The general public did not realize that Larry was the real genius behind the show. The special might act as a corrective to that.

Larry David brought Jeff Garlin onto the project as an executive producer, but Larry still needed some more input. For a director he thought that somebody with a real documentary background might work. He had wanted Seinfeld to be shot with a single camera, documentary style, but had lost that battle with the network. On HBO, he could have far more freedom. Also, he had the idea of not writing all the dialogue but letting the actors improvise around his story. So he approached Robert B. Weide. Weide was a documentary filmmaker who, as a bonus, had taken some great comics as his subjects — Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, all members of Jewish comic royalty. Fifteen years before, he had read and loved Larry’s screenplay Prognosis Negative and had even been a fan of Larry’s stand-up act. In other words, he got Larry’s humor and approach. The special was a stretch for Weide and a more commercial project than he was used to, both inducements to say yes. It was Weide who suggested that they add some talking-head interviews to the special. Not only would that allow them to have people like Jerry Seinfeld as guests, but it would give the show a real documentary element.

Larry began working on the special in earnest. He felt committed to improvising, an idea used more in serious independent films than for comedy. He said, “There’s no way that you can get that sort of documentary feel, that cinema verité thing, unless you’re improvising. And I’ve always liked improvising — whenever I’ve done it in the past, I felt I had a knack for it.” He would definitely have a manager character, taking the place of his real-life manager Gavin Polone. And a wife. He wasn’t sure if the wife should be Jewish (as Laurie was) or if they should have kids, questions that never were resolved in the special.

As for the title, Larry came up with Curb Your Enthusiasm early in the process. “I mean, who likes enthusiasm?” he explained. “It’s sickening, isn’t it? To see enthusiastic people when you’re miserable. Nobody wants that.” The executives at HBO thought it would be hard to remember and wanted Larry to consider other possibilities. On the list were Regrets Only, Half Empty, and Best Foot Backwards. But Larry, fortunately, never wavered.

Next came casting.

JEFF GARLIN

The manager was easy enough to cast: Jeff Garlin. Jeff Garlin’s original hope, as he discussed the special with Larry David, was to direct it. But Larry said to him, “No, you’ll be the producer, and I want you to play my manager. Nobody else can play my manager.”

Six-foot-one, tanned, with chestnut hair, notably overweight, and with a slight lisp, Garlin was an unusual comic. He had some significant health problems, including a heart defect that no doubt affected his childhood and was finally operated on when he was in his twenties. He was also diagnosed after many puzzling years of what appeared to be anxiety symptoms with a form of epilepsy. He had type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and regularly saw a psychiatrist who specialized in patients with ADD. Not a lot to laugh about, but certainly the kind of life that sometimes forms very funny people.

Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, Garlin’s love of comedy started when his parents took him to see Jimmy Durante perform. On the way home Garlin, who was eight years old, asked his parents, “Is that a job?”

Garlin doesn’t paint the typical picture of a Jewish household — overly dramatic mother, sighing father, annoying relatives. “It was a sweet house,” he has said. When he was eleven the family moved to Plantation, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale, where his father became a legal administrator. The move put the young Garlin into very unfamiliar waters. “I was the first Jew that a lot of these kids had met. So needless to say, I got into a lot of fights. I won most of them. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. South Florida is still the South.”

His favorite performer was Steve Martin. He identified with a generation of Saturday Night Live performers — John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd — most of whom left the show about the time that Garlin graduated from high school. He also names Albert Brooks and Woody Allen as filmmaker/writer/ actors he admired. They gave him a model for what he hoped to do. (Later when Garlin finally made his own movie, he would describe it to people as like “Woody Allen, only not as good.”) The closest he got to show business was his mother, who acted in community theater. His father naturally wanted him to go to college, but Garlin felt that the only way he would achieve his goals was if he had no safety net. “If I had something to fall back on, I probably would have fallen back on it. If you have nowhere to go but forward, you move forward.”

But he did end up at the University of Miami for filmmaking. And a week after his twentieth birthday he performed his first stand-up at the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale. “I didn’t bomb,” he has said. Two years later he quit school and moved to Chicago, rooming with Conan O’Brien, the first of several moves for Garlin between that city, New York, and L.A. in order to further his career. He took classes, most of which he considered “crap”: “I think that a good acting teacher is immensely helpful, but a bad acting teacher, if you don’t have your wits about you, can destroy you.”

Unlike Larry, he did not find himself nervous before going on. He spent five years at Second City and developed a reputation for being a great improv comic. Improvisation was ideal for Garlin, who frankly didn’t like memorizing lines. It would be his work both in improvisation and as a stand-up that would give him the necessary background for the improvisational process on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Later he would create a weekly show in Los Angeles called Jeff Garlin’s Combo Platter that brought in guest comics and used both stand-up and improv sketch comedy. He never liked to have a set routine but instead would respond to the audience. “To not be in the moment is to deny so much comic possibility,” he said like a comic Zen master. “By being in the moment, you are being true to the art form.”

His humor didn’t attack the audience but instead emphasized his own “low status.” He explained, “I love when you’re humiliated and the audience feels for you. In my stand-up, the only one who should ever look stupid is me.”

He didn’t do ethnic jokes, considering stereotypes to be “just mean-spirited and false. I don’t even like Polish jokes. When did Polish people become stupid?” He did, however, do jokes about his weight. “If there was a room where you could find the best cocaine in the world, the best pot, a glass of the best wine, and a two-day-old sheet cake from Gristedes covered in ants, you know where I’m going,” he told audiences.

In fact, Garlin had an eating disorder that he was constantly struggling to overcome. More seriously, he said, “There are times where I cannot sit still, I cannot do work and I cannot focus. Then sometimes I have a complete lack of joy. Am I going to be a jerk and let everybody now what a miserable time I’m having? No, I internalize it. And by internalizing it, what do I do? I eat.” Although he made jokes about being heavy, and would later tolerate comic abuse on Curb (“You fat fuck!” his fictional wife would scream), he also insisted that being fat wasn’t what made him funny. He used it, but he didn’t believe it defined him as a comic.

Garlin had married Marla Garlin, a casting director who has worked on such films as The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Like Larry, Jeff had been marriage-shy but his girlfriend had made an ultimatum. He is father to two boys. In an industry where being nice is often equated with being a loser, he’s known as a sweet guy. Garlin considers it a way of coping. “I’m humble. I’m lucky to be here, you know?”

Garlin had his ups and downs, sometimes getting fired from clubs. He was supposed to audition for Saturday Night Live on the stage of the Improv, but after David Spade and Rob Schneider went on, Lorne Michaels and the other SNL big shots left the club. Eventually Garlin made it onto Letterman (to appease his nerves he stuffed himself at the nearby Carnegie Deli), but he never considered himself a star. Although his early ambitions had been lofty, over time he realized that he was more like “an alternative band or jazz musician,” someone who has a loyal but not necessarily large following. It was all right with him, he finally decided, if he never sold out Madison Square Garden. He preferred not to have anyone introduce him before going onstage. Even after the beginning of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Garlin often went unrecognized, sometimes even by the doorman at a comedy club.

As an actor, Garlin found himself getting some small roles in sitcoms. At one point he told his agent he didn’t want to go to any more same-day auditions because he wanted prep time before trying out for a part. Nevertheless he agreed to try out the same day for an episode of Mad About You, the sitcom starring comic Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. He got the part but by the day of the shoot his character’s role had been cut to a single line. In rehearsals, the producers liked the chemistry on the set and decided to come up with more for Garlin to do, resulting in the continuing role of Marvin, lasting three years. It was Garlin’s most visible part before Curb. (Reiser makes an appearance in season three, episode five of Curb. The stand-up world is a small one.)

As a director, Garlin found himself called upon by many comedians who had come to trust his taste. He worked with Denis Leary on the HBO special Lock ’n Load and with Jon Stewart on Jon Stewart: Unleavened. Both comics asked Garlin to travel with them while they honed their material, giving feedback and helping them get more laughs. It was the sort of role he would perform for Larry on the set of Curb. And it wasn’t long before his working relationship with Larry David was so easy and casual that it felt, as Jeff Garlin said, that “we’ve been working together for thirty years.”

CHERYL HINES

Perhaps the most important casting decision for Curb Your Enthusiasm was that of Larry’s wife. The first thought that everyone had was to cast a Jewish actress closer to Larry’s age. The casting director, Garlin’s wife Marla, brought in women with loud voices. Despite not looking at all Jewish, Cheryl Hines somehow got booked for an audition, but then the date was put off. That same evening Robert Weide went to see her perform as part of an improv group, the Groundlings. He arranged to have her come in the next day.

Cheryl Hines had never met Larry, or Jeff Garlin, or director Robert B. Weide. “I’d heard a few things about Larry,” she has said. “Like that he wasn’t real warm towards people. And I think some writer told me about a pitch meeting he had with Larry where Larry basically said, ‘yeah, I don’t like it.’ In this business people never say that.” She’d also been told that he was a “germophobe” and that she shouldn’t touch him.

The daughter of a man she herself called a redneck, Hines grew up in Tallahassee, Florida. She acted in high school then went to West Virginia University and Florida State before finally graduating from Central Florida with a major in TV and a minor in theater. She did not study comedy; on Curb she would play the straight woman. In her early twenties she had a job at Universal Studios, where, among her other performing duties, she had to reenact the shower scene from Psycho. Moving to Los Angeles, she worked as a waitress, bartender, and personal assistant to Rob Reiner (who makes an appearance in season two, episode five of Curb). Unlike Garlin, she praised her experience in acting classes. “I learned so much from each teacher. It’s very specific; they teach very specific things, and I need that.”

Hines wanted to get onto Saturday Night Live and heard that the best way was to train in improvisation with the Groundlings, an L.A. comedy troupe. Phil Hartman, for one, had gone from there to SNL. She had never heard of the group but went to see a show, loved it, and began taking classes. “It wasn’t really a choice to do improv,” she said. “I wanted to know how you got from Tallahassee to Saturday Night Live.”

She found it took a while to get up her courage and assert herself during an improvised scene. “Women are brought up to be nice and supportive and not to make too much noise,” she said, “so guys . . . are quick to take control, whereas women take a while to get used to the idea that you need to jump in there.” In time, she became a member of the performing troupe. She never did get to audition for SNL, although she tried out for MADtv without success. But she did land the occasional television part, including an Unsolved Mysteries where she played the mother of kids who were being abused by the nanny, a part she considered the worst acting job she ever got.

When Hines walked in for the audition she was surprised when Larry shook her hand and greeted her warmly. Her audition consisted of the two of them improvising a scene together. All Larry told her was that they had kids and that Larry had stopped eating chicken. She was almost twenty years younger than her supposed husband. Jeff Garlin and Robert B. Weide were also in the room. Larry liked that she didn’t raise her voice or become strident even when acting annoyed. Jeff Garlin said afterward, “We saw a lot of actresses. It was instant chemistry. She was clearly the one. She was the only actress who also stood up to him. Everybody else was kind of intimidated, but she stood up to him like she was really his wife.” After she left, David, Garlin, and Weide looked at one another and agreed.

Before shooting began, Larry had no idea how the special would turn out. He was nervous enough that he thought if the cost wasn’t too high and if he didn’t like it maybe he would pay HBO back not to show it. Afterward, he would look back with some amazement that he had gone ahead with it at all.

Shooting the special required three basic kinds of scenes. There were the fake documentary scenes of Larry with his agent, or his wife, or meeting the HBO executives and other encounters. These scenes were improvised, based on an extraordinarily brief outline of one page by Larry, and so they had a surprisingly real feel about them. As the shooting went on and the actors got more comfortable, the improvisations grew longer. Larry didn’t instruct the actors much, or even tell them what to expect in the scene. He told Hines only that Larry’s wife had heard every excuse and story in the book and that she didn’t take his “shit.” Then there were the scenes of Larry performing stand-up in clubs while getting ready for the big HBO concert. This was not fake, but the real Larry performing both old and new material before audiences in L.A. clubs. Most of the time he got good laughs (he found these audiences more responsive and sophisticated than when he stopped performing some nine years earlier), but not always. Finally, there were the interviews. Most were with people who had really worked with and knew Larry and were speaking truthfully about him, although two were with the fictional characters of agent and wife. All of this made for a fiction that was, in fact, often real, or at least partly real. It was an unusual and compelling hybrid, and the effect was to create a portrait of Larry David, temperamental comic and genius behind Seinfeld.

As for the improvised scenes, while the situations sometimes felt Seinfeld-like, they played out very differently. There was no quick banter and smashing punch lines. Instead, the humor was situational and grew more slowly. Scenes were sometimes funny and uncomfortable. This was something truly different.

Because of the long, improvised scenes, the editing process was long. The finished special used a soft jazz score rather than the signature tune that would later seem such a perfect fit for the show. In a couple of ways the special superficially resembles Seinfeld. Short scenes of stand-up punctuate it, and near the end a couple of plotlines intersect. But otherwise, the resemblance is more minimal than might be expected. It does feel like a documentary. Larry points out the presence of the camera in the room, which follows him into a meeting or onto a stage. The HBO executives (played by Allan Wasserman and the late Judy Toll) look uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the camera. The club scenes are underlit and shot from the side.

Although the apparent casualness of filming and the unscripted dialogue have an air of reality to them, the special is clearly plotted. Larry’s agent Jeff comes up with the idea of an HBO special and takes Larry in to pitch it successfully. Then Larry prepares by playing small clubs in Los Angeles and New York. Incidents occur along the way: a former Seinfeld assistant asks for a job recommendation; Larry offends a woman he knows by mispronouncing her name; Larry worries that Cheryl (her hair dyed dark so she will look more Jewish) will think he’s having an affair with a young woman who is in fact having an affair with Jeff; Larry avoids going to the wake for a friend’s stepfather. Each time, Larry comes off badly, and the audience both laughs and winces, a pattern that gets set for the series that is to come. We hear remarks that eventually we will come to recognize as Larry Davidisms: “I have a tendency to nod to black people.”

Eventually Larry visits the arena in Pasadena where his concert will be taped, only to suffer stage fright at the size of it. Quickly he runs to HBO where he tells them his own stepfather has died (he has no stepfather) and he has to fly to Florida. The concert is cancelled. Larry leaves the building, whistling happily. In other words, not only does Larry create a radically different kind of concert special, he also leaves out the concert.

The interview segments have a sort of parallel function. The first is to tell the audience that they already know Larry David’s work. Jason Alexander says, “The average guy on the street didn’t know the funny stuff coming out of our mouths was coming out of Larry David.” The second is to tell the audience that Larry was never a successful comic. Jerry Seinfeld says, “And then he would always call the audience ‘You people.’ I used to say to him, you know, calling them ‘you people’ is a bit distancing.” The third is to set up the special. Larry Charles says, “Once he saw that Seinfeld was successful, I think he felt the most fulfilling thing he could do next would be to return to stand-up and complete that unfinished business.”

In the very brief stand-up segments (which shrunk during the editing process), Larry looks fairly confident. He usually has a piece of paper with notes on a stand, as comics sometimes do when trying out new material. His bit about not taking “shit” from magicians is particularly funny, as is his description of a near-death experience caused by masturbating with a high fever and his ruminations about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. (Did Clinton really think there’d be no price to pay for getting oral sex from a Jewish woman?) But in a late segment, a request to be euthanized when he’s unable to go to the bathroom by himself receives total silence.

A true revelation is how good Larry David is on the screen. The man who never truly appeared on Seinfeld, who previously had acted in a few bit parts and in some television comedy sketches almost a decade earlier, proves himself to be a fully confident and remarkably charismatic performer. The camera likes Larry, likes his expressions, likes the way he lopes when he walks, likes his sighs, frowns, and his big, head-back laughs. What’s more, he’s convincing. It’s not so easy to play a fictional version of oneself, but he does it without self-consciousness, as if he’s not acting at all. When, of course, he is.

Larry’s rapport with the other lead actors is also good. Cheryl only gets one real scene, but she comes off as the wife who knows her husband well, treats him with skepticism, but is charmed by him anyway. Jeff, on the other hand, is a mover and shaker, a businessman who pushes to get things done, and who takes advantage when he can. Yet, he’s still a real friend. The part will evolve later in the show, with Jeff becoming far more likable and vulnerable.

The special aired on October 15, 1999, a mere seventeen months after the last episode of Seinfeld. That episode had been dumped on by critics and viewers alike, but Seinfeld was, if anything, a bigger success in reruns than it had been the first time around. People were watching episodes for the second, third, or fourth time. It was a good time for Larry to wipe out the memory of that last episode. (He didn’t need to erase the memory of Sour Grapes, except for himself; nobody had seen it.)

And it worked. The special was a critical hit. Variety called it “a work of genius.” Treating its documentary quality seriously, Tom Shales in the Washington Post called it “a peek into the life and mind of a brilliant creative talent who is also clearly a huge pain in the neck.” He did complain that Larry had no “TV presence whatsoever.” James Brundage, writing for Filmcritic.com, seemed to have taken a while to realize that it wasn’t a real documentary. But once he did, he declared it “the best mockumentary I have ever seen.” Meanwhile, an article in the New York Times noted that it seemed so real to people that a friend of Cheryl Hines believed that she had actually gotten married to Larry David.

Larry would have been justified in shouting, as George once did in Seinfeld, “I’m back, baby! I’m back!” Of course, the viewership did not come close to the tens of millions who had been watching Seinfeld. This was HBO, after all. But it also meant that Larry had far more freedom and control. And freedom to continue expressing his comic self as he wanted was very tempting. The acclaim could only encourage an idea that he had been nursing: to turn Curb Your Enthusiasm into a show.

CHAPTER 8

The First Season

On the first day of filming the HBO special, Larry had said to Jeff, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this as a series? Maybe we will.” Later he explained, “We realized as we were doing it that this thing seemed like it could be — a show! The scenes came out very well, better than expected. I didn’t cringe when I saw myself — I mean, sometimes I did, but it wasn’t a big cringe-fest for me. And it was fun. I found myself laughing.”

Chris Albrecht, chair and CEO of HBO, had known Larry since the seventies. He too had been a comic at Catch a Rising Star. He once nicely captured Larry David’s attitude toward life as “I knew I should have had the chicken.” Watching the special, he too realized that it had the makings of a series. He asked Larry for a meeting and offered him a thirteen-episode season. Larry said he would be willing to make ten. Usually it’s the channel that doesn’t want to commit itself too deeply, but it was Larry who said that he would agree to only one season. He wasn’t going to let himself feel trapped as he had on Seinfeld.

The show that Larry imagined was not without precedents. The husband who often finds himself in trouble with his wife, or getting caught in his own schemes and subterfuges that backfire, has a long history on television. More recently, comedians have played fictionalized versions of their real selves: Jerry Seinfeld, but also, just as tellingly, Garry Shandling. Shandling first played himself in the sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which was co-created by Alan Zweibel — the same person who had a hand in conceiving the Curb special. On the show, which aired from 1986 to 1990, Shandling played a stand-up comic and performed monologues. He also broke the fourth wall, often interacting with the audience. Later Shandling created the better known Larry Sanders Show, playing a talk show host (Shandling had often substituted for Johnny Carson and was offered his own show but turned it down). The episodes were frequented by celebrities playing exaggerated or outright fictional versions of themselves, as would occur on Curb. The show mixed reality and fiction, as Shandling was known to ask the writers and the guest stars to use real experiences on the show. Questions of Jewish identity arose, sex was a major subject, race and sexual orientation were themes, and, seeing as it was on HBO, there was much swearing and sex talk. The dialogue had an improvised feel and the camera work was loose. It even had, in the talk show aspect, a show-within-the-show, just as Larry would put a musical-within-the-show in Curb’s fourth season and a show-within-the-show in the seventh (the Seinfeld reunion).

Running concurrently with Seinfeld and ending in the same season, The Larry Sanders Show was considered far more risky. Seinfeld himself called it his favorite sitcom. It’s easy to imagine Larry envying the kind of freedom that Shandling had on HBO. Shandling talked about the show in a way that Larry never spoke about his own work: “I wanted to do a project that dealt in a deeper way with human behavior. . . . I wanted to be more deeply challenged as an artist.” But Larry’s own character would, in its own way, be an exploration of human behavior — the sort of behavior that Larry claimed he wished he could practice in real life. Shandling said something else about the show that could easily apply to Larry’s character in Curb: “Everyone wants to be famous. They think being famous will change their life. I’m here to tell them that it doesn’t.”

As a writer for Esquire put it about Larry’s character on Curb, “You needn’t love yourself to be a narcissist; you can be just as transfixed by self-loathing.” The personality that Larry David developed for the first season of the show has a reduced super-ego and a runaway id. He speaks his mind, acts selfishly, tries to fulfill his wants, and avoids obligation. He understands instinctively that to be involved in human relationships means to experience constant conflict on both a small and a large scale. Larry David himself said, “The person on the show has more character than I do. He’s not as bright, but inside he has more character. I’d rather be the person on the show.” In years to come he would often assert that he liked the character on the show far better than his real self.

The HBO special was the origin of the series, but the show itself takes something of a leap into a different form. For one thing, there is no stand-up. Instead, Larry is positioned as the vastly wealthy co-creator of Seinfeld, someone with an office and an agent but no visible work. In other words, a man of leisure who chooses to fill his days with the minutiae of modern life — squabbles with the wife, arguments with friends, hours spent in restaurants, stores, and shopping malls. He might as well be a successful Jewish importer who has retired to Florida condo living. The difference, of course, is that he is not only rich but famous. And famous people have famous friends.

So what Larry David gives us is a domestic comedy of manners involving a husband who is, yes, a nudnik, but also opinionated and even aggressive, along with a mildly disapproving but still affectionate wife, difficult friends, and a series of confusions, embarrassments, and social faux pas. The plots in season one sometimes feel Seinfeld-like as Larry feels his way into the series. They are relatively modest in ambition — far more modest than in subsequent years.

The character of Larry dominates the show far more than Jerry ever dominated Seinfeld. All the others are secondary and are there to play off Larry and illuminate various facets of his character. They exist only because Larry does and they never have developed plotlines of their own.

JEFF GREENE

“Like it or hate it, Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry David,” Jeff Garlin said, confirming as much. “And so when people tell me how great I am on Curb or how great Curb is, I defer to Larry David. So if you’re uncomfortable, I also defer to Larry David. My responsibility on Curb Your Enthusiasm 100 percent is to help Larry David get his vision on the screen. My job is to make the other actor look good.”

Which is not to say the other characters aren’t important. Jeff Greene, the manager that Garlin plays, is not quite the obvious sidekick that he appears to be. He does have a recognizable upper middle class, Californian, Jewish male point of view and often seconds Larry’s opinion on various contentious matters. As Garlin said, “My job as his best friend/manager is to pour gasoline on the fire and make it worse.” But the character of Jeff also understands better how the social world works. He doesn’t cause the friction that Larry does, or put his foot in his mouth, or insist on his version of the truth or morality as Larry does. The irony is that Larry is more of a moral straight arrow, for it is Jeff who has the wandering eye when it comes to extramarital sport.

CHERYL DAVID

The role of Cheryl, Larry’s wife, is less co-conspirator and more judge and jury. Like any good Jewish husband, Larry fears his wife’s opprobrium, and the woman holds an unseen but universally understood power in the relationship. That power originates in the sex drive. That is, in Larry’s sex drive and in Cheryl’s ability to withhold. Larry also knows that Cheryl understands the ways of the world, the simple rules of social conduct that often baffle or aggravate him. She is the first to see that he has done wrong, but she is also the first to understand and forgive. She is, in other words, a kind of mother to him, whom he might often take for granted but upon whom he depends for his life.

Cheryl has no job. She worked once but, like the real Laurie David, has given it up to devote herself full time to the environment. Cheryl always seems to be at home and only occasionally busy with her cause, but she seems to have no household duties as the TV Davids turn out to be childless with a staff befitting such wealthy Hollywood royalty. (In a parody sketch on the Fox show MADtv, Larry asks Cheryl why is she always just in the next room and what is she doing in there.) They eat in restaurants and, when they have a dinner party, Cheryl hires a caterer. She is nothing less than an old-fashioned woman of leisure. And while in the first season her dress is very plain (due largely to the show’s small budget), in time she will begin to wear shimmering, well-cut, even alluring designer wear as befitting a princess.

“It’s a departure from who I am in real life,” Cheryl Hines said, “so it is a fictitious character for me. All I can do is imagine if I was married to someone like the Larry David on the TV show and I had to put up with him 24 hours a day, that’s what I imagine when I’m improvising with him.”

RICHARD LEWIS

Just who is Larry’s best friend? Is it his manager Jeff, whom he inevitably sees more than any other friend, or is it his long-time pal Richard Lewis? Lewis appeared as an interviewee in the special and as a guest star in the first episode, the first of many appearances on the show. Unlike the fictional manager, Richard — like Larry — plays a version of himself: a recovered alcoholic, love-seeking, highly neurotic stand-up comic who only wears black.

In real life, Larry and Richard were born three days apart and met when they were thirteen, at Camp All American in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. They didn’t like each other. Later in the New York clubs, Larry saw Richard perform a few times. When they finally spoke, it was Richard who reminded Larry of their earlier connection. They developed a friendship that Larry would later claim was much like the one in the show, in which arguments and raised voices never hurt their relationship.

Lewis has claimed that comedy helped him get through his bad patches. “I went onstage to get reassurance that I wasn’t going insane.” His alcohol abuse worsened and eventually he was hospitalized for having hallucinations. When Richard Lewis got into trouble Larry David was one of the people he would call in the middle of the night. Larry was also one of those who convinced him he had to get help for his drinking. Between 1991 and 1994 Lewis did not perform. He hit bottom, cleaned up, and has remained sober for over fifteen years. A highly successful comic, he has performed in a series of HBO specials. Known for being neurotic, obsessive, wired, an essentially unhappy man with trust issues, he was famous for pacing restlessly onstage, stooping as he walked, running his hands through his long hair — what one critic called a “kvetch ballet.” Until Curb, Lewis’s film and television success was modest.

On the show the two seem like competitors as much as friends and are more often in conflict than not — over Richard’s latest girlfriend (whom he invariably believes to be “the one”), a piece of jewelry they both want to buy, or a perceived insult. Their voices grow loud and sometimes they even scuffle, although nothing divides them for long. When they’re together their teenage selves re-emerge. Over time in the series, Richard shows himself to be part of the inner circle to which Larry too belongs. They go to the same parties, the same openings, even the same synagogues and funerals. Richard is not always a part of an episode’s main story, but an adjunct to it.

SUSIE GREENE

Last of the regular company of characters is Susie Greene, Jeff’s wife. If Cheryl doesn’t like Jeff (at least in the first season), Susie likes Larry even less. Although Susie Essman, who plays Susie Greene, doesn’t get as much airtime as the other stars, she’s like the spice in the dish, giving it that extra flavor.

Susie Essman grew up middle-class Jewish in Mount Vernon, New York, and unlike the other stars hasn’t moved to Los Angeles. “It’s so fucking boring,” she said, sounding like her character. “Constant sunshine. I want to kill myself.”

She always knew that she wanted to be a comic actor, but took an urban studies degree. Waitressing to pay the rent, she finally walked on at an open mike at Mostly Magic, a club in Greenwich Village. Her career grew from there. Although she had a few minor movie roles, Essman continued to work primarily in stand-up. She found one advantage in being female: men rarely heckled her. On the other hand, they were harder to win over. “The reason . . . is because humor is power and funny women scare the shit out of men.”

Improvisation was an essential part of her show; when she got up onstage, like Garlin, she only had a general idea of how the evening might go. “I want to make my show a real, live experience, so that what’s happening in this immediate moment is never going to happen again.” She was working the clubs back in Larry’s day and saw him perform. “All the other comedians were cracking up at the back,” she remembered, “but it was way over the audience’s head.”

Larry David was looking for an actress who could use foul language like she meant it, something Susie Essman was known for in her act. (Her hero was the late Richard Pryor.) One night he was flipping channels and caught her doing a Friars Club roast for Jerry Stiller, who played George’s father on Seinfeld. Instantly he knew she was the one. He called her on the phone and offered her the part. She asked what it was and he said not to worry, she could do it. She asked if she could read a script. “There’s no script,” Larry said.

Essman got on set, saw her home, and made some quick decisions about her character. “I took one look and said this is a Beverly Hills housewife whose husband is in the business. She gets her hair blown out three times a week, gets every kind of facial. She wears lots of animal prints. . . . She just reacts without any kind of censor. Everything is an indignity, and she is absolutely sure of herself in every single response.”

It was Essman who brought the idea of disliking Larry to the show. “That came as a surprise,” Jeff Garlin said after shooting her first scenes. “We did not know that she was going to go that way. And when she did, we just fell over laughing.”

In the first season, Susie is a harridan, a woman worthy of being afraid of. But in time she softens; sometimes she’s even kind to Larry when he makes a mess of things. And, as Essman gets deeper into her character, it becomes clear that underneath the foul language and the quick fuse is a woman who is protecting her family — her husband, her child, and her marriage — from the vicissitudes that may threaten them.

Larry did not write conventional thirty-five to forty-page scripts for the episodes. Instead, he wrote outlines six to nine pages long, a series of scene descriptions with the general feeling and the key plot points laid out. The story was not to be improvised, but the dialogue was, although Larry might feed a key line or two to an actor — something he did increasingly as the show went on. Larry found the experience liberating. He didn’t have to create the voice for each part but could rely on the actors to do so, allowing them the freedom to really create their characters.

Most shows begin shooting with just a few scripts in hand; a team of writers cranks out more under the pressure of the shooting deadlines. Larry wrote all his outlines before beginning to shoot, allowing his ideas time to gestate. Later, when he would create season-long story arcs, this was crucial, but it was important even in the first season. For years Larry had carried a notebook in a pocket to jot down ideas, and it was these jottings that provided the seeds for the outlines. “Most of the ideas stink,” he said. “But you’d be surprised. See, a lot of these I’ll use, not as a big story but like a little piece of filler. And then all of a sudden it somehow leads into something.”

Among the ideas that came from life in season one were the notions of: having to tip the “captain” in a restaurant, a lawyer charging to read a script, the wire in Cheryl and Larry’s back yard, and the friend who struggles to compliment Larry’s film Sour Grapes. The notebooks were so important to Larry that he would even use them in a story line, losing one in episode six of the first season. One idea had been in the back of Larry’s mind for a long time and he finally used it for the season closer in which Larry pretends to be an incest survivor at a group therapy session. He had discussed the idea with Jerry Seinfeld years before, but his co-creator didn’t like it. While Seinfeld never censored a script, Larry recalled, he did occasionally veto an idea that he wasn’t comfortable with. Quite possibly NBC would have had issues with it as well. But Larry had no problem putting himself into the situation.

Sometimes ideas came from other people on the show. Robert B. Weide, the director, came up with the porno story for season one, episode three.

As Larry was writing, Jeff Garlin got rear-ended in his car and had to have back surgery. (In episode seven of the first season, Jeff Greene’s car would be rear-ended — this time with Larry driving.) And then a month later Garlin had a stroke. He was only thirty-seven. His wife was pregnant with their second child. He spent a week in hospital and, coming out, had to use a cane (actually, he used a golf club) to get around. He was slurring his words. But Larry was supportive, acting helped him to recover, and he managed to make it through the season.

Shooting the episodes took place over about six months. A Digital Betacam was used to save money; a computer later turned the images into something that looked more like film. One camera was used much of the time, just as Larry had wanted and failed to get for Seinfeld.

For cost reasons the cast had only one trailer to share and had to take turns going into the bedroom to change into costume. Even famous guest actors had to share. Larry’s real office in Santa Monica was used as his office on the show. The house he and Cheryl live in was rented from the owner, director Sam Raimi (Spiderman). It was empty and the set decorator had three days and a small budget to make it look inhabited; the result was a house that didn’t quite look lived in. It was the first of several houses the couple would live in over the course of the series. In season two a family’s real house was rented to look more authentic. When the family grew tired of the inconvenience of having television crews in the house, another had to be found for the fourth season.

Jeff Garlin got to read the outlines in order to give Larry feedback, but the other actors were kept largely in the dark, even about the episode actually shooting. Larry wanted real reactions and spontaneous dialogue. Cheryl Hines would sit in her makeup chair asking, “Does anyone want to tell me anything about anything?” In the second episode of season one Larry goes shopping with Mary Steenburgen whom he has a crush on. Discovering that he has been to Barney’s, Cheryl asks why. Shooting the scene, Larry did not tell Cheryl Hines in advance that his character went shopping with Mary Steenburgen so that she would react with natural surprise.

Robert B. Weide, who directed six of the first season’s ten episodes, explained that “One of our rules for actors is, ‘Don’t try to be funny or go for the joke. It will only end up on the cutting room floor.’” Rehearsing was very brief so as not to spoil the spontaneity. Some actors found the process hard, even scary, and some vomited before going before the camera. But Larry often cast stand-up and improv veterans in speaking roles, people who were used to thinking on their feet. Larry even allowed actors to speak over each other, something that happens in real life but never in sitcoms. The result was a hybrid — something that felt almost like a reality-show but that had a crazy, obviously designed story. Of course, Larry couldn’t just take a scene because it was improvised — it had to come out well. So when he didn’t like what someone was doing, Larry would give suggestions, speaking bluntly (something actors weren’t used to), and they did scenes over and over again, building up hours of recording that would have to be edited down. Shots often had to be retaken because actors laughed, especially Larry.

Susie Essman’s first big scene, for example, did not take place until the sixth episode of the first season, when she discovers that the boy Jeff sponsored for summer camp has robbed their house. Larry David’s direction to Susie Essman was simply and crudely to “rip Jeff a new asshole.” After the first take, Larry told her to be even meaner. Mock him for being fat, Larry said. Essman was reluctant — Garlin was a human being, after all. But they began shooting again and she took her performance up a few notches, calling Jeff a “fat fuck” — an expression that would become associated with the character.

The improv process affected people in different ways. Richard Lewis found himself nervous. He had no idea how he was going to come off. Larry told him not to worry but it was only later, seeing a completed episode, that he really understood the feel that his old friend was going for. During the taping of episode four of the first season, Larry and Richard had to get into a scuffle in the entrance to a jewelry store. Richard got so into it that he broke Larry’s glasses and sprained his finger. Sometimes it was the director who used the process to his advantage. Andy Ackerman, the director of episode five, privately told actress Rose Abdoo (playing an interior decorator) that during her own scuffle with Larry she should suddenly kiss him. The kiss caught Larry totally by surprise.

Like Larry David, Jeff Garlin thrived on improv. David Steinberg, the veteran comic turned director who would helm the second episode (and more in subsequent seasons), said, “Jeff is one of the best improvising comedians I’ve ever worked with, and that’s hard to be good at. You have to be older, you have to read, know what’s going on in the world, be worked out in a troupe for a minimum of a year to learn how little you have to do in a way. Deep listening is what makes an incredible improviser, and having instincts sharp enough to know whether to jump in or not.”

Most of the guest actors had to audition for their parts. Tim Bagley, the shoe salesman in episode two, wasn’t too crazy about the character description — a flaming homosexual. So he went in and played the character in a more restrained and dignified manner, and Larry gave him the part. But Larry allowed life and art to mix. The woman playing Cheryl’s best friend in episode seven, Julie Welch, is Cheryl Hines’s best friend in real life.

The process of editing was onerous and took even longer than shooting — about two weeks per episode. All those improvised takes had to be closely examined to find the best parts of each then edited together in a manner that would look seamless. A lot of sound editing was also required to make all the lines audible. Although he worked with editors, Larry was very much in charge. He spent six hours a day in the editing room; he called watching himself that much “horrifying.” Larry did not want to use the same music that had been employed on the special. He wanted something to add to the liveliness and humor, something buoyant. And he already knew what he wanted. Years before he had heard an Italian-sounding instrumental tune on a local bank commercial and had asked his assistant to track it down for him. It was “Frolic” by Luciano Michelini, who often worked in Italian film as composer and music director. Its upbeat circus sideshow quality comes from the combination of spritely mandolin and puffing tuba. Elsewhere in the show Larry drew on related Italian music, with mandolin and accordion, but he did so far more artfully than when he used the classical works in Sour Grapes. Over time his musical repertoire would expand. The theme from Carmen, for example, would be associated with a guest character but would continue to be used in subsequent episodes. Likewise, klezmer music, which was introduced for the seder scene in episode seven of season five, would be used frequently afterward.

With the first episode set to air on October 15, 2000, HBO cranked up the promotion machine. Larry didn’t like doing publicity and he feared the show being over-hyped. He thought that viewers should simply discover it for themselves. But he told the New York Times, “If you like a show where everything goes wrong, you’ll like this show.” An HBO exec, Carolyn Strauss, said, “Larry has always been this kind of guy, where the world moves one way and he moves another. It’s the clash of that, that’s always been a hallmark of his stand-up, and what influenced Seinfeld so much.” Clearly, putting viewers in a Seinfeld frame-of-mind would be good for the show.

The season opener, “The Pants Tent,” introduces themes that will recur throughout the show, especially that of sexual humiliation. It uses several plots whose stories crossed a là Seinfeld. The second episode introduces Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, stars playing versions of themselves. It begins the question of where Larry and Cheryl fit into the social world that surrounds them, one of rich famous people. Ted, both here and in future episodes, proves to be the friend whom Larry seems to like the least. “Beloved Aunt,” the fourth episode, isn’t the first to bring in Richard Lewis, but it allows him to weave his own comic “stylings” (as comedy emcees like to call it) into the show. It also has some gentle satire of Christianity, a well that Larry will find himself dipping into occasionally. Larry doesn’t so much criticize the faith as he does show a Jew’s perplexity over its images and rituals. (Paul Dooley makes a strong comic impression as Cheryl’s father.) Another recurring theme not always known for its comic possibilities — race relations — rears its head in episode nine, “Affirmative Action.” Larry’s behavior around black people is touched on in the HBO special; here it gets full attention. And in the season closer, Larry uses a subject — incest — that he had not been able to touch on in Seinfeld and manages to be very funny. It is also notable for being one of the few episodes in which Cheryl wants sex more than Larry does.

The season began and the critics weighed in. Julie Salamon reviewed it for the all-influential New York Times: “[The show] may be even more idiosyncratic than Seinfeld because Mr. David is a very strange man — and he’s playing himself. . . . You find yourself laughing at the uncomfortable situations he creates for himself, and even sympathizing with him. . . . Mr. David operates by a strict moral code, whose rules aren’t obvious but which seems to revolve around the notion that all deeds, good and bad, will be punished somehow. In Curb Your Enthusiasm he has used a glum principle to turn life into a very funny comedy of comeuppance.”

The Los Angeles Times couldn’t curb its enthusiasm either. “Larry David is an acquired taste. For some of us, it takes about ten seconds. . . . Funny and wickedly weird. [David] elevates his own gloom and pessimism to high art.” The reviewer praised Cheryl Hines and Jeff Garlin too, but even more so Richard Lewis “who memorably sulks his way through a pair of early episodes.”

The show had about 5 million viewers (HBO would show an episode several times and tally the numbers up) — not at all bad. But the numbers were less important at HBO than a show that creates buzz and gets people to subscribe to the channel. Curb was getting just that sort of attention. Soon the New York Times was calling it a “cult favorite,” an industry darling, even a “cultural touchstone.” And then it wasn’t being called “cult” anymore, but simply a hit. The thrilled actors professed their own surprise. “It is surprising,” Cheryl Hines said. “Because sometimes with the subject matter, you would imagine people would find it offensive on a mass scale.”

Jeff Garlin also called it a “huge surprise. We thought that three people might watch it. And they all worked at HBO. . . . It is amazing.” He liked to recount a comment from a forum that the show put on during the William S. Paley Television Festival where a man stood up and said, “Hi, I live in my mother-in-law’s basement. I love the show.”

CHAPTER 9

The Real Larry:

Season Two

A lot of writing about Curb Your Enthusiasm has focussed on the question of how close the fictional Larry David is to the real one. Larry himself said, “I’m playing — yes — I am playing myself. I’m playing the part of myself that doesn’t censor my thoughts.” And “I aspire to be like that character. He’s honest. It’s the things I’m thinking but not saying.”

Of course it isn’t the job of a creator to analyze his own works, and Larry David has developed a salable attitude about the character that he can trot out whenever interviewed, a useful but simplified version of his fictional self. For the Larry of Curb is not as consistent as commentators like to pretend, or as free to speak his mind. He sometimes gets into trouble because of his brutal honesty, but often as not his predicaments are the result of lying. Larry frequently lies to get himself out of social obligations or difficulties with his loved ones, or he fabricates schemes that, as they did for his boyhood hero Sergeant Bilko, sometimes backfire. It can even be the occasional altruistic impulse that lands Larry in hot water, usually due to some misinterpretation or misunderstanding.

It’s also interesting to distinguish between talking and doing. Larry is without question a talker, someone for whom speech is often more important than action. It’s worth noting that Larry David always characterizes the fictional Larry as someone who says what he wants, not someone who does what he wants. Indeed, for a wealthy man of leisure, Larry’s movements are surprisingly circumscribed. It’s verbal freedom that he most values. One need only look at the story arc of season four, in which Larry tries to cash in on Cheryl’s promise that he can sleep with another woman one time before their tenth anniversary. Larry expresses the desire numerous times, talks and fusses over it, plans and schemes — and each time fails to consummate the act. Yet he is not really unsatisfied, for the fulfillment is already complete.

Larry David also understands that his fictional creation isn’t, as he is sometimes glibly labelled, an amoral animal. If someone is taking too many samples at an ice cream shop or falsely accusing a friend of having a small penis, Larry will feel compelled to stand up for the cause. Nor does he suffer from anhedonia, that is, the inability to enjoy oneself (a word that Woody Allen had wanted to use as the title for his film Annie Hall). As the real Larry has said, “Larry isn’t a misanthropist. He has a clear idea of right and wrong for himself. Any wavering from that bothers him. I think he likes people. He has fun. He enjoys life.”

It is this essential pleasure-taking, a love of humor, an ability to feel intense passion about trivial things, that helped to endear his character to audiences. Time magazine rightly noted how unusual it was for a television show to get viewers to identify with “an abrasive, Jewish, late-middle-age, married-but-childless . . . multimillionaire.” The fact that he held to core values — friendship, marriage, and fidelity — did not hurt. That he carried on despite repeated social humiliations was also somehow cheering.

Larry has also had some things to say about the trials he put his character through: “Positive is not funny. Nobody laughs at positive. ‘What a beautiful day it is!’ or ‘How many friends I have, how many people love me.’ There’s nothing funny about that at all. But there’s funny in the negative. When you speak in negative terms, the more negative it is, the funnier it is.” About his own humor, he said, “It’s just instinct. It can’t be learned. It’s your sensibilities. It’s what works for you. Where my line is, somebody else’s is ten yards farther. . . . Ultimately what you’re writing is for yourself. I’m looking at it through my prism and if it’s funny, I’m laughing.” What Larry also seemed to feel acutely was the fragility of social relationships — how a misspoken word or action can injure or damage. “Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious. One tiny miscommunication or mistake it could be all over.” Larry’s need to make comedy out of this would later take on a poignant tone when, in Curb’s sixth season, Cheryl leaves Larry — an act that had as its source Larry David’s own marriage breakup.

Season one began to air in October of 2000 and by January it had been renewed for a second season. After that, instead of the creators waiting to see if the network wanted to continue the show, the positions would be reversed; HBO would have to hope that Larry wanted to do another season. Like most situation comedies, the first season of Curb was made up of stand-alone episodes. There were sometimes references made to past events and the occasional thin thread connecting a plot in one episode to a plot in another, but for all intents and purposes they were separate. And there was certainly no overarching story. But for the second season, Larry decided to add a new über-layer of narrative, a story arc that ran the whole season. It would allow Larry to develop a story much farther, or at least play off it longer.

Although he wasn’t writing full scripts, Larry still found the writing daunting, onerous, and difficult. He would become moody, distracted, and look for excuses to get away from his desk. Creating the outlines, Larry discovered that the biggest challenge was to continue the story arc while making each half hour self-contained to provide the immediate satisfactions of a single episode. In the future he would create arcs that truly developed, but on this first try he found one that was more a constant reiteration or replaying of the same idea, each time with building comic effect. And to do it he reached back to his greatest success — Seinfeld. Or rather, its aftermath.

Larry had not been trying to get the audience to forget about Seinfeld. The show had often been referenced in the first season, most notably in episode six (“The Wire”) in which Larry pleaded with Julia Louis-Dreyfus to meet a fan of her “Elaine” character so that the man would agree to bury a backyard wire. The show put the audience in an interesting position; while the viewer wanted to identify with Julia and Larry, who were annoyed by this obsessive fan behavior, it was a little hard not to identify with the fan too. After all, wouldn’t most of us be thrilled to meet Julia Louis-Dreyfus? Perhaps it was having her on the show that gave Larry the idea of a story involving Jason Alexander, the actor who played George.

It was well known that the Seinfeld actors were having trouble with their subsequent careers. Rather than pretend that wasn’t so, what if Larry actually played that up? And so he came up with a story in which Cheryl is growing impatient with her husband doing nothing since the end of Seinfeld. So Larry, talking with Jason Alexander, muses about the idea of a sitcom about an actor who can’t get work because he’s too identified with an earlier role. They pitch the idea to a series of networks, each of whom would bite — at least until Larry, with perhaps unconscious intent, does something ridiculous to kill the deal.

Alexander was supposed to appear periodically over the season. But then his own sitcom, Bob Patterson, got picked up by ABC and he had to drop out. So Larry figured out a way to have Alexander and Larry part ways; they wouldn’t be able to agree at whose office they should take the next meeting. The two would become stubborn doppelgängers, making Jason Alexander’s insistence that in real life he’s nothing like George Costanza hilariously untrue. So Larry offers the role to Julia Louis-Dreyfus instead, continuing the story line as before. A necessity ended up improving the story arc. (Later, Larry David and Julia Louis-Dreyfus actually considered pitching the idea to a network. But in the end they decided, perhaps wisely, against it.)

Besides the story arc, the second season would have another difference. The marriage between Larry and Cheryl would often not seem as sweet. Larry is even more thoughtless, selfish, withdrawn, and ungiving. Cheryl looks and acts less happy and less amused, and she herself comes across as less kind and more materialistic, the flip-side to her lefty political work. There is a darker, less comfortable marriage on view.

Production began in February 2002. Five months before, the Twin Towers in New York had fallen, and the New York Times asked, “Will it still be funny to watch a man so enmeshed in his neurosis?” The reporter answered his own question: “What could be more necessary than a good laugh.” Larry would address the subject of terrorism, but not until the next season, and for his own comic purpose — to expose his character’s selfishness and cowardice.

As before, Jeff Garlin acted as Larry David’s comic conscience. Larry said, “Because I’m acting in so many of the scenes it’s hard for me to see. So I’m completely dependent on Jeff and his eyes. He’s invaluable on the set because he has a great barometer for what’s not funny or not ringing true. He’s also my extra guy. Extras can destroy a scene, and you have no idea they did it until you’re editing. One little gesture with the face, and the scene is destroyed.” Garlin kept a watchful eye on the walk-ons. He was also known on the set as being a generous supporter of the other actors. And for lifting spirits during tiring shoots. Cheryl Hines said, “If you just watch the show, you would think that he’s this very calm, low-energy guy. But in real life he’s so goofy, and funny, and full of energy.”

Again, some of Larry’s ideas came from life. But others were suggested by fantasies of the road not chosen. The idea for the first episode of season two came from someone asking Larry David what else he might have done in life. His answer: a car salesman. And so Larry, playing a sophisticated game of pretend, asks a car dealer for a job on the showroom floor. Larry David had not lost any confidence in the improvisational process. During the shooting of the episode, he asked the actors playing customers at the car dealership to surprise him with their questions.

Episode three brings in a Jewish theme for the first time, as Larry’s whistling Wagner offends a nearby Jewish man. Larry also whistled “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers, though he as yet had no inkling that Mel Brooks’s musical would play a major part in the story arc for season four. For episode six he drew on a real personal problem — chronic neck pain, which results in his going to an acupuncturist. Larry’s somewhat stiff appearance is due in part to a lack of flexibility in his neck.

In subsequent seasons, Larry would show himself to have some interest and rapport with kids, but in episode seven of season two he proved himself lacking in any parenting skill. Here he obeys the wishes of the young daughter of an ABC executive — cutting the hair of a favorite doll, only to have the girl burst into tears. Larry got the idea while looking at his own daughter’s doll and thinking that it could use a haircut. He didn’t actually cut the doll’s hair, but it was imagining the outcome of doing so that gave him his story.

It was on Seinfeld that Larry first wrote a scene in which writers are pitching a sitcom idea to network executives. Over the course of the Curb Your Enthusiasm second season, Larry David and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have to make three pitches — to HBO, ABC, and CBS. Louis-Dreyfus spoke of how anxious the scenes made her feel, as if she really were pitching a series. It is the character of Cheryl who urges Larry to find some work for himself, but each time Larry kills the deal with the network he shows that, in truth, he has no desire to be involved in a television show again — proving once more that the real and the fictional Larrys are hardly identical.

The show brought unexpected success to its regulars. Cheryl Hines was living in a ranch-style house with a pool and a gym. She and her husband liked to have poker nights at home with people like their friend the actor and SNL veteran Kevin Nealon (which would later spawn an episode of Curb). Hines began getting calls with acting-job offers for which she wasn’t being asked to audition. Jeff Garlin got offers. He even took a meeting with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio who were working on The Aviator, a big, serious film about Howard Hughes. Going in, Garlin knew he wasn’t right for the part but he was flattered that they knew and liked his work. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that Scorsese would have a couple of very amusing cameo appearances in season three of Curb.)

As for Susie Essman, she found fans of the show approaching her and politely asking if she might swear at them. “Go fuck yourself, you fat fuck,” Essman said to one admirer who responded with a grateful “Thank you.” She was even asked to make phone calls for charity, abusing people for $2,500 toward a good cause. Essman’s stand-up career took off. She said, “For years you’d get onstage but the audience is not your audience. It’s not people who are there to see you. Now I draw my own audience — it is just a delight. I don’t have to win these people over. They get me. So I can totally let rip.”

CHAPTER 10

That Championship Season:

Season Three

“Bespectacled, bald, and basset-eared, a long-limbed fifty-four-year-old fellow draped in untucked corduroy” is how Esquire described Larry David during the third season. The New York Times called him “praying mantis tall, and wrathful.” They were only two of many articles about Larry and the show, for in its third season the viewership would double to an average of 5 million viewers. The accolades would follow. Described by a reporter as a comic genius, Larry replied, “Are you out of your mind? What does it even mean?” It was noted that in real life he was married and a father, and that friends called him “content” and “kindly.” There was a big difference between the real Larry David and his fictional counterpart.

In season one, Larry had partly relied on some of the tricks that he’d picked up writing Seinfeld. In season two, he’d extended his reach, but the story arc, though amusing, was really a series of repetitions rather than further developments. But in season three, Larry would hit his stride. He knew his show better than he had before, success had given him confidence, and confidence made him bolder and more ambitious. The outlines he prepared were unified rather than scattered. They were less monochromatic in their feeling. Sometimes the character of Larry would be down, sometimes humiliated or angry. But at other times he would be flying high, even giddy with pleasure. Almost every episode was hilarious and felt like an instant classic. The stand-alone episode plots were highly inventive. The story arc actually moved forward and deepened. And the season would end on a delightfully high note.

On paper the arc actually sounded less promising than in the previous season. Larry would invest in a restaurant. The audience would see it all the way from its conception, through the interior decoration, to the opening night. Larry would prove himself more a handicap than a help to the project, interfering with everything from waiters’ uniforms to the selection of chef and the items on the menu. It would look as if he was dooming the restaurant even before it opened, only to turn it around in a moment of delicious triumph.

But the show wasn’t only about the restaurant. A theme that would begin to appear over and over was now introduced: death. It would be there in the first episode in which Larry admires the shirt worn by the deceased husband of Cheryl’s friend in a photograph. And it would enter Larry’s own life in the death of his mother. Although the audience never saw her (and wouldn’t until the heaven scene in the last episode of season four), they would witness her genuinely grieving son — caught, nevertheless, in remarkably telling comic situations.

Emboldened by two good seasons, Larry also felt freer to be more politically incorrect and even to flaunt his disregard for conventional boundaries that hemmed in humor. Religion became a significant target, whether it be the Christian Scientist who refuses to take medication in episode two, the excessively strict religious laws that alter the burial place of Larry’s mother in episode six, or the bizarre iconography of Christianity in episode nine. This latter one came from an idea planted by Cheryl Hines. While home in Florida for Christmas one year she phoned Larry. She told him that her family had made a nativity scene out of cookies they had baked. “If you were here, of course you’d eat baby Jesus, and my family would be so mad at me.” Larry immediately saw the comic possibilities and “Mary, Joseph and Larry” was born.

The other territory that Larry increasingly encroached on was the subject of sex. This season it was oral sex and, for Larry, its aftermath — a pubic hair from Cheryl stuck in his throat. The awful sound he makes, trying to get it out, is enough to send some viewers running from the television. Next to masturbation, oral sex is the most recurring topic in this particular area of human behavior.

Casting had to be done before shooting. The most important bit of casting for the season was Nat David, Larry’s father, who would be an occasional returning character. Larry had the idea of using an old comedian in the role. Shecky Greene came in for an audition, and after him Shelley Berman, both of whom were born in 1926. After Berman left, Larry ran down the hall to catch up with him. “Will you lose the rug?” Larry asked, referring to Berman’s toupee. He agreed and got the part.

Shelley Berman had been in the business a long time. After his discharge from the army, he had studied acting in Chicago and joined the Compass Players, the precursor to Second City. He wrote jokes for Steve Allen (Johnny Carson’s predecessor), performed in clubs, made it to television, and was the first comic to win a Grammy Award for a recording. In 1963 a camera followed Berman around for an NBC special, much like the comedy specials that HBO would later air. His career had known its downs, but in recent years, although in his eighties, he had found himself in demand again. He even had an occasional role as a judge on Boston Legal. Larry would prove right in his casting choice. Berman would prove himself a nimble improviser and a wonderfully subtle comic, all the while convincing the audience that Larry really was his boy.

Larry would add another member to his family. Cousin Andy, a New Yorker, would arrive for Larry’s mother’s funeral and would stick around for some time. Along with Nat David, Andy would reinforce the viewer’s sense of Larry’s roots, for both characters would have a Jewish way of speaking and of seeing the world. For Andy, Larry again chose well, bringing in Richard Kind, an actor who could make a viewer laugh just by his appearance, with his enormous mouth, wide face, and decidedly unathletic body. He would (except when bedding a Playboy bunny) be the voice of conventional middle-class Jewish America. A veteran of Mad About You and Spin City, as well as a lot of theater experience (including The Producers), Richard Kind could match Larry for the camera’s attention.

The other fine casting choice was Chris Williams as the wealthy rapper Krazee-Eyez Killa in episode eight. Williams himself was not a street kid, but a graduate of Georgetown. But he was brilliantly funny as the rapper engaged to Wanda who tells Larry that he loves “the pussy.” It was director Robert B. Weide’s idea that Krazee-Eyez should try out some new lyrics on Larry; he let Williams come up with them before the shoot and didn’t tell Larry what to expect. Williams was a good example of the value of the improvisational process, not just for his excellent scenes with Larry but also for bringing a rapper’s voice — which Larry himself could never have written — to the part.

The season would also be notable for its parade of guest stars. Michael York, Joan Rivers, and Martin Scorsese made appearances, and episode number five (“The Terrorist Attack”) alone had Alanis Morissette, Paul Reiser, and Martin Short. Each one of them contributed to the season’s sparkle.

The season began to air and the critics ate it up. “The funniest thing on television” declared Scott Raab in Esquire. “As daringly funny as Seinfeld at its best,” said Time. “Even more of a tour de force than Seinfeld,” insisted the New York Times. The more thoughtful New Yorker writer Virginia Heffernan saw the differences rather than the similarities with the earlier show. “It’s not Seinfeld. It’s angrier, grimmer, more macabre. Watch the show too often and you might note a downturn in your mood or your sense of virtue. But comedy makes no room for qualms, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is, with discomforting frequency, hilarious.” Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times praised the show via his shrewd observations: “[Larry] is like a small child who will not stop asking questions everyone else has decided it is pointless to answer. But as a man of principle, even of misguided principle, he can be regarded . . . as heroic. . . . And he is thoroughly, almost helplessly honest, except when he’s afraid of being hit.”

Ratings went up (helped by a lead-in from The Sopranos), showing audience appreciation, and award nominations went up too, showing industry recognition. Larry David’s peers saw the ground he was breaking in the sitcom form and bestowed ten Emmy nominations on the show, up from two the previous year (and none in its first season). Larry David and Cheryl Hines were nominated for acting, four directors got the nod, and the series as a whole was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series. Larry David phoned up Cheryl Hines to congratulate her, saying in his wry fashion, “I’m really happy for you because I know you like this sort of thing.” And didn’t Larry like it too? she wanted to know. “Well, it’s pretty much a huge inconvenience, don’t you think?” he asked.

Robert B. Weide won for directing the “Krazee-Eyez Killa” episode. At the Golden Globes Larry was nominated again as was the show for Best Television Series — Musical or Comedy, which it won. “It’s a sad day for the Golden Globes,” Larry said, happily accepting the award. “I’d like to thank my parents, who always taught me that when you have the opportunity to annoy someone, you should do so. Little did they know that one day I’d be doing it on such a massive scale.”

Not all the people closest to Larry were happy, at least not all the time. His real father found the season upsetting. The fictional Larry’s mother died at a time when his real mother was in a fragile and declining state of health. As for wife Laurie, she found the kissing scenes with Cheryl hard to watch and the constant subject of sex and its humiliations uncomfortable. She suggested that he was going too far, but Larry didn’t listen to her. Of course, he didn’t have to go to school to pick up the kids and hear other parents clearing their throats, as if they too had a stuck pubic hair.

CHAPTER 11

Larry David, Auteur:

Seasons Four and Five

After the third season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David took a hiatus, skipping an entire year. Such breaks were known, if not common, on HBO dramas such as The Sopranos, but were unheard of on the supposedly less demanding sitcoms. But for Larry it was never a matter of cranking out shows or worrying about losing an audience that had just started to grow. Every year he would think hard about whether he had another good season in him. And this time he needed some time off. For the 2004 season, starting in January, he had found a story arc that was far more unlikely, surprising, and ambitious than any he had written yet.

Visiting New York, Larry went to see the Broadway musical The Producers. Based on his own 1968 movie, Mel Brooks had created a musical version of the comedy about a corrupt Broadway impresario and his mousey accountant protégé. Originally starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, it was a smash hit, winning twelve Tony Awards and breaking box office records. Touring productions brought it to other major American cities and there were productions in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries.

Mel Brooks was one of Larry’s heroes. While he watched, he inwardly mused about the fictional Larry being asked by Mel Brooks to take on the role of Max Bialystock on Broadway. Unlikely though it was with no singing or dancing experience, Larry would agree, only to have to actually learn the part. He would need someone in the other leading role, Leo Bloom, to rehearse with — which presented an interesting guest actor possibility. The final episode would take Larry back to New York, where he had shot the Martin Scorsese scene in season three. The whole idea was ripe with comic opportunities.

Larry sat down and wrote the first three outlines. Only then did he approach Mel Brooks to see if he would agree to be on the show and to let Larry take to the stage of the St. James Theater along with the real cast to film the final episode. Brooks liked the idea but it wasn’t all up to him. He had to get the theater unions to go along with it. Fortunately, everyone came onboard, including two guest stars — Ben Stiller and David Schwimmer.

And then Larry went to see the show again, a touring production in Portland. He watched the actor singing and dancing up a storm, the big production numbers, and he thought: What have I gotten myself into? The shooting began. The show’s assistant choreographer, James Hadley, came to Larry’s house and coached him in the basement. Not surprisingly, Larry didn’t pick up the steps easily. He thought about writing himself out of the ending but couldn’t think of a way. He’d created the challenge and would have to go through with it.

What is never mentioned about this season is that it has, in fact, two story arcs, a technique that Larry would continue in seasons after. The second arc involves the Davids’ tenth anniversary and Cheryl’s engagement promise that if they made it to their tenth Larry would have permission to have sex with another woman one time. Larry trying to make good on the promise by bedding a series of women — a dental hygienist, a sexy Hasidic dry cleaner, an oral sex teacher, an actress in the show — provides several of the best subplots of the season.

Of course each episode also has to stand on its own. Some of the early episodes revolve around Ben Stiller who, the story goes, has been cast to perform in The Producers opposite Larry, as the milquetoast accountant Leopold Bloom who blossoms under Max’s influence. (Stiller’s father, of course, had memorably played George’s father on Seinfeld.) When Stiller finally quits The Producers, he is replaced by David Schwimmer (Friends) who does not get along with Larry any better. There is also some further boundary-stretching in the territory of political incorrectness; it seems like Larry wants to deliberately challenge viewers and critics both. In episode three, “The Blind Date,” he not only brings back Michael, a blind character from the previous season, but breaks up his relationship by telling him that his girlfriend really isn’t beautiful. An episode later, he fixes Michael up with a Muslim woman. Perhaps even riskier is staging a confrontation between an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor and a young man who had been on the Survivor television show, each believing that his ordeal was worse (season four, episode nine).

The season is also notable for introducing a new semi-regular character, Marty Funkhouser. Although his part in any episode isn’t large, Bob Einstein — best known for his Super Dave character, who had his own show and was a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman — plays Marty Funkhouser in his trademark dour and deadpan style so that his presence alone is funny in a way that is very difficult to describe.

One scene illustrates how Larry would rethink during the shooting process. In season four episode seven, Richard Lewis worries that he will not be well endowed enough to please the black woman he is going out with. In one scene he and Larry talked about it, giving some needed exposition, but there was nothing funny in it. So Larry decided to reshoot it in a hotel washroom with the two men at urinals. And he added retired NBA star Muggsy Bogues, the shortest player ever in the league (but, it turns out, still with a large penis). Running about a minute and a half, the scene took five hours to shoot.

Near the end of the season’s shoot Cheryl Hines found out that she was pregnant. Struggling with nausea, she decided to keep the news to herself since she was only in the first trimester. Feeling ill one day during the last episode’s shoot, she went into the show’s single trailer to lie down. Already inside were Jerry Seinfeld (who was making a brief, nonspeaking appearance in the audience during opening night of The Producers), Mel Brooks, Larry David, and Jeff Garlin. Instead of resting she happily listened to Brooks talk about how he met his wife Anne Bancroft. David Schwimmer came in and then Anne Bancroft herself. Hines thought she had gone to heaven. (Bancroft, who would look frail in her brief appearance in the season’s final episode, was making her last onscreen performance in a great career. She would succumb to uterine cancer in June 2006. On a happier note, Hines’s daughter was born in March 2004.)

That last episode, in which Larry actually had to sing and dance with the chorus of the show, in full costume and on the stage of the Broadway Theater, was the most challenging shoot he’d ever known. It also turned out to be the most memorable for him. In the finished episode he shows surprising confidence and although he doesn’t have the talent of a real Broadway star, it is delightful to see the character that the audience knows so well actually pull it off.

This was the first season to add a new opening credit. Previously there had been no writing credit at all. Now Story by Larry David appeared on the screen. It was an attempt at modesty more than anything else. Larry made the outlines, but it was the actors who “wrote” their own lines. The credit made clear all that Larry felt he could take credit for.

Meanwhile, the other actors’ careers continued to thrive with the help of the attention from the show. Cheryl Hines did a guest spot on an improv TV show that parodied cop dramas, Reno 911!, and was asked to provide the voice for the character of Kate in a DreamWorks animated series about a family of white lions called Father of the Pride. She also landed roles alongside Woody Harrelson and David Cross in The Grand (2007), and Luke Wilson in Henry Poole Is Here (2008). Jeff Garlin got to co-star in an Eddie Murphy film, Daddy Day Care (2003). The critics didn’t like it, but it performed well at the box office. Even Larry did a little moonlighting. He made a guest appearance in the first season of HBO’s Entourage where he got to be angry at Jeremy Piven.

Larry David has said, “I don’t consciously try to make people squirm. I’m never aware of making people uncomfortable, honest-to-God. I had no idea that I could have that effect on people.”

But he did. People were either devoted fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm and believed it was the only truly funny comedy on television, or else they found it unwatchable. The latter type found the embarrassing social situations, the references to the problems of male and female genitalia, along with the casual treatment of death, the Holocaust, the mentally handicapped unbearable to watch — all of it made them flee from their televisions. Exactly what the fans loved.

Following another eighteen months off, Larry came back with a fifth season. After the previous season’s ambitious story, he returned to a more traditional series of episodes that were largely independent. Yes, there were two story arcs, but they were touched on less frequently.

The first is Richard Lewis’s need for a kidney transplant and, more to the point, a donor to provide one. Larry and Jeff both turn out to be matches but Susie forbids Jeff from risking his life, which leaves a reluctant Larry. After scheming to acquire a kidney from Richard’s cousin Louis Lewis and then from the donor list, Larry finally gives in and donates his own to Richard. But not until he finds his Christian spirit. For in the other arc, Larry comes to believe that he is adopted. He hires a private investigator, tracks down the Cones in Arizona, and becomes liberated from the burden of his Jewishness and the legacy of the Davids. Turning himself into a good, fanny-pack-and-sun-hat-wearing, beer-swigging, car-fixing Christian, he realizes that he has to do the right thing by his friend Richard.

Larry David does like a big season closer. The last episode has Larry going under the knife and dying from the subsequent complications. Whereas in previous seasons the ending had Larry opening a restaurant and Larry on Broadway, this one has Larry in Heaven — with Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen as his angelic guides. It’s the culmination of a season that allows Larry David, somewhat in the manner of Woody Allen, to play with existential questions of identity and meaning, life and death, but always for the purpose of a laugh.

Individual episodes have some exciting, highly irreverent stories. “The Christ Nail” (season five, episode three) has Larry using a nail from Mel Gibson’s movie Passion of the Christ to hang a mezuzah on the door of his house before his father’s arrival. In “The Seder” (season five, episode seven) Larry invites a convicted sex offender, who is Jewish, to the family seder. Both, of course, playfully and irreverently deal with the themes of identity, faith, and practice. And like the question of adoption, they are spurred by the presence of Nat David.

“I’ve seen a lot of comedians who, when the camera isn’t rolling, sit in the corner and sulk,” Cheryl Hines said about the shooting. “But Larry is not that person. We sit around and talk and have a great time. Larry is a bit of a perfectionist and puts a lot of pressure on himself. Now that the show’s been airing and has been critically acclaimed, he does feel a great pressure to keep doing outstanding shows.”

And acclaimed it was. In fact, a number of critics — The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Slate — felt that the previous season’s Broadway story had been a mistake, taking Larry too far out of his home territory. They showered praise on this season. It received more award nominations too, including eight for the Emmys (although it didn’t win any).

Larry took the 2006–2007 season off, and while HBO couldn’t have been pleased by another stride-breaking hiatus, they didn’t believe in bullying their artists. For one cast member, at least, it was a valuable time off: Jeff Garlin was busy with two different projects. The first was his long-in-the-making indie film, the quirkily named I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. After spending several years writing the script, he’d taken it around town, only to find it nearly impossible to raise the money. His projected budget was half a million dollars, tiny by Hollywood standards. Even the smaller studios who financed independent films took a pass. Garlin believed that the low budget was what made them wary — that and he being the only name behind it. “They’re not going to tell me they don’t believe in me as a lead actor,” Garlin said. Most of the time the studios never actually said no; they just didn’t answer. That was how Hollywood worked. Nobody wanted to make an enemy.

Twice he managed to get financing and twice the money vanished. But Garlin didn’t give up. “I have a sense of resiliency. They knock me down, I just get back up. I don’t get emotional.” When it came through a third time, he began shooting. Writing, acting, directing — at last he was making his own film like his hero, Woody Allen. Garlin had a stand-up star (if not a movie star) to play opposite him, the foul-mouthed comic Sarah Silverman, making herself adorable. Some of the other actors had been in Curb, including the woman who played his mother, Mina Kolb, as well as the former SNL player Tim Kazurinsky and the director of Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Paul Mazursky. Also in Garlin’s movie was Dan Castellaneta, an actor of small parts in film but whose voice is known to millions as Homer Simpson. Because Garlin kept running out of funds he had to spread his meager eighteen days of shooting time over two years.

The film premiered in April 2006 at the Tribeca Film Festival. Garlin got there late, wearing sunglasses, as if — wrote the New York Times — he was going to his own execution. But the three showings sold out and a fourth was added. Afterward he was actually happy. “It’s an unusual feeling,” he said. He should have been, for I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is a charming, funny, sweet little movie. That it is very personal to Garlin (his character has an eating problem) is clear. Its rambling nature (some scenes were semi-improvised), the way characters talk about small things, and even the lively accordion music is a little Larry David–like but it’s more a result of shared sensibility than borrowing. When the movie was released the following year the reviewers liked it. “Beautiful in its own way,” declared the Boston Globe. “A big-time minor movie,” pronounced Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “May be one of the wisest studies of urban loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty” praised the Village Voice. Other reviewers thought it too slight or shambling, but Garlin’s warmth as a person translated to the screen.

While Garlin was very happy to have his Curb gig, which had raised his profile immeasurably, he wanted to create his own material. Along with finishing and releasing the movie he was busy creating a pilot television show. HBO had passed on his pitch, but TBS had given him the green light. He would play the star of a variety show who was always getting into fixes in his real life — a show that sounds a little like Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show or the episodes of Seinfeld where Jerry and George were creating a show based on themselves. The pilot co-starred Phil Rosenthal from Everybody Loves Raymond and also made use of Bob Einstein (Marty Funkhouser in Curb), Jeff’s wife Marla Garlin (who was a casting director and only rarely worked as an actress), and the comedian Robert Baxt. Later Garlin would say that the pilot suffered from too much rewriting and rethinking, and from the conflict between his own looser style of comedy and the tighter, more controlled style of Rosenthal. TBS took a pass on making it into a series.

Even so, Garlin was doing very well indeed. He was getting more film roles (the director Brett Ratner asked him to do anything he wanted in a scene for his Pierce Brosnan vehicle, After the Sunset, to make it funnier), guest starred in seven episodes of Arrested Development (an innovative and smart show that shared other actors with Curb), and was a voice in the animated hit WALL.E.

CHAPTER 12

Television Is Funny, Life Is Not

Seasons Six and Seven

It was Woody Allen, one of Larry David’s heroes, who said that you try to get your art perfect because it’s impossible to do in life. Never would this be more true for Larry than in the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which he would somehow spin comic gold out of the rags of his own real experience. For Larry and Laurie David’s marriage was breaking up. And so, therefore, would Larry and Cheryl’s.

The official announcement was made in June 2007 that Larry and Laurie had separated amicably after fourteen years. They would share custody of their two daughters. Larry, of course, had to make everything a joke and so he told people that when he left the house to his environmental-activist wife, he first turned all the lights on. Larry took up residence in his friends Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen’s guest house. “We could not get rid of him,” Ted said afterward. “We used to call him Larry the Lodger.”

Perhaps it was because of the breakup that Larry wanted to do something special for his two daughters — as only a celebrity can. They were huge fans of Hannah Montana and so he wrangled a guest spot on the show, along with the girls. He played himself, waiting at a restaurant with the girls and unable to get a table — a very Larry situation.

But a viewer knowing nothing of Larry David’s personal life would simply think that he was pursuing comic possibilities in Curb’s sixth season story arc about the separation of Larry and Cheryl. In the classic sitcom form, a long-suffering wife puts up with a ridiculous, scheming, naughty but fundamentally innocent husband. No matter how many times he screws up, she always forgives him in the end — because in the parallel universe of television, happy endings are guaranteed. But not on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In real life husbands and wives are not all-forgiving. A marriage, unlike the relationship between a parent and a child, is based on conditional love. It must be earned. And if Larry David is good at anything, it’s seeing the truth in ordinary human behavior behind the facade and turning it into comedy — which means that Cheryl is going to come to the point where she has simply had enough of Larry. But can you really play a marriage breakup for laughs? As it turns out, yes. At least mostly.

A change in the sixth season was that Larry decided he wanted some help in writing his outlines. The show had been on for long enough that he was ready for some collaboration. Reaching back, he asked three Seinfeld cohorts to join the show as executive producers — Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel. Their job would be to help Larry work out the various story lines to create the right balance or, as they liked to call it, “geometry.” Berg, Schaffer, and Mandel would also direct.

Again in this season, Larry employs a second story arc as well, one that in fact takes up more screen time than the second arc usually does. He got the idea from the terrible effect of Hurricane Katrina and its disruption of the lives of so many people. “I needed to exploit their tragedy in any way that I could,” he said. And so he imagined what would happen if Cheryl wanted to bring in a family of African-Americans made temporarily homeless by a natural disaster. It would shake up the David household and give Larry a new set of characters to play off, characters who were very different from a white middle-class New York Jew.

Larry David had been using black characters with big personalities in the show for some time. Not just Wanda Sykes, who was a regular as Cheryl’s friend, but also Chris Williams as Krazee-Eyez Killa and, in episode six of the previous year, Kym E. Whitley as a large prostitute named Monema. In fact, most of the black characters fell into certain categories (a nicer word than stereotypes), spoke a street vernacular, and had jobs legal or otherwise that demanded no education. The only notably educated black character has been a doctor in episode nine of the first season whom Larry insulted by implying he got into med school through affirmative action. Of course the show relied on other types as well — gays, Asians, Hispanics — sometimes for laughs, sometimes as objects of Larry’s ignorance. But the black characters seemed different. They were juicy parts for actors — big, noisy, funny, and allowed for a lot of mugging. Larry David seemed genuinely fond of their vivacity. He almost romanticized them.

And now he would bring a whole family of noisy, emotional, sassy-talking African-Americans into Larry the character’s house: a young, attractive mother, her two kids, her brother, and her aunt. For the mother, Loretta Black, he cast the film and television actress Vivica A. Fox and for the equally important role of the brother, Leon Black, J. B. Smoove, a writer for Saturday Night Live, performer, and comedian who had once been a hip hop dancer. Of all the Black family, his character was the most expressive as he became Larry’s friend and confidant and Smoove played him, as he said, “like he’s got controlled Tourette’s.”

In the sixth season, Cheryl leaves Larry after a stormy plane trip during which she thinks her life might end. She begins to see the man seated next to her and Larry suffers greatly at the loss of her, although it does not prevent him from starting to date (Lucy Lawless of Xena: Warrior Princess fame, no less). But Larry schemes to get Cheryl back, going so far as to influence her therapist. In the highly satisfying closing episode he takes Loretta to the Garlin bat mitzvah and realizes he has fallen for her. The ending montage of Larry and the Blacks living like a regular family is priceless.

“This isn’t Seinfeld,” wrote Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times at the start of the season. “This isn’t a show about nothing. It’s a show about everything. Or rather everything in the rarefied world of extremely successful television show creators.” However, she also noted what some other critics were saying — that after so many seasons, “David is having to reach a bit.” The show seemed strained at times. Had it come to its natural end?

While shooting, Larry had thought that the sixth season might be the last. The only problem was that he had an idea for the seventh season, an idea that would bring the two great creations of his life together, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

By now it wasn’t just newspaper reviewers and television viewers who had become aware of Curb. Intellectuals, academics, and public commentators had too. It was the portrayal of Jews, gentiles, and their differences that seemed to light a fire under them. An academic named Evan Cooper presented his paper “We’re Not Men: Representations of Jewish and Gentile Men on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm” to the American Sociological Association. The paper examined the way both shows “feminized” Jewish men. A couple of Jewish intellectuals, Michael Green and Rosalin Krieger, also weighed in. Green, writing in the Jewish daily The Forward, asserted, “By the end of the day, Larry David turns out to be quite the traditionalist.” He argued that the show recreated “the long-dead world of the shtetl,” the old Eastern European villages where Jews lived before the war, in Westside Los Angeles. There, everyone knew everyone else and was connected by blood or by work. Larry’s bickering over “minutiae” was even seen as a kind of “rabbinic discourse” similar to expounding on the intricacies of the Talmud. Krieger’s interest was in Larry David’s exploration of Jewish ambivalence toward Christians.

In England, Holly A. Pearse (writing in the cultural journal Jewish Quarterly) claimed that “Larry David raises core questions of what it means to be Jewish in contemporary America.” She saw Larry’s marriage to a gentile as a paradigm of Jewish/ gentile misunderstandings and the show as a sign that “rumors of the Jewish cultural assimilation in America may be greatly exaggerated.” But the best, or worst, was yet to come. The seventh season would give commentators plenty to froth about.

In the meantime, the cast members of Curb were finding that their popularity was opening a lot of doors for them. Simon and Schuster published Susie Essman’s What Would Susie Say?, a quasi-memoir/advice book with plenty of comedy thrown in. Larry David and Richard Lewis both blurbed the back cover. Cheryl Hines got a supporting comic role in the Katherine Heigl/Gerard Butler romantic comedy The Ugly Truth (2009). There wasn’t much fresh about the film but Hines did a good job in the role of a newscaster in a sexually frustrating marriage. Her best line — “No, Larry, that would be my untouched vagina” — sounded as if it came straight out of Curb. Even more important for Hines was her directorial debut. She helmed the feature film Serious Moonlight (2009) with Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton, using a script by the filmmaker Adrienne Shelley who had been murdered. Hines had acted in Shelley’s 2007 film, Waitress. Perhaps it was Hines who gave Larry David the idea of giving Meg Ryan a guest spot in the seventh season of Curb.

As for Larry himself, a rare acting opportunity, and with one of his heroes, came his way. He described how he was approached: “First, I was just asked if I was interested in being in a Woody Allen movie, if I was available. And I said sure. I thought it was going to be, like, two or three days. You know, you come in and you do it, and then you leave. And then the next day I get a script with a cover letter from him. I opened the script and there I see Boris, the character, on page one. And then I got to page 50 and he’s on page 50. And then I go to the end and he’s got a speech at the end. I go, oh my God, what is this? So I called him up on the phone. I said, you know, are you nuts? I don’t think I can do this. There’s so much material to memorize, I hadn’t really done anything like this before. You know, on the show I improvise; I make up my own stuff. It was a big challenge for me. I don’t care for challenges . . . but he talked me off the ledge.”

The script was called Whatever Works and Allen had written it in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. Allen had starred opposite Mostel in a 1976 movie about blacklisting called The Front. When Mostel died in 1977, Allen shelved the script. Allen is a prolific filmmaker, producing a new film every year, and this was not the first time he had dusted off an old script. Allen began his career as a teenager, writing and selling jokes, became a successful stand-up comic, and graduated to writing and starring in his own comedies. But he is a lover of serious film and literature and, mixing comedy with human drama, created his masterpieces — Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and a long list of other films. But as his career went on the critics and public both began to dismiss his later films as a pale imitation of his better work. In recent years, however, he has made something of a minor comeback, getting better reviews and drawing somewhat larger audiences for films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), which won an Oscar for Penélope Cruz’s performance.

Allen had always been able to get fine actors to be in his movies; just to be in a Woody Allen picture was an honor. And the allure was great for Larry David too, who had played small roles in Allen movies early on his career and never would have expected to be made the star. But he wasn’t really an actor and had never done anything so demanding. The character of Boris, a world-class physicist, failed suicide, and philosophic complainer dominated the script from beginning to end. He even had a young love interest, to be played by Evan Rachel Wood. Although he accepted the role, Larry worried particularly about the emotionally dramatic moments and the long monologues. He told Woody Allen that casting him was “potentially destroying” to the film.

Woody Allen himself wasn’t worried. He said, “[Larry David is] believable to me as an intellectual, as a guy who would know physics, who was cultivated, who’d be sardonic and opinionated and really very taken with himself. And . . . insecure underneath.”

In the end, Larry didn’t find the work beyond his capabilities. The shooting took place in New York. He was supposed to have a limp and he didn’t practice it until on the set. As a director, Allen pretty much left his actors alone. He already had the blocking worked out and simply had to show Larry where to stand or move. They went over the lines a couple of times and began shooting. Only when he didn’t like something Larry was doing would Allen make a suggestion. “It was really a breeze,” Larry reported. “He’s very easy. He gives you a lot of freedom to do anything you want. If you’re not comfortable with some of the words, he lets you change them.” Larry even tried to improvise, but when he found that the other actors couldn’t react to an unexpected line, he gave up and stuck to the script.

The character that Larry inhabited was a step, but a small one, from his persona on Curb — an intellectually pretentious, cynical man who feels superior to those around him and who, through a decidedly unintellectual and not very bright young woman, comes to learn some simple lessons about enjoying life. Larry had no problem with the comedy, but that he could play the drama as well surprised the critics. For the most part they liked what they saw. When Whatever Works was released in 2009, Time’s Richard Corliss called it Woody Allen’s “freshest film in ages” and gave credit to Larry for his “robust manliness” when he might have played the role like a whiner. Roger Ebert, who had so disliked Sour Grapes, wrote that Larry played Boris with “perfect pitch.” The Philadelphia Enquirer called the combination of Woody Allen and Larry David a “match made in misanthrope heaven.”

Not everyone was taken by the film, or Larry’s performance, however. “[Larry David] has no equipment for suggesting a conflicted inner life,” wrote David Edelstein, the critic for New York. Reviews like that likely didn’t bother Larry David. He probably would have agreed. Of his final big monologue in the movie he said, “It is a beautiful speech, quite moving. If someone else had delivered it, you might have been moved to tears, actually.”

The story of Larry and Cheryl didn’t end with the last episode of the sixth season. Indeed, it can be said that the story for season seven is really a continuation — that seasons six and seven have one big story arc in the marriage crisis.

At least a couple of years before, Larry had an idea of putting a scene from Seinfeld into Curb, possibly in flashback. He asked Jerry Seinfeld back then if he would come on the show, but in the end Larry left the idea on the back burner. He just wasn’t quite sure how to do it. But the answers became clear as he began to sketch out the seventh season. For years people had asked him if Seinfeld would ever have a reunion show and he had always said no. Reunions were always “lame,” a pathetic echo of their earlier selves. The actors, looking older, always seemed somehow ridiculous. But what about a mock reunion, something like the mock documentary that began Curb in the first place? What if Larry thought that giving Cheryl an acting role in a Seinfeld reunion show would help to win her back?

Bringing on the cast members of the old show, writing scenes for the supposed reunion, even finding and shooting on the old sets, was an exciting but also daunting idea. It was a big help to Larry that he had three former Seinfeld producers now helping him with the story lines — Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel. He talked it through with them and then, feeling confident, approached Jerry Seinfeld who was living in New York with his wife Jessica and three kids. Seinfeld had written and acted the starring voice in the 2007 animated kid’s film Bee Movie, which had received mixed reviews but had made a hefty profit, and had continued with the occasional stand-up appearance and television ads outside of the U.S. Generally though, he was keeping a low profile. “The idea of working with Larry was just too overwhelmingly appealing to me,” Seinfeld said. “And Curb is such a great show. There was a little part of me that said, ‘Do we really want to tamper?’ But to hell with that. How much damage can you really do?”

Once Seinfeld gave the okay, Larry approached the other actors, just as he would on Curb. (He was careful to keep the order in which he approached them a secret.) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the busiest of them, was starring in The New Adventures of Old Christine. She agreed, although privately she was doubtful that it would really happen.

Jason Alexander had been making guest appearances, doing television ads, some directing, and making use of his talents as a singer and a magician but hadn’t been noticed by the public much. The Jason that Larry was imagining for the Curb Your Enthusiasm season, a continuation of his earlier appearances, was competitive, pretentious, even mean-spirited — not like the real Jason Alexander. “I became a funnier and richer human being because of [Larry’s] genius,” he said. “So I just said, I’m in Larry’s hands.”

Michael Richards had been in semi-retirement since the notorious 2006 incident at the Laugh Factory, a comedy club in West Hollywood, when he had become enraged at some hecklers and had used the word “nigger.” (The incident may have been the inspiration for the Curb Your Enthusiasm season seven episode “The N Word.”) Agreeing to do the show, Richards told a reporter that he had done a lot of “deep work” on himself since the incident. “It’s like open heart surgery.”

The Seinfeld reunion would have a major part to play in four episodes, but that left six episodes needing stories. In the first two, Larry would manage to rid himself of Loretta, even though she would suffer from (curable) cancer. Although Larry David has said that he doesn’t choose subjects to shock or upset people, it’s hard to believe he didn’t quite deliberately choose one of the most visible causes of our time. As always, Larry David would not belittle the seriousness of the illness itself but Larry the character’s reaction to it and, to a lesser degree, the victim Loretta’s use of it. Once she was gone, he would be free to win back Cheryl, but that wouldn’t stop him from dating a couple of other women. Most other stories were stand-alones that might have fit comfortably into any previous season, dealing with everything from the mentally unbalanced (“Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister,” season seven, episode one) to the dangers of fellatio in moving cars (“Vehicular Fellatio,” season seven, episode two).

But Larry David’s greatest attention would be on the four reunion episodes. In episode three, Larry would approach Jerry, Julia, Jason, and Michael about doing the show. In episode six, Larry and Jerry would take up residence in an office to collaborate on the script. Episodes nine and ten would be almost completely devoted to the reunion, so much so that Jerry would later say they ought to be included in the Seinfeld DVD set. The first would show the actors doing a read-through of the script and the final episode would show the rehearsals and the airing of the show.

Shooting the episodes proved to be an emotionally moving experience for Larry and the actors. The Seinfeld scenes were shot on the show’s old stage on the CBS Radford lot, on the original sets of Jerry’s apartment and the diner, which were dug out of a warehouse. Only the fridge needed to be replaced, and the apartment door — which Seinfeld had taken as a souvenir. Larry was extraordinarily sunny on the set; he kept saying, “This is unbelievable.” He would watch the taping of the rehearsing of the reunion segments and would step in to suggest changes in blocking or line delivery, just as he had done on the show. Alexander had worried about being able to be George again, but found that the character came right back. Michael Richards had saved a pair of Kramer’s shoes and found that putting them on made him ready to slide through the doorway of Jerry’s apartment again. The regular actors were thrilled too. Jeff Garlin said that being on set “more than made up for the fact that I never got an audition on Seinfeld.”

The buildup to the new season was very big, with articles about the reunion story in virtually every magazine and newspaper and every entertainment news show. The Curb Your Enthusiasm seventh season began on September 20, 2009. The critics were almost unanimously ecstatic. Newsweek declared the story arc to be “genius.” Entertainment Weekly called it flawless and a big step up from the previous season. “If there’s a funnier show on television, let me at it,” wrote Tom Shales of the Washington Post. And they had only seen the first episodes. Viewers tuned in to the show in increasing numbers so that by the finale the numbers had grown to about two and a half times the previous season’s.

And then came episode seven, “The Bare Midriff.”

In past seasons, Larry David’s irreverent treatment of Christianity resulted in some superior episodes, such as “Mary, Joseph and Larry” and “The Christ Nail.” In both it wasn’t the idea of faith that he mocked (although he has stated publicly that religion in general is “ridiculous”) but its superficial, even kitschy trappings — grown men and women dressed as biblical figures, fake artifacts from a movie. In both TV and movies, Christian settings and themes — or at least watered-down versions — dominate. Every year there are countless Christmas television shows, specials, and movies. One show from a Jewish perspective (well, from Larry David’s cranky, amused assimilated-Jewish perspective) could hardly be a threat. Nevertheless some people would find it so.

“The Bare Midriff” aired on October 25, 2009. While it advanced the Seinfeld reunion plot, it has a story all its own. Maureen, a receptionist for Larry and Jerry who are writing the reunion script, likes to wear short shirts that show her belly. She has lost considerable weight and is proud of it, but she is still a little chubby and the two men find her attire distasteful. When Larry asks her to dress more modestly, she gets offended and quits. Larry goes to her mother’s house where she lives in order to ask her back and, while there, asks to use the bathroom. He has been taking some pills that result in a powerful stream and at the toilet he accidentally splashes a large painted portrait of Jesus hanging on the bathroom wall. He is distressed by the accident but seems to decide that it’s better to leave the picture alone. However, when Maureen and her mother see the drops they mistake them for Christ’s tears and declare that a miracle has taken place.

Immediately after the show’s airing, the assault began, most of it on the Internet. Catholic League President Bill Donohue made a statement on the organization’s website. “Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother?” He accused HBO of being anti-Catholic.

“Why is it that people are allowed to show that level of disrespect for Christian symbols?” asked Deal W. Hudson, who ran InsideCatholic.com. He demanded a public apology from the show.

James L. Hirsen, on the site FirstLiberties.com, wrote, “According to David’s comic sensibilities, people who believe in miracles are dolts, but people who have hybrid cars parked in the driveways of 15,000 square-foot mansions in Beverly Hills are rational.”

But the most vicious attack came from the Jewish-born Michael Savage, an extreme right-wing commentator with a very large radio audience of eight to ten million listeners. His radio commentary, later posted on YouTube.com, named Larry “Hollywood idiot of the day.” Savage called Hollywood a “sewer pipe” spewing its foul creations on America, and denounced Larry David not only as anti-Christian but as an “anti-Semite in Jew’s clothing” who fostered stereotypes of the weak Jew. Using apocalyptic language, he declared that Larry would bring a “terrible calamity upon the Jewish people.” He called for every Christian American to be “outraged” and for them to force HBO to take the show off the air.

Larry David himself did not bother to respond. But HBO did issue a written statement. “Anyone who follows Curb Your Enthusiasm knows that the show is full of parody and satire. Larry David makes fun of everyone, most especially himself. The humor is always playful and never malicious.” And on the web, fans posted comments defending the show, saying that religious people needed to have a sense of humor. While it seems unlikely that Larry was deliberately trying to provoke public responses, it was equally doubtful that he was being affected by them much. No doubt he would continue to write the show just as he wanted to.

CHAPTER 13

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good

On Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry might have reunited with Cheryl, but in real life Larry David was a divorced father of two and dating again. He was a combination of hopefulness and cynicism not unlike his fictional persona. “I would like to meet a woman who likes me at the same time I like her,” he said. “But I realize that’s impossible. And against nature. No. Nobody can pull that off. They like you, and you like them, and you’re having sex? That’s not happening.”

An interviewer suggested to him that being rich, famous, and funny put him on Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor list, but Larry shrugged it off. “Women don’t like the humor when it’s combined with inconsideration and insensitivity.” Yet he did begin to enjoy his newfound freedom. Being single, he decided, was “better than okay.” That was about as positive as Larry David could get.

Curb Your Enthusiasm now had enough episodes in the bank that it could look to syndication, where the real money was, as well as the potential for a larger audience. In November 2009 the first syndication rights were grabbed by the TV Guide Network. Only recently had the network begun broadcasting shows; until then it had simply shown TV listings. The executives thought that being the first to show Curb in syndication would wake people up to its new role as an actual broadcaster. But immediately after the sale, Larry was sorry that he had signed onto it.

“I regretted it instantly,” he said. “I knew there was no way they would be able to cut it down.” The problem was that now it was in syndication, the show had to be interrupted by commercials. That meant that each episode could only be about twenty-one minutes long. But the shows that Larry produced were thirty minutes or even longer. It wasn’t so much that Larry thought Curb was too sacred to cut, but that he didn’t think it would be possible to convey the convoluted multiple plots if bits were left out. The shows wouldn’t make sense.

Larry David talked over the problem with Jon Feltheimer, the CEO of Lions Gate Entertainment, which now owned the TV Guide Network. “They’re going to take all the good out of it,” Larry moaned. He didn’t expect the generous response of Feltheimer and the network. They would program Curb in one-hour time-slots instead of thirty minutes, allowing for the full shows to be seen. The only problem was that there would be another seven to ten minutes of airtime to fill. Feltheimer said that Larry had to help him fill it.

And so Larry came up with an idea — a talking-heads panel after each episode that could discuss any moral or other issues from the show. Susie Essman agreed to host it. The other panelists would be public figures, celebrities, sports figures, even rabbis. It was Larry’s hope that, while people would have strong opinions, they would also be funny. It was a unique way to solve the problem, and it pointed to one of the unique strengths of the show. Curb gave people a lot to talk about. The dilemmas that Larry either created for himself, or found himself in, were extreme examples of experiences that everyone has but made large, as if put under a microscope and blown up so as to be easier to see.

But the real question was: would Curb Your Enthusiasm return for an eighth season? Certainly its fans wanted it to. And HBO. And the actors too. “I think it would be kind of sad and stupid to stop now,” said Bob Einstein (Marty Funkhouser).

People were asking, but Larry wasn’t saying. Michael Lombardo, HBO president of programming, said, “Once the reviews come out and he’s feeling good and relaxed, that’s the moment I start sweet-talking him about the next season.”

But even when Larry was feeling good about the show, he wasn’t sure. “I have to feel like I want to do it again,” he said. “I’ll check my idea book and see if, first of all, I have a good arc. Then I have to decide if I’m equalling or topping the last season. This one is going to be hard to beat.”

In a radio interview in February 2010, Jeff Garlin reported that Larry was doing some writing for the show. And then, finally, in March 2010, Larry started to sound upbeat. “I’m leaning towards it, so I would say there’s a good chance.” If there was a new season it would include the actor J. B. Smoove as Leon, he said. The marriage of Larry and Cheryl, though, was less certain. Fans were overjoyed when, at last, the teasing ended and Larry confirmed that Curb would live for another season.

Larry David began in stand-up comedy. And there was a time, after the staggering success of Seinfeld but before Curb took off, when he was seriously thinking of returning to his roots. “I think I finally could get an audience who would be on my side,” he said. “I’ve never done it under those conditions. I’d like to see what that would be like.”

Returning to stand-up was the origin of the HBO special that became Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the strongest parts of that special were by no means the stand-up. Instead, they were they improvised fictional relationships between Larry and his wife, Larry and his manager, Larry and strangers — those are the scenes that really came alive. The simple truth is that the best form for Larry David’s comedy is not standing alone at a microphone, mocking his life, telling jokes, riffing on ideas. It’s acting and reacting with other characters — family members, friends, children, employees, waiters, receptionists, prostitutes, celebrities — in a specific place, and with consequences, which is narrative. He is an artistic instigator, a performance artist, an improv player, a playwright. His big subject is social behavior, or how human beings — with their needs, fears, prejudices, and aggressions — manage to live in such close proximity to one another. Race relations, rudeness and civility, selfishness and generosity, religious practice, friendship, attraction, love, sex and its complications, even dying — all of these subjects are primarily about how we treat one another.

And by some miracle Larry David has found the fullest expression of his talent in the form of the situation comedy. Not the old, tired sitcom form, but a new, shaken-up, boundary-breaking form of half-hour television. He did it first on Seinfeld — tentatively in the early shows, then with a wild abandon in the later years. And he has done it again, in an even more satisfying and uncompromised way, on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

In 2004, a clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina came up with the idea of showing Curb to schizophrenic patients at a state hospital. He showed them specific scenes — Larry opening the door of his dentist’s office only to explode with anger when the woman he let in ahead of him gets seen by the dentist first, or Larry fearing that his friends Mary and Ted are taking back an invitation. The student explained that on the show, Larry often broke just the kind of social rules that people suffering from schizophrenia break.

Larry David’s response was to make a joke: “I knew that my own mental health was problematic, but should I be worried?” But the truth is many, if not most, people occasionally wonder about themselves. Did I get angrier than was warranted? Can nobody else see how unfair this is? Am I the one who’s crazy? The character of Larry is not schizophrenic, of course, but he does lack the social brakes that most of us have. He knows better, knows how a person is supposed to behave (at least most of the time), but he can’t get himself to stay within the accepted boundaries. Which is why he ends up in physical altercations so often (portrayed as comic and harmless). And why he has to offer a never-ending stream of apologies. By being this way, he makes clear the rules that we so often take for granted and that allow us to hide the emotions we would rather not have on display.

Imagine for a moment the story lines on Curb being presented seriously rather than comically:

• Two old friends both end up in a fist fight

• A man cuts the hair of a young girl’s doll, traumatizing the girl

• A man discovers that he was not informed of his mother’s death

• A man wakes a surrogate mother up to the fact that she will be giving up her own baby

• A man struggles to overcome his own fears of mortality and donates a kidney to a friend

• A woman leaves her husband when she can no longer live with his obsessions and his neglect.

Each of these stories is worthy of serious examination, and each explores an aspect of human relationships. Making us laugh is, of course, Larry David’s goal. He claims not to think about the stuff that comes along with the humor. But we think about it, even argue about it. That Larry David has found a way to explore our behavior, and some of our baser motivations, on a situation comedy is extraordinary. He does so in a manner that is very, very funny and yet, by creating discomfort, forces us to think in a larger way about what we are seeing, which makes it art.

Yes, it is easy to forget that success was no sure thing for the Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, native, former bra salesman, limo driver, and frustrated stand-up comic. He had to have the strength of character to choose a risky, disrespected line of work. He had to get up in front of indifferent and even hostile audiences. He had to face down powerful television studio executives who did not understand his vision. At last overwhelmingly successful, famous, and rich, he had to stay deeply, viscerally in touch with the sources of his comedy.

And how is Larry David doing? Pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Episode Guide

Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm

HBO comedy special / Original Airdate: October 17, 1999 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

This special was originally intended as a one-off, in the manner of other HBO comedy specials featuring the likes of Richard Lewis and Dennis Miller. Such specials might have some backstage funny business or skits, but the bulk of the show would be a performance before a live audience in a big theater. Larry David subverts the genre in two ways. First, he presents a fictional version of himself, with actors playing his manager and his wife. Second, the special culminates in a cancelled performance.

The narrative of the special has Larry and his manager, Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin), pitching the show and then preparing for it with several dates in small clubs where Larry tries out his old and new material. We also see meetings with HBO executives, where they present to him the proposed stage set — a recreation of Jerry’s apartment on Seinfeld, which Larry nixes. He hasn’t performed stand-up for over nine years, he never had the fame or following of other comics who get such specials, and the fictional (and possibly real) Larry acts understandably nervous about the enterprise, which is why he doesn’t appreciate it when wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) tells him after one show, “There are a few things that didn’t work.” She suggests he not use the word “pussy” quite so much.

And how is Larry as a stand-up? Pretty, pretty, pretty good. But not great. His jokes are a tad esoteric, his delivery too exaggerated as he sometimes oversells the punch lines. They work fairly well in the intimate setting of a club, but it’s hard to imagine them bringing down the house in the 3,000-seat Pasadena Playhouse.

In terms of the series that will develop from this special, perhaps more interesting are the small subplots that have no relation to the main story. One has Larry inadvertently insulting a woman performer by calling her Carolyn instead of Caroline, raising the subject of apologies that will become such a frequent and sadly necessary part of Larry’s life in the series. Another has Larry skipping the wake for an acquaintance’s recently deceased father, yet another social infraction that causes him grief. Death, too, will loom large in the series. A third is a situation that isn’t Larry’s fault but is only worsened by his guilty-seeming actions. The real culprit is the married Jeff, who meets a young woman named Becky for a tryst in New York where they’ve gone to work the comedy clubs. Larry is pushed into walking across Central Park with Becky, only to run into a friend of Cheryl’s. Larry appearing to have an interest in other women (or their specific attributes — breasts, derrieres) will become another staple of the series, even though Larry will prove to be the opposite of the straying husband. None of these stories is as fully developed as they will be in the later series, but all of them contain themes that will occur over and over.

There are other moments—not story lines but much smaller bits—that point to the series to come. “I have a tendency to nod to black people,” Larry confesses, thereby introducing the very large subject of liberal white guilt and race relations in America in his own special way. And when Jeff insists that HBO pay for the porn movies that Larry watched in his hotel room, the special raises yet another big subject, sex and its subsets: pornography, the female body, fantasy, secrets, and masturbation.

The look of the special — its rather bland settings and handheld camera work — give it an even more documentary feel than the series will have. The storytelling is also shaggier, without the absurd yet plausible crossing of story lines. Nor does its jazzy score provide quite the same underlining comic punch of the music in the series. And then there are the interviews, not to be used again, that punctuate the special. Three main purposes are served by these authentic seeming, entertaining, and insightful moments where comics and industry people talk about Larry. The first is to give the show a documentary feel. The second is to establish firmly for the audience that Larry David was the genius behind Seinfeld and bring into focus the vague image that viewers might have of him. Jason Alexander, who played George, says, “The average guy on the street didn’t know the funny stuff coming out of our mouths was coming out of Larry David.” Comedian and Seinfeld writer Carol Leifer asserts that Larry made Seinfeld “revolutionary.” The third purpose of the interviews is to help along the narrative of Larry putting on a night of comedy for the special. Other comics inform the viewers of Larry’s less than lustrous early stand-up career, leading to the special’s climax — or rather it’s anticlimax which, in its low-key manner echoes the end of the much less successful Seinfeld finale.

After visiting the very large theater, Larry gets cold feet. He goes into HBO and tells the executives that he can’t do the show because his stepfather was in a car accident and he has to fly to Florida to be with his mother. It’s tempting to speculate that Larry David came up with this idea when he himself had second thoughts of doing a whole stand-up show. The fictional Larry resorts to outright lies (he doesn’t even have a stepfather), setting a useful precedent for the series.

Larry will prove to be a man who hates obligations and responsibilities. The last shot shows him waiting for the elevator and whistling happily. The real Larry David, however, is not quite like his fictional persona. For in agreeing to turn the special into an ongoing show, he will take on ten heavy responsibilities a season. Larry David, it seems, prefers to whistle while he works.

Season One

EPISODE ONE

The Pants Tent / Original Airdate: October 15, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

For this first episode Larry David gives us, as his main narrative line, a story that is not in any way sexy or sexual but nevertheless has to do with sex. It is a little naughtier than NBC would have allowed on Seinfeld (although, in this case, not much), but it is more about social acceptability than it is about desire, lust, or relationships.

And what is the very first opening shot of the first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm? It is a close up of Larry’s crotch. That’s right, Larry is flicking down the “tent” or “bunch-up” made by his corduroy pants when he sits down. Moments later he calls his wife Cheryl to come and take a look, immediately introducing the second-most-important character in the series. (Some might argue that Jeff Greene is, but the call is a close one.) Larry knows that he needs Cheryl as reactor, as sounding board, as the disapproving superego of his conscience, and simply to soften the harshness of his own character. Cheryl doesn’t do a lot in her first appearance, but she comes across as rather sweet: an easy-to-live-with person.

This episode also lets the viewer, who is likely as not a Seinfeld fan, know that this show will work in at least some of the same ways. It will have multiple, overlapping plots to enliven and reinforce the main story. This one has three, the first of which involves a car-to-car cell phone conversation with Larry’s agent Jeff (our first introduction to him) in which Larry calls Cheryl “Hitler.” Little does he know that Jeff’s elderly Jewish parents are also in the car listening. The second plot involves Larry’s friend Richard Lewis (famous friend number one), whom Larry runs into at a movie theater where he has gone to see a Dustin Hoffman picture with Nancy, a friend of Cheryl’s. (Larry David is showing his age here. While Hoffman is still working, he is no longer expected to carry a film. A “Dustin Hoffman picture” comes from Larry David’s time as a young man.) Larry gets into a ridiculous argument with a dark-haired sexy woman in a low-cut dress (she won’t let him pass her to get to his seat); she accuses Larry of looking at her breasts. (Possibly true.) The woman turns out to be Richard’s new girlfriend. The third plot line comes when Nancy, soothing the upset Larry by rubbing his arm, notices the bunch-up in his pants and assumes that her touch has given him an erection.

If the episode has three stories, it has one theme: forgiveness. Well, not forgiveness exactly, but rather the need to apologize in order to keep the social order. In his office, Jeff is writing a letter of apology to Kathy Griffin, not for any particular reason. (The show offers no information as to who Kathy Griffin is. The viewer is expected to know she’s a stand-up comic, a former member of the Groundlings — the troupe where Cheryl Hines learned improv — and once a guest star on Seinfeld. One of the charms of Curb Your Enthusiasm is that it treats people in the industry as if they aren’t in the slightest way special.) The second apology comes from Larry himself, who goes over to Jeff’s house to make things right with Jeff’s suspicious parents. Unfortunately for Larry, as he pastes a Band-Aid on one wound, he opens another by refusing to go upstairs and admire the sleeping children. He refuses, however, to apologize to Richard Lewis’s girlfriend. In fact, he shows for the first time in the series that he can be truly nasty, when he refers to her (likely) artificial breasts as “chemical balls.” This about his best friend’s girl. Nice, Larry.

Two great lines stand out. The first occurs at home, where Cheryl has invited her friend Nancy to explain to her that Larry didn’t really have an erection. Nancy doesn’t believe it, causing Larry to lose his temper and begin shouting. (Shouting is Larry’s way of showing extreme emotions. A lesser emotion evokes a pained look.) Larry insists that he knows when he has an erection, whether or not the cause is “mysterious” or something he can exactly “pinpoint.”

The other line is a throwaway, not issued by Larry but by Jeff’s old, hunched father in a new, hot restaurant when Larry and Cheryl are forced to share a table with the Greene family. The same Kathy Griffin happens to be there (tying up loose ends in the Seinfeld manner) and when she walks away from the table, Mr. Greene (played by veteran actor Louis Nye) says with admiration, “Look at the way that girl walks. Look at it. What rhythm she has.” Ad-libbed or not, it’s a priceless line.

EPISODE TWO

Ted and Mary / Original Airdate: October 22, 2000 / Directed by David Steinberg

One of the weird pleasures of Curb is seeing celebrities living like relatively ordinary people. Okay, ordinary people who seem to spend their time shopping, going to the latest hot restaurant, and otherwise passing their days in useless activity. What exactly does this tell us? That life is the same for celebrities as it is for us? Not exactly. More like, celebrities are as trivial as us, they just get to express it more.

David Steinberg, the Canadian stand-up comic turned director, is at the helm for this one. And the first shot is of Mary Steenburgen sending a strike ball down a bowling lane. Steenburgen is, as many people know, half of a celebrity married couple, the other half being Ted Danson. And there’s Ted himself, sitting with Larry and Cheryl, cheering his wife on. With one frame to go, Larry needs to make a strike or the Davids will lose the game.

If this were an episode of Seinfeld, George would (a) throw a gutter ball, (b) try to cheat, or (c) try to create a diversion so as not to have to throw at all. But Larry is not the shlemiel that George was, neither incompetent nor unsporty. So what does he do? He rolls a strike.

The episode, however, is not about bowling. Nor is it just about friendship. Rather, it’s about marriage — or rather the effects of an innocent flirtation on a married couple. And it’s about self-knowledge, or the lack of it. What the episode comes down to is Larry finding himself smitten with Mary. This is why he risks hurting Cheryl’s feelings by going on about what a wonderful person she is, with a true “inner beauty.” And why he laments the fact that society frowns upon a married man having a married woman as his friend. It’s also why he makes snide comments about Ted Danson; he unconsciously resents the fact Ted gets to have Mary and he doesn’t.

Does this mean that Larry wants to have an affair with Mary? Of course not. He sublimates any such feelings. It’s all about friendship. And it’s a friendship he gets to pursue when he hears that Mary is going to Barneys for some clothes shopping. The next thing we know, Larry (who hates shopping, we later hear from an amazed and disconcerted Cheryl) is moving up the stairs of some high-end shopping mall. And buying something that he describes as “half shirt, half jacket” because Mary has one too. (It’s worth noting in passing that many, many a Seinfeld episode revolved around a piece of clothing.)

A related subplot involves Larry’s shoes being taken by another bowler so that Larry decides to order a new pair, only to renege when the shoe thief reappears at the bowling alley with the shoes on. The subplot highlights one of the important activities in the life of a leisured American: shopping. And it also allows for two rather funny guest spots. Tim Bagley — a highly successful character actor who was a member of the Groundlings, the same improv group where Cheryl Hines cut her teeth — plays the shoe salesman. Bagley plays the character as slightly effeminate and brimming with moral outrage. Meanwhile, the shoe thief is played by Joe Liss, a comic and writer who did his time at Second City. Liss plays the thief as a wide-eyed, amazed innocent. They underline the fact that Larry David is much more comfortable drawing his talent from the world of comedy clubs and improv groups. Curb Your Enthusiasm is not so much an actor’s dream gig as it is a showcase of comedians.

Back to the main story. This new friendship of Larry’s is bound to backfire and the cause of it is, of course, Larry himself. Having lunch with Mary and her mother after the Barneys shopping spree, he takes a sip of water from the mom’s glass instead. “Aauugh!” he cries, practically spitting when he finds out. As a result of this insult, Larry is sure that Mary and Ted are reneging on an offer of luxury box seats to a Paul Simon concert. (One of the perks of celebrity friends is celebrity-style freebies.) Although they don’t renege, in the end Larry gets stuck in the box with Mary’s mother, who falls asleep on his shoulder. And just like the previous episode, the last shot is of Larry looking miserable.

How does Larry come off? As selfish, unfeeling, and a little crude too. But although Cheryl is hurt, she is never a scold. Nor is their marriage threatened. Cheryl and Larry appear to be a solid couple and take their relationship for granted — in a good way. This provides a kind of sweetness to the show that undercuts the sour.

EPISODE THREE

Porno Gil / Original Airdate: October 29, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

To put it bluntly, this is the weakest episode in the first season. Yes, it pushes the envelope more than a little in its verbal descriptions of pornographic filmmaking, an unusual source of humor. But it also points out another fact about Hollywood. In the glittering, dream-making machine, there is more than one way to be a star. When ordinary middle class people go to a party where they feel out of place, it might be because their hosts are blue-collar workers — car mechanics, say, or postal workers. But in Larry David’s world, they’re former porn stars.

The main story involves Larry and Cheryl being invited to a dinner party at a former porn star’s house. Cheryl is reluctant to begin with, but then has to endure Gil’s nauseating war stories about sex in front of the camera. (Is it true that Tabasco sauce up the rectum will keep an erection hard? So Gil, played by Bob Odenkirk, tells us. Feel free to find out for yourself.) Larry upsets Gil’s wife by breaking her lamp and wearing his shoes indoors, and it’s her insane anger that is most funny. (“When you walk through my door you play by my rules. You take off your fuckin’ shoes!”)

A couple of side plots are worth noting in the episode. One is the opening incident, when Larry refuses to pick up another golfer’s ball simply because he doesn’t like the bolo string on the man’s hat. Sure enough, the man shows up again and takes his vengeance. (This plot is sketched in a rather cursory way.) The second plot is Jeff, Larry’s manager, needing bypass surgery and asking Larry to sneak into his house and take out his porn tapes so his wife doesn’t find them if he dies. Jeff, as later shows will prove, is allowed to have far more nasty habits than Larry.

What makes the episode weak, at least for this viewer, is that Gil’s porno stories are unpleasant without also being funny and that the resentful golfer story line feels like something left on the cutting room floor of Seinfeld. But what is most likable about this episode is not really its humor. It’s the marital spats that occur between Larry and Cheryl. After enduring the porn star’s party, Larry wants to know “what’s the level of anger here? What am I dealing with?” The answer is 8.7 out of 10, Larry having won some “pity points” for having been screamed at. He’s both a little afraid of his wife’s anger and relieved to know that her affection is salvageable. They even hug, something that will prove to be a rare occurrence.

EPISODE FOUR

The Bracelet / Original Airdate: November 5, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Richard Lewis has some similarities as a comic to Larry David. They’re both from Brooklyn, both Jewish, and they both consider themselves hypochondriacs. But to prove the truism that nature provides infinite variety, one need only look a little closer. With his long hair, sweeping black overcoats, hunched shoulders, nervous bobbing, and Yiddishy exclamations, Richard Lewis gives the impression of being a Jewish vampire — albeit one who feels too guilty to bite anyone but himself. Even just in physical contrast, Larry is polar opposite; tall and still, hands at his sides, he’s more undertaker than vampire.

Lewis gets a lot of screen time in this episode, but not before the premise — one that would have been right at home on The Honeymooners — is set up. Larry gets on Cheryl’s bad side when she comes home from a trip to see her family in Tallahassee, only to find hubby too engrossed in a televised football game to pay her much attention. Wanting to get back into her good books, he takes his secretary’s advice and decides to buy her a present — a platinum bracelet that Cheryl had admired. (Jackie Gleason might have picked a box of chocolates, but no matter.)

But there’s a slight hitch, naturally. Larry goes to the store unshaven and the salespeople, thinking he’s a homeless person, won’t buzz him in. So he calls Richard Lewis to go in for him. “Look at you,” Richard says. “You look like the Jewish Ratso Rizzo.” Lewis has a thing for Dustin Hoffman too. But a blind man in need of assistance approaches the pair. He has just moved into a nearby apartment and asks for them to help him arrange the furniture. When they finally return to the store, it’s closed (a narrative trick Larry David will use occasionally).

Larry manages to make up with Cheryl anyway, but she still wants the bracelet. Unfortunately, Larry has already told Richard that he can buy it for his girlfriend. The two of them arrive at the same time and while they fight to get into the store, the salespeople call the cops.

There’s quite a bit of funny business between Larry and Richard, some of it verbal and some of the slapstick variety. Perhaps for the first time, Larry’s chilly selfishness is made all too clear. He offends Cheryl, won’t help in her charity work, and doesn’t want to assist Michael, the blind man. The ending fight — a ridiculous, hand-flailing knockabout — would have made the Keystone Kops proud.

EPISODE FIVE

Interior Decorator / Original Airdate: November 12, 2000 / Directed by Andy Ackerman

Two small threads link this episode to previous ones and foreshadow how the show will grow in terms of narrative complications. One is the appearance of a lamp identical to one that Larry broke at Porno Gil’s house (season one, episode two), which also gets knocked over. The other is the episode’s opening trigger. Larry, having hurt his finger in the tussle with Richard Lewis, goes to see his doctor. (Larry David did actually sprain his finger shooting the previous episode. He revised his outline for this one to include the incident.)

The episode is rife with complications, resulting in multiple scene changes and various supporting characters. There’s the Asian parking lot attendant who lets Larry out even though he doesn’t have the cash to pay, only to corner him later, screaming: “I know that face. It’s the face of a liar!” There’s the interior decorator Cheryl wants to use, who also happens to work for Diane Keaton and who, in the middle of a physical tussle, suddenly kisses Larry. (The woman’s name is Carmen and her appearance is accompanied by music from the opera of the same name, a sort of musical joke.) There is the chubby young woman whom Larry chivalrously allows out of the elevator first, only to have her get in to see the doctor before him. There is Larry’s doctor, who uses a take-a-number system to see his clients and who happens to be married to Larry’s lawyer. There’s the lawyer herself (played by Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding) who has charged Larry $1,500 to read his script even though he didn’t ask her to. And there is Diane Keaton, who does not actually appear unless you count her feet (or those of the stand-in).

Suffice it to say that Larry is thwarted at every turn — at the doctor’s, the lawyer’s, at Diane Keaton’s house, even in the parking lot. And it’s not his fault. He even comes across as rather charming. He holds open the elevator, he honestly runs short of cash, and it’s not his fault that he’s late for his meeting with Diane Keaton, whom he wants to act in a film he’s written. But as the injustices pile up against him, he turns into one angry guy. His anger causes him to take social justice into his own hands but the one who suffers is, of course, Larry.

EPISODE SIX

The Wire / Original Airdate: November 19, 2000 / Directed by Larry Charles

Larry Charles, whom Larry David met on the set of Fridays, was later known as Larry’s first lieutenant on Seinfeld. Charles was responsible for some classic scripts (“The Baby Shower,” “The Library,” “The Fix-Up”) that were notably darker than other episodes. Here he’s the director and maybe it’s the luck of the draw, but this is definitely one of the best episodes of the season.

Larry and Cheryl might be wealthy but they still have the same problems as any householder — and not everything can be solved by money. In this case there’s an ugly wire running overhead across their back garden that they want to have buried. But in order to do so they need permission from five different neighbors. Four have given the okay. One, naturally, is a holdout. The couple, Phyllis and Dean, want to come over and meet the Davids.

Phyllis and Dean are played by comedian/actors Lucy Webb and Wayne Federman. Federman is not only a busy stand-up comic, but also the head monologue writer of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Once more, Larry David turns to the stand-up world for the small comic roles. Phyllis and Dean turn out to be the most boorish kind of television fans. “I’m finally in the house that Jerry Seinfeld built,” Phyllis says. And although he must be fed up with everyone giving Jerry all the credit, Larry takes it in stride and replies, “With his own hands.” But things go sour when Dean turns out to be seriously obsessed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He makes it quite clear that only if Larry arranges a meeting, will he agree to bury the wire.

The look of disgust on Larry’s face is priceless. (It ought to make any of us who wish that we could meet a celebrity feel deeply ashamed of ourselves.) “What is he, four years old?” rages Larry. But Cheryl wants that wire buried, so sure enough he calls Julia.

Julia reluctantly shows up, looking deliberately ordinary with her hair pulled back. But Dean is late at work (helping Jeff, who’s being sued by a camp because the boy he sponsored burned down a cabin). Instead they find Phyllis, distraught over the death of her cat — but not too distraught to take out the camcorder. In a later scene Dean finally gets to meet her, but by then Julia is so pissed off (for too many reasons to mention) she takes a strip off him. When Larry says that he kept his end of the bargain, Dean says, “You saw this as a meeting. I saw this as a horrible moment in my life.”

Like the previous show, this one too has a few stitches connecting it to earlier episodes. In this case the bracelet Cheryl wanted makes its reappearance. There’s also a nice little Seinfeldian discussion of the social nicety of the telephone cutoff time — in other words, how late you can call somebody else’s house. Nine-thirty? Ten? Ten-thirty? Whichever one it is, Larry manages to get it wrong, upsetting both Julia (who is so annoyed that she calls Jerry Seinfeld) and Jeff’s wife Susie.

Indeed, this episode gives Susie Essman a chance to tear up the scenery. When she discovers that her and Jeff’s house has been robbed by the boy Jeff sponsored for camp, she pretty much goes ballistic. That is one tough and scary woman.

And the wire? Well, anyone who has seen Curb can guess whether or not the wire is still there by the end of the show.

EPISODE SEVEN

AAMCO / Original Airdate: November 26, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Unlike the perpetually single characters on Seinfeld (except, for a time, the unhappily engaged George) Larry is married and has no choice but to be part of a larger social world. Married people compromise. Married people do all kinds of things they’d rather not do. But, well, they’re married.

Larry tries hard to live as if he’s not married. For him that doesn’t mean fooling around, but simply doing only what he wants. And one of the things he doesn’t want to do is throw a dinner party. “What is this compulsion to have people over to your house and serve them food?” he asks Cheryl. But Cheryl insists — that is, if she can find a caterer to replace the one who has cancelled. (What, you don’t have your dinner parties catered?) Larry acquiesces but he makes a bet with Cheryl that he won’t enjoy himself. And if he wins, what does she have to give him? A “blow job in the car.” Just like a hooker. Man, that Larry. What a romantic.

But the dinner party is only one strand of this episode’s two main converging plot lines. The other one concerns Jeff’s new car, a baby blue ’57 Chevy. He allows Larry to get behind the wheel, and at that moment millions of regular viewers are no doubt screaming at their televisions, Don’t let him, don’t let him! But it’s too late. Larry yells at a driver who retaliates by rear-ending the Chevy.

The highlight of the episode is the Davids’ dinner party, where Larry is forced to talk to a man about injection molding. (Later, Larry will tell Cheryl that at their next party he “wants some Jews.”) A couple urges him to take a cruise while someone else asks if he gets paid every time an episode of Seinfeld is rerun. (Yes, he does.) This last fellow (played by Mike Hagerty) turns out to be a car mechanic who specializes in old Chevys and agrees to fix Jeff’s car. He then proceeds to sit at the head of the table and lead everyone in prayer.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that fixing the Chevy goes amiss, or that the new caterer turns out to be a minor thief, keeping the leftovers for herself; all that tidying up in the last minutes is to be expected. No wonder Larry is spending his time doing absolutely nothing.

EPISODE EIGHT

Beloved Aunt / Original Airdate: December 3, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

In this first season, Larry David’s idea of his own character is really not that harsh. He’s a bit insensitive, sure. But he does put himself out for others once in a while, not that it ever does him much good. And most of the really ugly things that happen are misunderstandings. They’re not really his fault. This very funny episode is a case in point.

Death, suicide, and mourning — what better subjects for a situation comedy? But of course we’ve already learned from Seinfeld that for a character created by Larry David, funerals and their aftermath are a gold mine (or should that be land mine) of opportunities.

The opening shot is a crucifix over an urn. Jewish comics often think crucifixes are good for a laugh. See Mel Brooks’s The 2000 Year Old Man where his character decides that the cross is “too simple” and won’t sell. Or Woody Allen juggling one along with other religious paraphernalia in Hannah and Her Sisters. In this Curb episode we see Cheryl in a reception line and discover that her aunt has recently died by her own hand. And what is Larry doing? Fiddling with the temperature control on the wall and complaining about having cut his finger while punching a new hole in his belt.

But while Larry would rather go golfing than sit with Cheryl’s relatives (we meet her parents for the first time, played by Paul Dooley and Julie Payne), his offer to write the obituary for the newspaper comes only from a desire to be helpful — and perhaps win some brownie points from Cheryl. And there’s nothing wrong with the obituary that he dictates to Jeff; it’s the fault of the newspaper editor that the words “Devoted sister, beloved aunt” have been misprinted as “Devoted sister, beloved cunt.” Even jaded viewers of profanity-laden HBO shows will feel shocked at hearing the word in such a context. Unlike viewers, nobody in the family finds the mistake very funny.

It might not be Larry’s fault, but that doesn’t stop Cheryl from temporarily exiling him from the house. So he goes to Jeff’s house, to stay the night and give Jeff’s mother (still wary of Larry from the “Hitler” incident in episode one) a pair of sunglasses for her birthday. And all would be well except that Larry accidentally leans against the woman’s ample bosom, which naturally she believes is on purpose. (It might be interesting to count the number of times that Larry will be considered a pervert, porno lover, fetishist, or even “ass man” over the seasons.) As Jeff puts it, “You copped a feel off my mom, you gotta go.”

But Larry, at least in this season, often proves himself no slouch when it comes to moving with the tides. He ends up sleeping in his car and when the sun comes up he simply doffs a pair of sunglasses — the same glasses that he had bought for Jeff’s mom’s birthday. At least he doesn’t have to spend time with Cheryl’s family.

EPISODE NINE

Affirmative Action / Original Airdate: December 10, 2000 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

Until now Larry has occasionally been selfish and mean, but he hasn’t been truly ignorant or tasteless. But that is about to change. This is not a “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People” episode. This is a “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Stupid, Thoughtless People” episode.

Which of these characteristics is most important to Larry: that he is rich, white, Jewish, in show business, or from Booklyn? The first two, if what happens early in the episode is any indication. Larry goes on a walk with Richard Lewis, who, like a petulant girlfriend, complains that he always has to initiate their get-togethers. When a black man jogs by, Richard says hello and introduces him to Larry as his dermatologist. Larry tries to be funny by suggesting the man has become a doctor through the “whole affirmative action thing.” The doctor is naturally offended; Larry has suggested that he wasn’t good enough to get into medical school on his own.

But wait a minute. Was Larry really trying to be funny? Would the line be funny if it wasn’t offensive — or even if it is? Not at all. Perhaps what Larry was really doing was saying that for him the man was black before he was anything else, and that his race makes Larry uncomfortable. He’s saying it without realizing the true meaning, of course. Larry is, indeed, someone who says aloud the thoughts that most people manage to keep to themselves. This is rather brave of Larry David (the man, not the character). I can’t think of a single actor in television who would wish to appear as even a mild racist, unless, like Archie Bunker, it was an essential part of his fictional character.

Larry David does like to pile one related incident on top of another to raise the stakes and he does so here when Larry the character runs into a black woman in a Mexican restaurant. She had interviewed for the job of line producer on Sour Grapes, but the position had gone to somebody else. She implies that she didn’t get the job because she’s black and then claims that there was not a single black character on Seinfeld. (Not quite true, but close.) “I’ve got your number,” she cries. “There’s no number!” insists Larry. To add insult, she notes that the film wasn’t very good and she was better off not getting the job.

This Larry-as-accused-racist has to reach a crescendo and to do it David relies on his favorite structure — using one plot to fulfill another. That other plot, begun early in the episode, has poor Cheryl suffering from a seriously itchy case of dermatitis. Among Larry’s issues is an excessive aversion to picking up other people’s cooties. First there was the incident with Mary Steenburgen’s mother’s glass. This time he flinches and backs away from Cheryl. But he really messes up by losing her prescription (he hands it to a maître d’, thinking it’s a rolled-up bill). Because it’s the weekend, when Cheryl’s own doctor refuses to hear from patients, Larry has no choice but to phone Richard Lewis’s dermatologist friend. The man agrees to write a new prescription and Larry goes over, to find the doctor engaged in a party attended by black men and women. They all want to know how Larry offended the doctor and to his credit he tells them honestly. With his own peculiar brand of charm, he manages not to turn them into an angry mob. At least until a particular woman walks into the room — the line producer he didn’t hire.

All of this means no prescription. Cheryl has no choice but to phone her doctor, but she makes the fatal mistake of sending Larry to the all-night pharmacy, where there is a long lineup. If a tip works for a maître d’, why not a pharmacist?

Because for a pharmacist it’s a bribe, that’s why.

The most pathetic shot of the entire first season is of Larry, a condemned man, walking up the stairs to tell Cheryl.

EPISODE TEN

The Group / Original Airdate: December 17, 2000 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Sometimes being married to Larry must seem like living with a seven-year-old. For example, in this, the opening of the last episode of the first season, Larry gargles and sings at the same time, asking whether Cheryl can make out the song. (She can; it’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”)

Is it possible to make a joke out of absolutely anything? Is there no subject that is taboo? How about sexual abuse? Nope, that’s okay. How about incest? Ditto. At least for Larry David.

Sex, in various manifestations, is the theme of the episode. A dissatisfied Cheryl asks why it is she always has to initiate sex. Larry’s answer is that he’s available all the time and any time she wants to have it she can, while the opposite isn’t true. But the next night, when Cheryl asks for it, Larry declines. The reason is that he’s “tapped out,” code for his having masturbated already. Of course masturbation, or rather abstinence, was the subject of the famous episode of Seinfeld called “The Contest.” But here Larry David goes farther; Cheryl divines that Larry pleasured himself while thinking about Lucy, an attractive ex-girlfriend they had run into that day. “She made a brief appearance and said goodbye” is the most Larry will admit to. He tells Cheryl that she should be glad he doesn’t fantasize about her. “You don’t want any part of that world.”

When Lucy asks Larry to lunch, he gets a little excited. But what she really wants is for him to attend an incest abuse therapy group with her. Not surprisingly, Larry agrees only reluctantly, soon finding himself the sole male in a circle of unhappy women led by the former Saturday Night Live actor Laraine Newman. When he is asked to speak, instead of telling the truth, Larry makes up a story about having sex with his uncle when he was twelve. “An osteopath. I don’t even know what they do.” Perhaps the extraordinary thing about the scene is that it is funny and it isn’t offensive.

On second thought, maybe the episode isn’t really about sex. Maybe it’s about women’s health and sexuality. For one thing there’s the therapy group. For another there’s Cheryl being given a chance to come out of retirement and act in the hit play The Vagina Monologues thanks to Jeff dropping her name to the director. Why Cheryl has stopped performing has never been addressed. Did Larry become too rich for her to work? The only problem is (plot-crossing alert) the director turns out to be the same woman who conducts the therapy group and it’s clear that she and Larry recognize each other. But the group members swear to secrecy and Larry and the woman cover up, making Cheryl suspicious enough to quit the play before she starts.

At home, Larry spills the beans about the group, and Cheryl, sorry she quit the play, phones the director to apologize. The only problem is the part has gone to another actress — Lucy!

Wait a minute. Maybe the episode is about sex after all. Lucy only got the part because Jeff took her on as a client, and he only took her on so that he could sleep with her, which he does. It’s interesting though how severely Larry disapproves of Jeff’s extramarital affairs. He might be a Freudian id run rampant, but Larry’s unspoken desires seem to fall short of cheating. Flirting, admiring — that’s okay. But not cheating.

Larry David provides a satisfying ending to the season by finding a way to get Cheryl’s part back. To do that, something bad has to happen to Lucy and Jeff (a car accident), divine punishment for their transgression of Larry’s code.

Season Two

EPISODE ONE

The Car Salesman / Original Airdate: September 23, 2001 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

It’s a cliché that men don’t want to grow up, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And Larry is certainly a boy/man. This is most obviously expressed in his tendency to become obsessed by trivial things while missing or, more to the point, avoiding what’s important to most people.

“Have you just retired and this is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life?” Cheryl asks him. Having sold their house, they’re living in a hotel. Larry seems quite content with this transient lifestyle, room service, and reality TV on the set. But Cheryl has arranged for them to go and see a house.

And what a house — showy, made of stone, too grand to be rustic, with a breathtaking ocean view. Larry himself thinks it’s too big, a house more appropriate for “the Osmonds,” but Cheryl loves it. And this is something we are learning about Cheryl. The wife of a rich man, she wants luxury: expensive restaurants, limo rides, a huge house. She has no compunction about enjoying it. Larry, however, grows suspicious of the house’s owner because the guy, a William Morris agent whom Larry knows, tells him his sweater is one hundred percent cashmere. Larry doesn’t believe it. Talk about trivial.

The nagging accusation of doing nothing is obviously rattling around in Larry’s brain when, having lunch with Jeff (their business relationship seems to exclusively involve going to restaurants), Larry meets the owner of a car dealership. Impulsively, Larry asks how one becomes a salesman and then asserts that he could sell a car on the very first day. A car salesman? Let’s face it, that’s the sort of dream job an eight-year-old kid might think up. The owner agrees to let Larry try.

This new “job” of Larry’s turns out to be a very good excuse for not helping Cheryl when they are due to move into their new house on Monday. She’s naturally flabbergasted by this new job, which Larry equates to wanting to swim the English Channel. Even Larry doesn’t pretend the job will last long, but that doesn’t stop him from making it the intense center of his waking interest. However, he does reluctantly take a meeting with Jason Alexander who, it turns out, has been having trouble getting work due to being identified as his Seinfeld character, George. “They see the idiot. They see the schmuck,” Jason complains. It’s amusing to see that Larry, having fashioned the George character after himself, is puzzled and offended by this characterization. As they chat, Larry gets the idea for a series in which Jason plays a character who was previously in a hit show. Now he can’t get work, everyone identifies him with the old character, and life is a series of frustrations. Jason likes the idea (why wouldn’t he if he’s out of work?) and wants to pursue it. But Larry, of course, has a more pressing obligation. He’s now a car salesman.

Short clips of scenes of Larry, gussied up in jacket and tie, talking to customers on the floor of the Toyota dealership are funny indeed. When a customer asks him a question he simply makes up the answer. But when Richard Lewis appears to confront Larry (Richard has signed with Jeff, but Larry told Jeff that Richard would be a high maintenance client) the two get into yet another physical altercation. These two seem to bring out the kid in each other, perhaps because in real life they’ve known each other since summer camp. Larry gets fired, leaving him free to follow up the sitcom idea. And even though the time is past the “cutoff” for phoning people, Larry says “there’s a special dispensation for good news.”

Hmm. Car salesman or television show creator — pretty tough decision, isn’t it? It seems to be true that everyone wishes he had some other job — even the people who have the jobs the rest of us might want. Larry wants to make it clear that television holds no glamour for him. In fact, it all seems like too much trouble to bother. Or maybe the message is that Hollywood people, who live in a kind of protective bubble of celebrity and wealth, sometimes crave an ordinary life. Well, sorry Larry. It’s back to television land for you.

EPISODE TWO

Thor / Original Airdate: September 30, 2001 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

What do big asses, wrestling, and television shows have in common? The answer is Larry David.

Since Larry doesn’t take his own personal life all that seriously there’s not much reason he should take anyone else’s seriously either. So when Jeff tells him that he has left Susie, all Larry can manage to say is, “It’s a long time coming.” But at the moment Jeff’s real concern is not his marriage but the fear that Susie will make public certain sexual preferences of his — nothing “evil” but still humiliating.

The important moment in this scene though has nothing at all to do with Jeff. Rather it’s Larry’s response. He says that for this very reason he never tries anything kinky with Cheryl. In fact, he doesn’t even confide in her. “I just treat her like an acquaintance. Do you think I want her blabbing about me?” This isn’t particularly funny; if anything it’s an ugly little truth about Larry as a husband, one of those moments that gives the show its uncomfortable edge and takes it beyond funny. Larry is a character who often refuses true intimacy. He keeps his likes, his fears, his deepest self to himself. Living with Larry would indeed be like living with a stranger, and how long can any feeling person accept that? This does not bode well for Larry’s own relationship, although like so many marriages, his will take a long time to unravel.

The second season’s story arc moves forward in this episode — if you can call being at a standstill moving forward. Larry goes to Jason Alexander’s office but, for reasons we’ll hold off on for a moment, he ends up late. They only have time to discuss holding a second meeting. Larry wants Jason to come to his office next time, but Jason refuses, saying that this meeting never really happened: “This isn’t a meeting about the show. This is a meeting about having a meeting.” Watching the two argue is like seeing Larry David confront George Costanza, or perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein meeting his monstrous creation. The horror!

Larry was late for the meeting due to a little driving incident, which gives us a chance to note the importance of the car in Larry’s life and in the story lines of the show. It’s certainly one of the practical differences between Curb Your Enthusiasm and its precursor, Seinfeld, which was set in New York, a city of neighborhoods, walking, cabs, and the subway. The vibe of Los Angeles — and especially privileged Los Angeles — is very different indeed. In fact it’s like an upscale version of American suburban life — houses (larger than the norm), restaurants that have to be driven to (and that are more expensive), shops and malls.

Driving to Jason’s office, Larry notices three kids in the back of a station wagon looking at him. He begins to make faces and then pretends to be firing a gun, as if playing cowboys and Indians. In other episodes Larry will also show himself as someone who, although childless, seems to like kids and especially likes to entertain them. That he’s rather heavy-handed about his play, sometimes too adult, and is rather stupid about judging their responses doesn’t mean his impulse isn’t genuine. Suddenly the wagon stops. A big, muscled-up guy with long blond hair gets out. “Have you heard of Columbine?” he yells at Larry. As always in threatening situations, Larry cringes with fear and becomes a “Yes, sir” muttering wuss. (Well, wouldn’t most of us?) While we’re at it, let’s not ignore the use of a tragic event — the murder of school children — for comic effect. That’s Larry David for you.

The muscle man (played by Deron Michael McBee, a former American Gladiator often cast as a villain in B-rated action movies) turns out to be a professional wrestler named Thor. Larry may not be able to take him in hand-to-hand combat, but he can get back at him in other, sneakier ways. Finding Thor’s kids sitting in the lobby of the hotel where he’s staying, he tells them that their father’s wrestling matches are fixed. “You mean it’s faked?” asks one of the boys, clearly surprised and upset. “Phoney baloney,” Larry says happily. Use the kids to get to the parent — nice strategy, Larry.

The third story line in this rather complicated episode starts when Larry, happily protected in his vehicle, sees Cheryl’s friend Wanda (played by the well-known stand-up comedian and actor Wanda Sykes) jogging. He yells out a remark about recognizing that “tush” anywhere. Later at the house, Wanda complains and then accuses Larry of certain sexual likings. “You are an ass man!” she says over and over. The ass theme exposes itself (shall we say) several times in the episode, convincing Cheryl that Larry indeed likes a substantial rear end. Larry is, of course, innocent. Indeed, in matters sexual he usually is.

And perhaps that second meeting with Jason Alexander ought to be mentioned. It never happens. George Costanza #1 (Larry) and George Costanza #2 (Jason) are just too stubborn. Well, I can’t think of a better reason for a television show not happening. But the season’s story arc is just at the beginning of its halting trajectory.

EPISODE THREE

Trick or Treat / Original Airdate: October 7, 2001 / Directed by Larry Charles

This episode contains perhaps the most memorable scene in the series to date, one that is both highly comic and highly disturbing. That the actors seem to really inhabit their roles, making the anger feel genuine, only adds to the heightened effect.

Cheryl and Larry are waiting outside a movie theater where a film, written by their friend Cliff, is about to have its premiere. Cheryl’s birthday is coming up and Larry is reminded of the story of Richard Wagner composing a piece for his wife’s birthday. He begins whistling it but a man nearby, offended at hearing music by an anti-Semitic German who was Hitler’s favorite composer, asks Larry if he’s Jewish. “You want to check my penis?” Larry asks. The two get into a screaming match, with the man shouting about the millions of Jews who died in the concentration camps. Larry could, of course, argue that Wagner’s music transcends his personal story, that Wagner has been performed in Israel, or other reasonable arguments. Instead, his response is not to address anything the man actually says, but to mock him, insinuate that the man is mentally ill, and then begin whistling the song “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers. The scene is crude, vicious, alarming, and, yes, somehow terribly funny.

“Trick or Treat” is an even more complicated episode than the last one, and mapping out every line and detour would create a map looking something like the shifting borders of Eastern Europe. This episode is also brimming with animosity, anger, and contempt for one’s fellow humans. There’s the argument with the filmmaker friend over the origins of the Cobb salad, the misunderstanding with Cliff’s wife who misinterprets a joke and thinks that Larry wants to have an affair with her. (She’s quite willing, but Larry wants none of it.) And then there’s Halloween.

When two teenage girls show up at the door without any costumes demanding candy, Larry refuses. (Jerry Seinfeld used similar material about teenagers without costumes on Halloween in his stand-up act. It’s common for comics to riff on the same subjects, especially when they have similar backgrounds.) But the girls — whose father happens to be the Wagner-hater — have their vengeance, wrapping the Davids’ trees with toilet paper and spray painting “Bald Asshole” on the front door. Larry is surprised that neither the cops nor Cheryl are terribly sympathetic to his stance against teenage non-costume-wearing trick-or-treaters. As Cheryl says, “Not everybody knows your rules, Larry.”

On the morning of her birthday, Cheryl wakes up to see a string ensemble playing in her living room. Cheryl is naturally touched at this surprising display of Larry’s romantic side — at least until Jeff shows up, expecting Larry to come golfing as planned. Yup, that sort of ruins the moment. Larry, however, makes further use of his musicians to get back at the Wagner-hater and his teenage delinquent daughters, by serenading them with Wagner from the front lawn. Yes, the Jews can be a stiff-necked people, as God tells Moses.

While the episode doesn’t address the season’s story arc, it does plant the seed for its development when Jeff mentions that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is looking for a project.

EPISODE FOUR

The Shrimp Incident / Original Airdate: October 14, 2001 / Directed by David Steinberg

David Steinberg takes the director’s seat for a very funny episode, even if it’s one that begins by showing Larry as a less-than-sensitive husband. Larry and Cheryl are planning to go out for Chinese food, but Cheryl wants to stop first at an upscale bar and have a drink. Larry refuses, arguing that she can get the same drink at the restaurant. Cheryl wants to make a night of it, Larry is dumb as a board about the idea, and in the end Cheryl is so disgusted that she doesn’t want to go at all and Larry agrees to get takeout. The sweet, more affectionate Larry of the previous episode seems to have curled up and died.

A mix-up over Chinese food orders is the catalyst that propels this episode’s story lines. Larry gets home, discovers he has brought back the wrong order, returns to the restaurant, and finds out that his order was taken by Allan Wasserman, president of HBO. This is the same Allan Wasserman who green-lighted Larry’s HBO special that spawned the show — the special that Larry got out of by claiming his stepfather was in an accident, a lie that comes back to bite him in this episode. Discovering that several shrimp are missing from a dish, Larry believes that Allan Wasserman ate them before returning the order. If this isn’t a Seinfeldian idea, then I don’t know my chocolate babkas from my Junior Mints.

In the first season, Julia Louis-Dreyfus looked deliberately drab, hair pulled back, unmade-up. But here, as Larry goes to tell her of his sitcom idea, she looks like the big-haired, energetic Elaine we remember. She likes the idea but demurs, saying perhaps it’s more suited to Jason Alexander because he played such an “idiot” on the show. The two of them have some fun dissing Jason: “Between you and me,” Larry smirks, “George was the only character that Jason could do.” Julia agrees she’s more versatile and jumps onboard. Their tentative title for the show: Aren’t You Evelyn?

The first hitch arrives immediately with Julia’s suggestion that they pitch it to HBO so that her character can say “fuck” and “cocksucker.” But the meeting doesn’t exactly go well when instead of pitching the show, Larry — a master of getting his priorities bass ackwards — takes the opportunity to accuse Wasserman of stealing his shrimp. The argument escalates and Wasserman throws his well-timed bomb: “Take your four hundred and seventy-five million dollars and buy some shrimp!”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus shows herself to be a convincing actor in the aftermath when she looks both angry and upset about Larry’s behavior. She gives a very funny line that might be remembered well by anybody who wants to get into show business: “Everybody steals shrimp and everybody lies about it. This is Hollywood.” Indeed, of all the actors on the show so far — including the regulars — Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the only one who rivals Larry for a strong screen presence. Julia offers a solution. She and her husband (that is, her real-life husband, SNL alumnus and television writer Brad Hall) play in a regular poker game with an HBO guy named Michael Halbreich. Larry and Cheryl can join the game and Larry can make nice with Michael (played by Sam Pancake, who has made recurring appearances on Kitchen Confidential, Lovespring International, Will & Grace, and Arrested Development).

Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than seeing Larry’s antisocial behavior is watching him act excessively social. He doesn’t seem to quite understand the rules that everyone else lives by, and his attempts at joviality can sometimes go a little over-the-top. Alas, such is the case at the poker game when Michael Halbreich, a married man despite some telegraphed signs that he might be gay, folds when he should have stayed in. Julia wins on a bluff, everyone shouts and moans in disbelief, and Larry tops them all. “You cunt!” he says over and over to Michael. In Larry’s mind this is a friendly way of saying that Michael acted like a sissy, but not only is Michael offended, so are the women at the table who now think Larry is a misogynist. He refuses to apologize and the game breaks up.

What is perhaps a little strange is that Cheryl, although naturally annoyed, doesn’t herself act offended. Maybe she’s less the feminist than she pretends or maybe she just knows Larry too well. She’s so unoffended, in fact, that in the car she plays a little game of theirs with Larry (the first time we’ve heard of it) where he pretends to hit her. Weird game, but then there’s no accounting for what couples do. Unfortunately, the dentist from the poker game who called Larry a misogynist sees them and thinks it’s real. He tells the HBO people and the new television series is dead in the water.

Misogyny and wife-beating — riskier material for comedy, but Larry David pulls it off, even if he doesn’t come across as quite as likable as he did in season one. Cheryl David looks rather meek and passive here, which is perhaps more disturbing than anything Larry says. And maybe it’s also why, when a social worker arrives at the door asking if she wants to press charges, Cheryl is still thinking about it as the show ends.

EPISODE FIVE

The Thong / Original Airdate: October 21, 2001 / Directed by Jeff Garlin

We all know that deep down, beyond the glib facade, the refusal to connect, there’s a deep, wounded person in Larry David — or at least, the Larry David character. If we only had a chance to see him somewhere else, say with his therapist, we would see the truth. And in this episode we get just that chance.

And what is Larry talking to the therapist about? Sneakers. Or more precisely, why he prefers gray sneakers over white or black.

So maybe we were wrong. Dr. Weiss (played by John Pleshette, perhaps best known for the role of Richard Avery on Knots Landing) does manage to shift Larry from the subject of sneakers to Cheryl’s discontent. When Larry admits they don’t do very much together, Dr. Weiss suggests that he take Cheryl to the beach.

Here’s a fact that you wouldn’t know without watching Curb Your Enthusiasm: eighty-five percent of all sunblock is bought by Jews. Or so Larry guesses. Although he has agreed to go to the beach at Santa Barbara, he can’t help complaining while there — at least until stopped by the sight of none other than Dr. Weiss himself. An older, pudgy man, Dr. Weiss is wearing a thong bathing suit. Naturally Larry makes an instant decision to stop seeing him. Is this merely an excuse, a result of his discomfort at the beach and a desire to put the blame on the good doctor? Possibly. Or maybe Larry just hates seeing an unfit man in a thong. Can’t blame him, really.

A slight problem is the fact that another patient, one Richard Lewis, introduced Larry to Dr. Weiss in the first place and now Richard decides he too must quit. Unlike Larry, Richard is no doubt a good patient, someone only too happy to talk about his unhappiness, his addictions, his lousy childhood. But like two kids who insist on going (or not going) to the same summer camp, it’s all for one and one for all.

The second plot in the episode begins when Larry leaves the shrink’s office for the first time and bumps into — cue celebrity cameo — Rob Reiner. The son of Mel Brooks’s old comic partner Carl Reiner, Rob earned fame with his role in All in the Family and has had a successful directing career including the Oscar-nominated A Few Good Men (1992) as well as When Harry Met Sally (1989), The Princess Bride (1987), and Stand By Me (1986) to name but a few. As a founder of Castle Rock Entertainment, he had some minor involvement in Seinfeld from the start. In this scene, Larry reluctantly agrees to have a lunch-with-Larry auctioned off to raise money for battling a hyperactive illness called Groats syndrome.

If you ask yourself whether Groats syndrome is real, you’re not alone. It’s a fake. Maybe Larry David felt that making fun of someone with a real illness would be going too far, even for him. At least until season seven, when he deals with one of the big ones: cancer. Or maybe he just enjoyed using the last name of baseball player Dick Groat.

A man named John Tyler who has a niece with Groats pays $4,000 for the privilege and Larry, overly self-conscious about showing the man a good time during their lunch, acts rather hyperactive himself. He riffs on John’s name being the same as a president, sings like Marilyn Monroe — he’s funny but also weirdly manic, kind of like a stand-up comic on uppers. Maybe the lunch wouldn’t have been a complete disaster if Larry hadn’t insisted on starting to eat before his guest’s meal arrived. But then he wouldn’t have had to host the Groats syndrome talent night. And when John Tyler’s niece comes on to play the piano and begins speeding up and playing horribly, he wouldn’t have tried to pull her off, causing her to attack him.

Note to Larry: Are you sure you should quit Dr. Weiss?

Fans should note this is the first episode directed by Jeff Garlin. Larry David doesn’t like people to direct the same episodes they act in, but the manager is absent from this one, giving Garlin the opportunity. Instead, the more frequent director Robert B. Weide gets a chance to appear. Or at least to be an extra. That’s him backstage at the talent show — the thin, bearded guy.

EPISODE SIX

The Acupuncturist / Original Airdate: October 28, 2001 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

As Curb Your Enthusiasm goes on, one of its pleasures is the sight of guest stars who haven’t been seen on the screen for some time. Larry David clearly has a fondness for actors he would have watched in his for-mative years, especially those with comic talents. In this case it’s Ed Asner, who was best known as the crusty boss on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Asner has since become known for his support of various political causes so it’s all the more amusing to see him, now in his early seventies, as a dirty-mouthed and dirty-minded old man. He certainly looks like he’s having fun.

But before we get to C. D. Weiner, the Asner character, we are introduced to his son Barry (played by Jeremy Kramer). Once a writer on Saturday Night Live along with Larry, Barry’s fortunes have not exactly gone in the same direction. Larry discovers him working behind the counter in a deli. What makes Barry bitter is that his father, suffering from a weak heart and unlikely to last long, won’t give Barry any money until after his death. Barry asks for a loan of $5,000 just until his father dies. Larry reluctantly writes the check.

Just as interesting though is Cheryl’s reaction to the loan. She calls Barry an “asshole” who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, a mildly shocking expression considering her generally clean language and more generous feelings about people. Even more striking, she condemns her multimillionaire husband for lending him the money: “People come to you with their hand out and you can’t say no?” She even calls him a “pussy,” a milder form of the “cunt” insult that got Larry into trouble not long ago. But how do we reconcile the envelope-stuffing, left-leaning Cheryl with the character we see here? The only way is to accept her as a bundle of contradictions, as one of those rich Hollywood wives who feels good supporting causes but also hates to give up a penny. Or maybe Larry David just wants to push the character a little farther. He does seem to like to bring out everyone’s uglier side.

Larry and Cheryl get invited to a surprise party for Barry’s wife but Jeff is slow picking them up and then Cheryl makes Larry change his clothes; they end up being late. The wife sees them on the sidewalk with a gift in hand and guesses what’s up, ruining the surprise — for which Larry, naturally, gets blamed. At the party, Cheryl tells Barry’s dad C.D. about her work for the Natural Resources Defense Council and he offers to donate to the cause if Cheryl will go out for lunch with him. Whether Cheryl is too naive to pick up his sexual hints or is just ignoring them isn’t clear.

It’s been a while since Larry tried to do someone any good, but now he takes a turn with C.D., telling him a story about how he never would have created Seinfeld if his own father hadn’t supported him when he was struggling to make a living. Larry hopes that C.D. will change his will, but instead the old man, believing that Barry put Larry up to it, decides to cut Barry out entirely.

Here is where Larry uses his favorite narrative device, crossing the plots of the episode’s two stories in order to resolve them both. The other part of the episode involves Larry making a bet with a Japanese acupuncturist that he can’t cure Larry’s neck problem. (The real Larry David does have stiffness and pain in his neck.) This plot, in turn, ties into a misunderstanding Larry has with a waiter in a Japanese restaurant. And it all comes to a head when Larry returns to the restaurant, sees Cheryl and C.D. having lunch there, and gets a glass of water thrown at him by the waiter. Naturally, the waiter misses Larry and hits C.D. who promptly has a heart attack and dies, solving Barry’s problem.

This is a rather fitful episode, the acupuncture story dragged out and the character of Barry never given a chance to do much. (Is he really an “asshole” as Cheryl contends? Not as far as we’re allowed to see.) It’s Ed Asner with his lascivious looks and grumbling curses who saves the day.

EPISODE SEVEN

The Doll / Original Airdate: November 4, 2001 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

The season’s story arc — trying to get a new sitcom on the air — is an opportunity to bring in Julia Louis-Dreyfus and media types who, after all, constitute Larry David’s world these last years. But the real point of it is not the attempt to put on a show, but Larry’s secret desire not to.

The cringe factor gets upped considerably in “The Doll.” Those viewers who sometimes find themselves turning off the show because they just can’t take it might end up not seeing this one to the end (a phenomenon that Larry David did not anticipate). But for those who aren’t faint of heart, it’s a good one.

The show opens with Larry David, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Jeff Greene pitching their television idea to the executives of ABC, their second attempt following the HBO debacle. Lane Michaelson of ABC gives it the go-ahead, mentioning incidentally that Jason Alexander will be starring in a show about a motivational speaker, which was the real, short-lived Bob Patterson. Michaelson then invites them to the screening of a new ABC miniseries called Harriet Beecher Stowe. It’s a sign of the difference between the people in the show and the rest of us that what we might find exciting they consider a dull obligation.

At the screening, Larry gets into an argument with a woman about bringing his bottle of water into the theater. He has a “chest freeze” from an icy drink at the after-party then wanders upstairs in search of a bathroom that has a lock on the door. He meets the Michaelsons’ little girl who is brushing her limited edition Judy doll’s hair. (Cue Larry to give his execrable Cary Grant imitation, “Judy, Judy, Judy . . .”) When she says the doll’s hair is too long, Larry offers to cut it with his Swiss Army Knife, only to have the child scream in horror, embarrassing him in front of the other guests. This distraction causes Larry to forget to guard the downstairs lockless bathroom door, resulting in Lane Michaelson walking in on Cheryl and seeing “everything.”

It should be noted here that Larry doesn’t intend to terrorize children, at least not usually. He simply lacks a parent’s instincts or even common sense. Yet there seems something vaguely perverse about him going upstairs and cutting a doll’s hair, a theme amplified by Cheryl’s bathroom exposure. But for poor, normal (that is, sexually normal) Larry things are only going to get worse.

Jeff thinks that his own daughter, owner of dozens of dolls, may have a Judy. He and Larry sneak into Susie’s house where Larry finds the doll and pulls off its head, stuffing it into his trousers. Later they will be confronted in a classic Susie scene: “Where’s the fuckin’ head?” she screams, like they’re in some cheesy slasher film.

Larry manages to give the head to the girl’s mother and at the second miniseries screening the girl has a chance to thank Larry by putting her arms around his waist and giving him a hug. Unfortunately, at the time Larry is in the women’s washroom, the door of which Cheryl was supposed to guard but, remembering her own exposure, has decided to leave unattended. Also unfortunately, Larry has just put a plastic water bottle down his pants to hide it so he can take it into the screening. The girl runs screaming to her mother, claiming that Larry has something “hard in his pants,” and the last thing we see is Larry escaping out the bathroom window with a mob in hot pursuit. The deal with ABC is, of course, toast.

Part of the cringe factor in the episode is that the viewer is increasingly unsure of just what Larry might do next. He seems to lack the usual hesitancies, the rational checks that might warn the rest of us something isn’t a good idea. Quite possibly this has to do with the new television show and Larry’s secret desire to scuttle his own new success. He is pursuing the show not because he wants to but because the world (embodied by Cheryl) says he must do something. Because Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jeff Greene need jobs. Maybe he doesn’t really think the sitcom idea is good enough. Maybe he doesn’t want to bother. Whatever the reason, his secret desire to fail seems to be causing Larry to veer out of control.

EPISODE EIGHT

Shaq / Original Airdate: November 11, 2001 / Directed by Dean Parisot

What makes this episode funny? Is it the use of a sports celebrity? Sure, that’s part of it. But even more it’s the small moments, the asides, and throw-away lines that get the chuckles.

Let’s look at the very first scene — a restaurant. (And how many restaurant scenes are in the average episode? My guess is five. Readers are invited to count for themselves.) Larry and Cheryl are dining with two other couples, neither close friends. Everyone is talking about some fourteen-month-old kid, cooing over how adorable he is. And what does Larry say? He holds up a broccoli crown and asks what the restaurant has done with the stem. Warming to his theme, he holds up a piece of cauliflower and asks whether anyone actually eats the stuff. This has nothing to do with the story line but everything to do with Larry.

We all know that a true friend is somebody you can count on, somebody who will go out of his or her way to help you. We also know that Larry absolutely hates being asked to do anything for anyone. He abhors an obligation. Does this make him incapable of real friendship? Quite possibly. In this case, it must be admitted that the two people at the table who ask favors of him are bare acquaintances. In fact, both requests prove that they know next to nothing about Larry. A man who is an artist asks Larry to write him a letter of recommendation for a fellowship at an art museum. Not only does Larry have little interest in art, he also dislikes the artist’s geometrical work. Next a woman asks him if he will contribute a page to a book being assembled for her husband’s birthday. She suggests he write a poem. And then the scene ends with another funny moment that has nothing to do with the story. Larry, putting down money to contribute to the bill, is completely ignored. He keeps throwing down bills until he has left $115, far more than their share.

The main story line is actually set up in the locker room of the golf club, where Jeff offers his courtside Lakers tickets to Larry. But the funniest moment occurs when Larry asks the Lakers’ doctor, also in the locker room, to look at something on his back. The doctor refuses, Larry persists, and at last the doctor says, “Next time you’re in a hurry why don’t you write me a bunch of shit for free.” (Actors have said that although the show is improvised, David does give the occasional line that he wants an actor to say. This definitely sounds like one.)

Larry takes Richard Lewis to the game — the scene takes place at the Staples Center, with a big crowd in attendance. Larry stretches out his legs and accidentally trips Shaquille O’Neal, injuring him. Richard Lewis gets off a good line as photographers crowd around: “It’s not an assassination attempt, for God’s sake.” Larry’s image is thrown up on the big screen and he’s booed by the crowed. The story makes the news and there are suggestions that Larry, a Knicks fan, tripped Shaq deliberately. At home the phone won’t stop ringing and on the street people call him “asshole.” The Lakers take away Jeff’s seasons tickets. Remorseful, he asks Jeff what he can do. “Buy the team!” screams Jeff.

The story though turns out to be a playful commentary on good luck and bad — or in sports terms, on winning and losing streaks. Tripping Shaq seems like bad luck indeed, but it triggers a series of incidents that turn Larry into a smiling, singing man. First, Cheryl’s parents, who have been visiting, decide to leave early because of all the negative attention. Then the artist from the show’s opening scene says he doesn’t need the letter of recommendation. Larry goes to visit Shaq in the hospital and a doctor tells him the blemish on his back is nothing to worry about. Shaq forgives him when Larry arrives with a cart full of Seinfeld tapes (the episode was made before their release on DVD). Larry even manages to catch the Lakers’ doctor cheating at Scattergories. Larry and Shaq happily watch the basketball star’s favorite episode, “The Contest.”

And then, just as suddenly — only this time without any trigger — Larry’s luck turns again. He gets sprayed by a passing car, receives a parking ticket, and finds out that the doctor who told him he was fine is a psychiatric patient (and what an old gag that is). Which only goes to show that luck is a fleeting thing and bound to change, one way or the other.

EPISODE NINE

The Baptism / Original Airdate: November 18, 2001 / Directed by Keith Truesdell

In what way is Larry Jewish? He obviously doesn’t practice the faith. He doesn’t keep kosher. He doesn’t even have a secular, modern nationalist (i.e. Zionist) viewpoint: witness the episode in which he taunts another Jew with music from Wagner. He does, however, have a New York accent. He’s also a Knicks’ fan (like Woody Allen). He likes Chinese food.

That seems about it. Except for one thing. He’s decidedly not a Christian. And when he and Cheryl have to go to a baptism for a Jewish man who’s converting to Christianity, Larry asks why. “You guys come to our side,” he asserts. “We don’t go to your side.”

The Jewish man is marrying Cheryl’s sister, Becky, and Larry and Cheryl are flying to Monterey to attend. Not only does Larry have no idea what a baptism is, he resents the Christian impulse to convert. As Larry says, trying to convert people to Christianity is the same as if he tried to get other people to eat lobster just because he likes it. “Eat lobster!” he shouts. “It’s good, it’s good!”

Even if it isn’t kosher.

A good deal of the episode is taken up with Larry and Cheryl trying to get to Monterey, made complicated by missing their flight due to Larry’s insistence that he drive to the airport. There’s a priceless couple’s moment when he asks Cheryl whether he should take Lincoln Boulevard. “I need Lincoln approval!” he cries, sounding like countless driving husbands before him. Suffice it to say that they arrive by the riverside in time to see the minister about to dunk the convert under the water. But Larry thinks the minister is trying to drown him, cries out, and disrupts the ceremony before it can be completed.

In the house afterward, the groom decides that he doesn’t want to convert after all — that the interruption was a sign from God. Larry is feeling pretty chagrined, at least until the groom’s Jewish relatives surround him and whisper their congratulations. Stopping the conversion was a “gutsy thing” says one, a “mitzvah [good deed] for my family” says another. And Larry basks in the glory of being a Jewish hero. “You know,” he nods sagely, “I thought something had to be done.” A woman asks if he will speak at her daughter’s bat mitzvah. This is very funny stuff, even if it does mean the marriage is off. Looks like Larry feels some Jewish solidarity after all.

In order for the story to work — Larry the character has to lose the plane tickets and then accidentally turn off their telephone answering service — Larry the director uses a couple of exceedingly minor subplots. One involves giving Larry’s maroon jacket to a homeless person. The other has Richard Lewis accusing Larry of stealing his outgoing telephone message that he claims he wrote in “Paris.” Regrettably, we never get to hear the message.

EPISODE TEN

The Massage / Original Airdate: November 25, 2001 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

In this last episode of the season, Larry David needs to bring the story arc to its conclusion. So it’s not surprising that the opening scene is Larry and Julia and Jeff discussing the sitcom. Losing first HBO and then ABC has drained Julia’s enthusiasm and she doesn’t want to do the show anymore. But Larry and Jeff convince her to make one final pitch to CBS. Larry tells her that he’ll do all the work; she won’t have to say a word. She agrees.

Something else isn’t very surprising about the episode. Jeff and Larry pass a man wearing a sandwich board that says I AM A SHOPLIFTER. The man, says Jeff, is undergoing what’s called “scarlet letter punishment.” Many viewers will guess that Larry himself is going to end up with just such a sign on him. The question is how will it happen? (Larry David seems to have got the idea from a Tennessee judge who sentenced shoplifters to standing with signs in front of the stores they stole from.)

It’s extraordinary how often innocent Larry is taken for being some kind of sexual pervert. You might say that he gets to experience none of the fun with all of the guilt. Jeff sends him to a massage therapist because he’s too tense and when the redheaded woman is almost done she asks Larry if he wants her to “finish” him off. Sure, he says, only to find himself being sexually stroked by the woman’s expert hands. He manages to croak out “stop” — which Jeff, when told about it, finds hard to believe. As does the writer, actor, comedian Mike Binder, whom Jeff happens to be having a meeting with. In fact Mike — offended that Larry doesn’t watch his television show — says his story is like one of his episodes. Indeed, there was an episode involving a masseuse on Binder’s two-season-long series, Mind of the Married Man. When Larry David found out, he asked Binder to come on Curb.

Larry’s greatest fear is that Cheryl will find out. And how will she find out? The psychic she’s going to might tell her. That Larry believes a psychic is real seems out of character, but no matter. In fact, he’s so worried that it’s all he can think about at the pitch meeting, where the CBS executive is played by SNL veteran Nora Dunn. Julia has to do all the selling and CBS says yes.

How Larry ends up wearing the sandwich board starts earlier in the episode, when he refuses to do a “stop and chat” with the maître d’ of an upscale restaurant called Moho. It happens to be the same restaurant that Cheryl takes Larry to as a special evening, even hiring a limousine to drive them. Cheryl is trying to create a romantic evening, but Larry is once again oblivious to her intentions — unless he unconsciously wishes to destroy them. Either way he spends the entire meal fretting about the limousine driver waiting for them (he refers to his own days as a driver, a job Larry David actually had) and decides to bring him some leftovers. But the previously insulted maître d’ catches Larry with a fork in his pocket, calls the police, and before you know it Larry is displaying a sign with the words I STEAL FORKS FROM RESTAURANTS emblazoned on it. As he walks back in forth in front of the restaurant, the executives of all the networks arrive — including CBS, which promptly drops the show. An ignoble end to the season certainly, but since Larry has given every indication that he doesn’t want to do the show, not really an unhappy one.

Season Three

EPISODE ONE

Chet’s Shirt / Original Airdate: September 15, 2002 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

This first episode of the new season has to get the story arc started, but it’s busy with a lot of other stuff as well. It might even have the most stories of the season.

The emotions and rituals around a death were a good setting to show the callous self-regard of those lovable Seinfeld characters, and the same goes for Curb. (As we shall see, however, an upcoming episode with a death that affects Larry more closely is a different matter.)

In this case, the deceased is the husband of Cheryl’s friend Barbara, who after four months — not a long time, despite what Larry thinks — is still having a hard time coping with everyday life. When Larry goes over to pick up Cheryl, he can barely manage to fake some sympathy. Instead he notices a picture of Chet, the dead husband, and exclaims, “I love that shirt. That’s exactly the kind of shirt I would wear, don’t you think?” He pesters Barbara until she finally remembers the store where Chet bought it. And in the next scene there’s Larry, happy as a clam, walking down the street with Jeff in the identical two-tone shirt.

This seems as good a place as any to note another conventional aspect of Cheryl and Larry’s marriage. Even though Cheryl has a car, Larry always drives, and often picks her up from places.

It’s not clear exactly who brought the new restaurant idea to Larry, but he and Jeff both decide to join the investors, who include Ted Danson and a remarkably young- and uncomfortable-looking Michael York. At least the restaurant business is a cut above Larry selling cars, but at his first investors’ meeting he makes some inane suggestions — such as a bell on each table for customers to ring when they want their waiter’s attention. As always, Larry focuses his attention on the small, distracting, or even ridiculous details. Another time he will suggest applesauce as a side dish, claiming that it is seriously underrated. It’s a wonder that the other investors agree to let Larry find uniforms for the waiters. (One of the fun aspects of the season is that we get to see the progress of the restaurant, from a raw space in this episode to the handsome, finished dining place in the last, complete with open kitchen.)

Watching Larry and Jeff looking at clothes for the waiters is one of those nice, small scenes that is full of chuckles. Every shirt that Larry suggests is ridiculous — a golf shirt, a checked shirt to match the tablecloths. The one he goes with has military-style epaulettes, reminding Larry of meals in the mess hall when he was in the reserves. There’s even one of those funny, throwaway conversations, this one with a fellow patient at Larry’s dentist, nicely played by the SNL, Second City veteran and comedy instructor Chris Barnes. Sensibly, the other investors reject Larry’s choice (people will think the restaurant is serving airline food) over Jeff’s suggestion of a simple blue shirt over slacks.

The restaurant meetings are an occasion for Larry to have another altercation in his uneasy friendship with Ted Danson. Life, Larry might say, is conflict, and there’s no reason that friendships shouldn’t be full of emotional and sometimes physical tussles as well. After Ted admires Larry’s new shirt, Larry picks one up for him. But when Ted discovers the shirt has a hole in it, he asks Larry to take it back to the store. Larry says it’s Ted’s responsibility. I’m pretty sure most people would find Ted in the right. As Ted says, Larry had a “nice thought” and then ruined it.

The animosity between the two carries on to the birthday party that Ted is giving for his five-year-old daughter, Jill. The party has a Wizard of Oz theme and Ted has asked Larry, Cheryl, and Jeff to play characters in costume — the cowardly lion, the tin man, and Dorothy. Angered by the shirt incident, Ted takes the role of the lion away from Larry and tells him to play the tin man. Larry refuses, not caring if he disappoints Jill. He even calls Ted an asshole in front of the girl, only spelling out the word. But apparently the kid is a good speller and takes the opportunity of swinging at a piñata to smack Larry in the mouth. (Later Larry delivers some pretty funny lines about the “dangerous” pleasures of the piñata.)

The continuation of the shirt plot is almost a little too Seinfeld-esque: Larry has his own shirt ruined by Barbara when she sees the shirt and, reminded of her dead husband, tearfully hugs Larry, staining it with her makeup. Larry has a backup from the store and he and Ted end up wrestling for it, tearing the shirt in half. That moment is forced, but overall this is a good episode, with all the actors sharp and witty. It’s a good start to the season.

Oh, one more word about that wrestling match with Ted. It is awfully like Larry’s various grappling encounters with Richard Lewis. How is it that Larry is always becoming physical with his male friends? Is there some homoerotic impulse at work here?

I can just imagine Larry’s face at the very idea.

EPISODE TWO

The Benadryl Brownie / Original Airdate: September 22, 2002 / Directed by Larry Charles

Let’s get one thing straight. Larry does not live in the ordinary world that the rest of us travel through. Oh, his world touches on the ordinary world whenever he talks to a waiter or needs his television repaired (as in this episode). But he really knows nothing about the lives of such people. He lives in a world where you take it for granted that your friends are famous. Larry does know people who have tried and failed to be famous, but they aren’t really his friends. It’s a world where you need to fuss over the amount of a tip or the price of a meal because otherwise money has no meaning since it is endlessly available. A world where going to the Emmy Awards sounds like a giant yawn.

The Emmys are where Richard Lewis is going to take his new girlfriend Debra — something that she, at least, is looking forward to. Before that though, Larry asks Richard and Debra for dinner so that afterward they can all watch a cut of Richard’s new comedy special before the final edit is locked in. The new restaurant’s chef, Randy, prepares dinner, but Debra turns out to be allergic to peanuts and her face swells up (something which we never actually see on screen). The problem is that she’s a Christian Scientist and cannot take any medicine.

The real energy in this episode comes from the conversations between Richard and Larry. Richard thinks that he may be in love with Debra’s “soul” but nevertheless — as Larry teases — he doesn’t want to be seen at the Emmys with Debra in her present swollen condition. The two of them talking about Christian Scientists has them in rare agreement; neither can fathom the idea of not taking medicine. Whether they are arguing vehemently or nodding in agreement, they look like the old friends they in fact are.

A plot is hatched to get Debra to eat a cookie laced with Benadryl, the medicine that will rid her of the allergy symptoms and make her presentable at the Emmys. Susie Essman, holder of the secret family brownie recipe, is remarkably subdued in her refusal to give it to Larry. Apparently the separation from Jeff has taken something out of her. Maybe calling someone a “fat fuck” is a sign of love, for Susie will not regain her wonderfully foul-mouthed energy until she and Jeff are back together. Cheryl has to be induced to make the brownies instead, but proving herself to have few domestic skills, they come out tasting horrible and Debra refuses to eat them. Richard ends up having to take her, swollen head and all, to the Emmys. Larry and Cheryl watch as the fork-tongued Joan Rivers calls them over to the red carpet, only to take one look at Debra and call her a “hemorrhoid.”

A subplot of the episode involving the TV repairman and Cheryl’s friend Wanda might be titled “The Continuing Saga of Larry and Black People.” Much funnier though is watching Larry at a Christian Science prayer meeting where Debra’s mother invites him to join the circle. Larry has to hold hands with two men and the look of squeamish revulsion on his face is a Kodak moment.

EPISODE THREE

Club Soda and Salt / Original Airdate: September 29, 2002 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Season three started well, but with this episode it starts to shift into a higher comic gear. It’s also highly educational. Not only do we learn about the rules of wedding gifts, but we are also offered a helpful household hint.

Jealousy has been a ripe subject for both tragedy and comedy since — well, basically since theater was invented. The Greeks, Shakespeare, eighteenth-century French farce, not to mention the development of the sitcom, have all used it. And now it’s Larry’s turn.

The reason for Larry’s jealousy is an actor named Brad who has become Cheryl’s tennis partner. When Larry walks into the house and finds the two, post-game, having a beer, the moment is an awkward one. But not just for Larry; Cheryl herself acts discomfited, as if caught doing something wrong. It seems quite possible that this friendship, though harmless, has some boy-girl attraction to it. (Brad is played by Josh Temple, a graduate of the improv group Bay Area Theater Sports and a host of such reality shows as America’s Toughest Jobs, which also demands strong improvisational skills.)

An old-school type when it comes to marital relations, Larry strongly objects to their friendship. Of course Brad wants to sleep with her, he tells Cheryl. Maybe he’ll get himself a “heterosexual single woman” to play golf with. Later he tells Jeff about the incident and his manager can always be trusted to confirm his view of things. Jeff is like Ed McMahon to Larry’s Johnny Carson. Jeff asks what the guy is even doing in Larry’s house. But really, in this age, a man or a woman can’t have a single friend of the opposite sex? This has to be a threat? No, it does not. Unless, of course, the guy is actually after your wife.

Which turns out to be the case. In order to get rid of Brad Larry offers to play tennis with Cheryl (in a moment in which they have their first onscreen kiss), only to complain during the game that whenever she makes a shot she grunts like “pigs fucking.” (Actually she does.) Unfortunately for Larry, taking a beating on the tennis court does not keep Brad away. He invites Cheryl to see him in a production of Tony and Tina’s Wedding. Cheryl clearly wants to go alone, but Larry insists on coming.

For anyone who has seen this noisy, “interactive” play in which the audience becomes the guests at the wedding, the theater scenes are hilarious. In the bathroom Larry encounters Brad, wearing a tuxedo and speaking in the Italian-accented voice of his character, Angelo. But when he tells Larry that Tina doesn’t love Tony but instead loves him and that one day he’ll be slipping her the “salami,” Larry takes this (correctly, it seems) as a message about Cheryl. And a challenge.

Before we get to the climax of this modern day Othello, we have to follow no less than three subplots that will converge with it. One has the chef Randy quitting over the pressure of opening a new celebrity-magnet restaurant, leaving the investors to find another. During the investors’ meeting, Larry learns about an old restaurant trick for getting out stains in fabric with club soda and salt. Ted suggests his family chef, but when Larry goes over for a meal he finds it “too saucy.” Then he asks the disappointed chef for some dessert and decaf.

In the second plot, Larry and Cheryl have forgotten to give a wedding gift to a couple they know. They had already given an engagement gift, a shower gift, and even flew to Chicago for the wedding. But when they buy a $300 bottle of wine, the couple refuses to accept it. One year is the “cutoff” for wedding gifts, they assert, and the Davids have missed the date.

The third subplot begins with Larry getting into an argument with a saleswoman for following him around a store, and then the saleswoman calls the cops on Larry when she believes he is trailing her in his car. All these plots provide necessary pieces to the episode’s climax in a restaurant after Tony and Tina’s Wedding. Larry has brought with him the $300 bottle of wine, but when the saleswoman’s husband (they happen to be at the restaurant) sees Larry and attacks him, a glass gets spilled on Cheryl’s shirt. Even as Larry fends off the husband, he looks over with horror as Brad — who knows the same household hint — pours club soda and salt onto Cheryl’s shirt and then begins to vigorously rub her breast with his hand. Cue the end music.

What makes this bright, lively episode work is that the jealousy theme is in fact quite believable — both Cheryl’s flirtation and Larry’s response. This is also the first episode in some time in which some real affection is visible between the two of them — a stark contrast to last season’s strained relationship. Larry David seems to be going for a warmer feel these days.

The episode is also notable for having the first reference to Larry’s parents. He has found them a nearby apartment and his mother, who is ill, is to be treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Casually dropped into the conversation, this information is the beginning of the setup for what will prove to be the best episode of the show to date.

EPISODE FOUR

The Nanny from Hell / Original Airdate: October 6, 2002 / Directed by Larry Charles

It is often in social situations that Larry finds himself in trouble and it’s worth pausing for a moment to ponder why. Is it because he has no social smarts, lacks the human understanding necessary to say the right thing, avoid insulting others, etc.? Or is it that Larry knows better and doesn’t care, perhaps considering himself superior to the rules that others live by?

The answer is both.

Witness the two errors he makes at a pool party held by one of the restaurant investors, Hugh Mellon. (Mellon is played by Tim Kazurinsky, another in a long line of SNL vets.) Mellon is a publisher and, judging by his enormous property and beautiful pool and house, a hugely successful one. He has instructed his staff to tell guests to use the washroom in the cabana rather than in the house, but Larry, in this case holding himself superior, insists on breaking the rule. The family nanny guards the back door, but Larry cajoles and wheedles his way past her. This is an example of Larry thinking that rules shouldn’t apply to him. The other incident involves Hugh Mellon’s son. The little boy swims naked and when he gets out Larry notices what a large penis the boy has. “Veys mir,” Larry mutters, the first time he has ever used a Yiddish expression. Others notice too, but Larry is the only one who thinks to mention it to the father, expecting him to accept it as a compliment rather than some rude violation. In this latter case it’s simply Larry’s social stupidity.

When Hugh Mellon finds out that Martine the nanny (played by Cheri Oteri, another SNL alumnus) allowed someone into the house, he fires her. So she comes to Larry’s house, expecting to be taken care of. Larry takes her to Jeff and Susie’s house for an interview, because the two have reconciled over the news that Susie is pregnant. But it turns out that Martine is mentally challenged and goes unhinged when she hears the musical theme from the Looney Tunes cartoon series. Making fun of mentally ill people is, to say the least, a tricky business, but it helps that Martine just seems empty-headed rather than ill in any recognizable way. Still, it’s a plot more weird than truly funny. (File it between Eugene Levy’s damaged character in A Mighty Wind and the mentally handicapped woman Michael Bluth becomes engaged to in Arrested Development.) Martine attacks Susie, knocking her off a balcony, but Susie is saved when she lands on a pile of sponge cakes Larry had brought over earlier for Jeff. Okay, the sponge cakes are funny.

This is quite a good episode, if mostly for the small details, such as Larry suggesting applesauce as a restaurant side dish. Or Richard Lewis believing that he invented the phrase “the blank from hell.” Or Jeff (who has been getting very little to do these days) taking a bite and saying, “It’s like a delicious sponge!”

And really, who doesn’t like sponge cake?

EPISODE FIVE

The Terrorist Attack / Original Airdate: October 13, 2002 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

How soon after 9/11 can a show make jokes about a terrorist attack? For Larry David it’s thirteen months almost to the day. As with other difficult subjects though, Larry does not make fun of the subject itself but rather the behavior of his characters.

Although Larry David himself has never mentioned The Larry Sanders Show, it is hard to believe that it wasn’t a major influence on Curb Your Enthusiasm. One of its traits — the use of many guest stars playing versions of themselves — has been a part of Curb from the start, but this episode has more guest stars than any other to date. Paul Reiser, Martin Short, Alanis Morrissette — they’re all here, folks.

At a restaurant called Barsac (which will be used as a setting in other episodes) the Davids are meeting Stu and Susan Braudy. (Stu is played by Don Stark, best known for his afro-topped role on That ’70s Show. Susan is played by Amy Aquino, known for her roles on ER and several other series.) On their way in, Larry and Cheryl pass Paul Reiser and his wife Mindy at a table. (Paul appears as himself, but Mindy is an actress playing Reiser’s wife.) Comics, of course, have different styles and this brief exchange between Paul and Larry is an enlightening example of that. Larry David is not a particularly quick thinker and certainly not a quick talker. His ideas are often rather convoluted and need to be elaborated in sentences and paragraphs. But Paul Reiser is quick, cutting — a comic capable of getting off an aggressive zinger. “No reason to touch,” he says when Larry puts his hand on Paul’s shoulder. When Larry tries to explain his restaurant investment by recalling the days when they used to hang out at the comedy clubs, Paul jumps in with, “Yes, but I didn’t invest. I just went there and I left. I didn’t lock up.” He’s very funny, but there’s a comic’s edge of competition in the air.

It turns out that the Reisers and the Braudys aren’t speaking to one another. Just as important for the plot is Larry neglecting to say hello to Mindy Reiser. But the immediate drama of the scene is the question of who is going to pick up the check. Stu Braudy, it turns out, always uses “the bathroom trick” — disappearing just as the check arrives. And bingo, he does it again. But it’s hard for the Davids to be mad when the Braudys are hosting a house concert with Alanis Morissette to raise money for the organization Cheryl volunteers for, the NRDC. And who was Alanis singing about in her famous song “You Oughta Know”? In fact, there has been much speculation about this Grammy-winning song. Larry offers a sly smile, assuring the group that he can get the secret from her.

Let’s face it, we don’t think of Larry David as someone who cares all that much what people think of him. But evidence shows this not to be true, for he does make the occasional gesture to prove himself a decent guy. In this show the desire — the need — to be thought well of takes on grandiose proportions. And the person Larry needs affirmation from is . . . Mindy Reiser, the very woman he ignored in the restaurant. As he himself says, she no doubt thinks he’s an asshole. Knowing what she thinks, he feels a burning need to make amends. And so when he is told a terrifying secret, a secret he must not reveal, he chooses to tell only one person. Mindy.

The secret, which Wanda tells the Davids (she has a source in the CIA), is that a terrorist attack on L.A. will occur that weekend. There’s a truly awful-wonderful scene after she leaves in which Larry says they should forget about the house concert and get out of town. When Cheryl refuses he says, “Maybe . . . ah, maybe I can go?” Cheryl suggests that it would be better for them to be together if such a terrible thing occurred, but Larry replies that at least one of them should survive. He even gently accuses her of being “selfish” for wanting him to “perish” as well. It’s a great scene, played in a brilliantly low-key manner by both Cheryl Hines and Larry David.

The only problem is that nobody, including Alanis Morissette, shows up for the concert. That’s because Larry, wanting to get on Mindy’s good side, tells her about the attack and Mindy, a well-known big mouth, tells everyone else. The Braudys and the Davids have a shouting match and afterward the concert is rescheduled for a night at Larry and Cheryl’s house, only this time the Reisers and not the Braudys are invited.

Larry insults Mindy Reiser a second time when he deserts her in her perfume shop to greet Martin Short who happens to be passing by. Short’s appearance feels a little arbitrary but he is his usual impish self as he tries to teach Larry to speak in the voice of Jiminy Glick. Meanwhile an angry Stu Braudy has bashed his car into Alanis Morissette’s so that she has to perform the concert wearing a neck brace. Larry has already won her confidence enough for her to confide in him just who “You Oughta Know” is really about and when she begins to sing it Larry slips beside Mindy Reiser to tell her. No doubt the well-kept secret will soon be public knowledge, but Larry will finally get what he needs. Mindy Reiser will like him.

The episode is a highly amusing one and it benefits from being less convoluted and more unified in its storytelling. The treatment given to the subject of a terrorist threat — or rather the characters’ very human responses — has a positive cathartic effect, providing the kind of release that only good comedy can.

EPISODE SIX

The Special Section / Original Airdate: October 20, 2002 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

According to the ratings on the film and television website The Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), the best loved episode of the third season is number eight, “Krazee-Eyez Killa.” But for my money this is the best, not only of the season, but of the first three years. There are four reasons. First, the surprise opening. Second, it’s more unified and focussed than a lot of episodes. Third, Larry actually cares about something. And finally, Shelley Berman. The man is gold, pure gold.

And what an opening! Here is Larry, ridiculously outfitted in a fair toupee, moustache, and slick suit, standing on the roof overlooking the bridges and skyline of New York City. From the beginning it’s clear he’s playing some sort of role as he berates a line of Mafia-type hoods, screaming at them, taking out a wad of bills, and slapping one in the face. “Go ahead, take the fuckin’ money,” he screams. Then he grabs one, hauls him to the edge of the roof, and begins to throw him over.

“Cut!” cries the director and the camera pans to show none other than Martin Scorsese in the director’s chair. Larry in a Scorsese film? The two consult; Scorsese wants the threat of violence to come more quickly, Larry suggests holding up a bag containing a pair of testicles. “It won’t read,” Scorsese insists, film-talk meaning the audience won’t be able to tell what it is. Rather than being grateful to have the part, Larry acts annoyed and impatient as he begins another take. “You do too many takes, Marty,” he says. “You know, Seinfeld, we did two takes and then we’re done.”

This little gibe at one of the great American directors is a joke on himself, for Larry David will often do a lot of takes for Curb. But Larry’s impatience, it turns out, has another source. He’s anxious about his mother’s health back in Los Angeles and his father hasn’t answered any of his phone calls. Larry, it seems, has a heart after all.

Rushing back to California, Larry takes a cab to the condominium he rented for his parents. At the door a surprisingly small Jewish man hugs his son. It’s the first time in the series Berman appears as Larry’s father. “How ya doing, boychickel?” What follows is a wincingly funny riff on one of the stereotypes of the Jewish mother. The first is a woman who won’t leave her son alone, constantly interfering with his life. But the second is the self-effacing mother, who refuses to be a bother, to have any negative influence on her son’s enjoyment of life. It’s the latter that Larry David plays on as his father on the show, Nat, explains that his mother explicitly told him not to bother Larry while he was having a good time in New York. Turns out his mother took a turn for the worse and ended up in the hospital, but according to Nat she isn’t there anymore. So she’s better? Larry wants to know. His father hems and haws in embarrassment. “So after a day or two, nobody goes on forever and ever . . .” At last Larry says, “She’s dead?” “Ah, yeah,” his father finally admits.

Not only did he not call Larry when his mother became more ill, he didn’t call him to attend the funeral either. In fact, her last words before dying were not to call Larry and interrupt his good time. So everyone was there — everyone but Larry. Even his cousin Andy, who is staying with his father and now appears. “I missed the funeral because she told you not to call me? That’s what you’re telling me?”

Shelley Berman plays the role of Nat with a wonderful old-world gentility and a slight formality of diction rather than a heavy Yiddish accent and the usual shrieking. Cousin Andy, on the other hand, is played by Richard Kind, a shticky actor with a wide mouth who is an alumnus of the Los Angeles Second City and is best known for his recurring roles on Mad About You and Spin City. He has since had a major role as troubled Uncle Arthur in the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-nominated film A Serious Man (2009). Kind is a natural comedian with a very Jewish demeanor and his needling Larry for not calling him when he was in New York is very good indeed. In fact, this whole extended scene is a comic marvel.

If there is a bright side to anything, even the death of your mother, Larry is sure to find it. At home, Cheryl goes over the messages accumulated while they were in New York. They are supposed to have dinner with a couple called the Mandels, but Larry tells her to cancel it. When she offers Larry’s mother’s death as an excuse and the people sympathize, a light goes on in Larry’s head. He has found the perfect excuse to get out of anything he wants. Immediately he makes a bunch of calls to cancel arrangements, even getting out of a bat mitzvah he’d been dreading. On the street, he gets out of a “stop and chat” and later when Cheryl doesn’t want to have sex, he half sobs, “I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,” and she takes him in her arms. It’s a tender moment even as it shows the opportunistic side of Larry.

The truth is, we all like a little sympathy now and then, but Larry’s turmoil over his mother’s death is not over. Visiting the cemetery, he finds to his shock that her coffin has been moved to a “special section” of ground that has not been consecrated. It seems that his mother had a tattoo on her buttock, which is against Jewish law (it’s in Leviticus, you can look it up). That it is highly unlikely a Jew of his mother’s age would have one is perhaps best glossed over. To Larry this is an outrage and he conspires with the gravedigger to secretly move her grave, passing him a wad of money. The man takes the money but even so he makes Larry, his father, cousin Andy, and Jeff do the digging.

That Larry would feel so passionate about his mother’s resting place adds . . . well, not a poignancy, but a strong purpose to the episode. The way it backfires, and of course it will, is that the wad of money Larry gives to the gravedigger turns out to be the phony bills used in the Scorsese movie. The gravedigger calls the cops on him.

From the surprise opening to the more typical ending, everything in this episode works. Shelley Berman has become adorable in old age, and his comic timing is impeccable. Small moments, such as Larry arguing with Andy about whether L.A. has Chinese food as good as New York, add greatly to the episode’s portrait of a believable Jewish family. A subplot about meditation and mantras with Richard Lewis is not at the same level, but it’s not bad either. Mark this one a classic.

EPISODE SEVEN

The Corpse-Sniffing Dog / Original Airdate: October 27, 2002 / Directed by Andy Ackerman

You have to feel a little sorry for Jeff Greene, Larry’s manager. Okay, he cheated on his wife. But does that mean he should get so few good moments on the show, nothing compared to Larry’s other best friend, Richard Lewis? And now that he’s on the straight and narrow, he has to constantly suffer with allergies from the German shepherd that Susie took in. And Oscar the dog (who Larry seems to genuinely like, calling him “Oskey” and scratching his ears all the time) gets more screen time here than Jeff.

First there are the Braudys. The Davids have a makeup dinner with them where Stu finally picks up the check. They’re looking for a dog and Larry figures he can do a good deed for them and Jeff by helping the Braudys to take Oscar. The good will is marred somewhat, though, by Susan Braudy feeling insulted when Larry thanks Stu for dinner but refuses to thank her. Stu’s the one with the job, he says. He made the money.

It isn’t that Larry doesn’t like children. In fact he seems to like them, if not quite as much as dogs. But he doesn’t really focus on them, clue in to what is going on with them — which is what happens when he goes to see Sammy, Jeff’s young daughter, and convinces her she should give up the dog for her daddy’s sake. Sammy drinks a glass of wine Larry has poured, thinking it’s grape juice. Although she looks and sounds clearly soused, Larry only thinks that she has suddenly developed a speech impediment. She drunkenly agrees to give up the dog and Larry gives it to the Braudys.

But not before the dog visits the restaurant, which is three days away from opening. Oscar begins barking and scratching, and since he is a trained corpse-sniffing dog the police are called and insist on digging up the earth. Eventually they find only a bra (rather anticlimactic), but the opening is set back weeks. All the investors are crushed — all but Larry, who gleefully realizes that there now will be time to put the splash guards between the urinals that he wants. It’s hard not to think that one of the reasons for Larry’s lightheartedness in these matters is all that money he’s sitting on. If he lost his entire investment it would have been worth it just for the diversion. But for others it matters a whole lot more.

Jeff’s wife Susie has been rather subdued for a couple of episodes but Jeff moving back in seems to have returned her to her old self. “You sick fuck,” she blasts Larry for getting Sammy drunk. “She stinks like a fucking wino.” Susie gives him his marching orders; get the dog back.

Larry insists on saying what he honestly feels with two exceptions: one is when he is under physical threat; the other is when he is trying to get himself out of a jam. So now he returns to the Braudys and apologizes to Susan for not having thanked her too for paying for their dinner. Never has such insincerity oozed from Larry’s lips. “You raise kids, that’s a full-time job,” he says. Eventually she sees through him, but with the help of a dog whistle he gets Oscar back anyway.

After the sublime heights reached by the previous two episodes this one is a bit of a drop, but then greatness can’t be achieved all the time. The two finest moments are rather small ones. The first has Larry interviewing a prospective chef named Phil whom Larry takes to immediately because he is bald. The two have a knowing conversation about baldness as only two club members can — when did you start losing it, the need for sunscreen, etc. Their shared hatred of men who try to cover up with hats or, even worse, toupees has some great give and take between Larry and the actor Ian Gomez, a frequent television performer who learned his improv skills in Chicago. “I’m surprised Hitler didn’t round up the toupee people,” Larry says.

The other moment is Jeff’s finest performance in ages and it’s a wordless one. Shot from above, it shows Jeff arriving home. Larry appears with Oscar and he and Jeff confer a moment. Then Jeff goes into the house, gets his bag, and throws it into the car. And you know that he’s going back to the hotel where he’s been living to get away from the dog. The resignation and defeat are in the slump of his shoulders. Words are not necessary.

EPISODE EIGHT

Krazee-Eyez Killa / Original Airdate: November 3, 2002 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Larry David has said that improvising allows him to bring other voices into the show, voices that he himself couldn’t write. His example was Chris Williams playing the rap star Krazee-Eyez Killa and it’s a good one all right.

At a garden party Wanda is showing off the big rock on her finger, for she has just become engaged to the rich rapper. Give Larry credit; when Krazee-Eyez recites a new rap about coming after a guy that’s full of violent sexual imagery Larry just listens appreciatively. He even offers a suggestion. “I would lose the ‘mother fucker’ at the end. Because you already said fuck once, you don’t need two fucks.” He suggests “bitch” instead. Krazee-Eyez likes the suggestion of substituting the word “bitch” so much that he declares Larry to be his “nigger.” For a change Larry proves himself to be uncharacteristically open-minded and even relatively at ease around a black person — at least until the subject matter of the conversation changes.

“You like eatin’ pussy?” Krazee-Eyez wants to know. The rapper certainly claims to, preferring to sample many “flavors.” When it comes to infidelity Larry has always been disapproving and now he points out that once married to Wanda, Krazee-Eyez will have to be faithful. Not to worry, Krazee-Eyez assures him, Wanda will never find out. As for Larry’s own liking for the act of cunnilingus, he admits to being “too lazy” and finding it a “whole to-do.” Besides, it hurts his neck. Seems there’s a little of Kramer in Larry; remember when he admitted to preferring a woman on top (“Let her do the work”)?

The engine of the story is Larry’s fear that Cheryl or someone else will tell Wanda about Krazee-Eyez’s cheating and that the rapper will think that Larry told and come after him. The second story line has Larry needing to do some reshoots on the Scorsese film. The only problem is that Cheryl got rid of the jacket he wore and needs again. Larry finds another in a store on Melrose but ends up insulting the salesperson by insisting on folding up a sweater. He gets thrown out without the jacket. This device of Larry needing something but shooting himself in the foot was used a lot in the first season and is a tad stale.

But all things work out in the end. The costume person on set has another jacket, Larry makes up with Cheryl — who heard about his attitude to oral sex — by performing the act on her. Or almost works out: during his filming for Scorsese, Larry begins to make an awful choking, throat-clearing noise. One of Cheryl’s pubic hairs is caught in his throat.

This may have been the season’s most popular show and no doubt it’s Chris Williams’s funny, energetic performance as Krazee-Eyez that gives it such appeal. Watching him give Larry a tour of his house where he points out even the floor, made out of “some floor shit,” is certainly a highlight. Although just as good is an earlier scene in which Larry refuses to take a tour of Jeff and Susie’s new home in Larry’s neighborhood (another enormous, bland house). “Get the fuck out of my house right now!” Susie yells. Essman is in fine form these days. The pubic-hair-caught-in-throat is certainly an uncomfortable gag (in both meanings of the word), the kind Larry David likes to foist on us now and then. And it feels somewhat humiliating for poor Cheryl. But as can be seen in the next episode, Larry David is far from finished using this gag to make us uncomfortable.

EPISODE NINE

Mary, Joseph and Larry / Original Airdate: November 10, 2002 / Directed by David Steinberg

What is more uncomfortable, having a pubic hair caught in your throat or being a Jew at Christmas? This seems to be the unlikely question asked by this very funny Christmas episode, directed by that nice Jewish boy David Steinberg.

The Christmas episode is, of course, a staple of television shows, an opportunity for family members to reconcile and a warm and cuddly feeling to be offered to the audience. By now we expect Larry to invert the normal expectations and he certainly does. All he needs to do is bring Cheryl’s parents and sister Becky to stay for Christmas.

“Hold on, a Christmas tree?” Larry says. “It’s too weird. I’m a Jew. To have a tree in the house is bad luck.” Larry might not be a practicing Jew, but he’s happy to define himself by what he is not: a Christian. But a tree the Davids get, and a whopping big one too. At least Larry has Jeff to commiserate. “It’s not going to end there,” Jeff says darkly. Larry begs off helping to decorate it and reads in bed while Cheryl’s family sing endless carols at the piano. And then he insults them by accidentally desecrating their beliefs in a manner that Freud could have written a fine paper about. He eats the cookies that they baked for a manger scene at church. He thought they were zoo animals. He thought Jesus was a “monkey.” The family screams at him, but Becky gets off the best line: “You just ate our Lord and Savior.”

Some Christmas traditions Larry doesn’t seem to mind as much. One is tipping the staff. He walks about with a mittful of bills like some Rockefeller, peeling off a few for the gardener and the housekeeper, the waiters at the club. There’s a complicated plot involving the housekeeper Dora whom Larry has to take out to lunch, and a lie to protect Jeff who seems to have made a late night call to another woman, with the result that Dora quits and Susie throws Jeff out again. And then there’s that pesky pubic hair caught in Larry’s throat. The sound he makes trying to get it out is enough to cause any viewer to run screaming from the television.

Wanting to be the big sport and make up with Cheryl and her family, Larry hires a live nativity scene — a bunch of actors dressed in period costume, complete with straw and stuffed animals. He sets them up on the lawn but when Larry comments to Joseph (or “Joe” or “Joey” as Larry likes to call him) on Mary’s sexy figure, Joseph takes offence and tackles him. In the wrestling match between them, Joseph bangs on Larry’s back, inadvertently dislodging the pubic hair from his throat. Now Larry doesn’t have to suffer from it, and we don’t have to listen to that awful sound. If only he didn’t have to look up and see Cheryl and her family standing there.

I used to go to a deli that had on its sign the words You don’t have to be Jewish. Well, you don’t have to be Jewish to laugh at Larry eating a nativity scene, ogling Mary, or wrestling with Joseph. But it might help a little. On the other hand, if some Christians were offended by Larry David’s cavalier attitude to their faith, they didn’t make much noise about it. Not this time anyway. An episode in season seven, however, will not slip by so easily.

EPISODE TEN

The Grand Opening / Original Airdate: November 17, 2002 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

The story arc last season of trying to create a new television show for Julia Louis- Dreyfus needed to come to an end in the last episode more as a matter of obligation than anything else. Viewers knew very well that the show would never get on the air. But this season is a different matter. Will the restaurant open at last? Will the opening be a disaster? Or perhaps the question ought to be — just how will the opening be a disaster? The story is stronger this season and has created some genuine buildup and even, I daresay, suspense.

Before getting to the opening, Larry David is going to make his characters jump through some hoops. One line involves the mean restaurant critic Andy Portico whose “thumbs down” can sink any new restaurant before it even has a chance. The character is clearly inspired by Roger Ebert who gave one of his own famous thumbs down to Larry David’s movie Sour Grapes. Paul Wilson — who began his acting career in the seventies and had regular roles on Cheers and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show — plays the curmudgeonly Andy Portico. Larry gets to face off with Andy in a friendly dodgeball game that turns fierce, finally throwing a shot that breaks both of Andy Portico’s thumbs.

Perhaps it’s an act of vengeance on the reviewer’s part that he suggests to Larry a chef named Guy Bernier (played by Paul Sand, recognizable for his recurring role as Rabbi Polonski on Joan of Arcadia). Once again the restaurant has lost its chef, this time because Larry discovers that his fellow baldy actually wears a toupee. Other than a few peculiarities, such as a refusal to put salmon on the menu (“I won’t buy it, I won’t broil it, I won’t bake it”), the Portico-recommended chef seems ideal. At least until the investors discover he suffers from Tourette’s syndrome and every so often begins to shout obscenities from the open kitchen that is visible to the restaurant. But Larry has seen numbers on his arm and, concluding that he’s a concentration camp survivor, won’t fire him.

There’s other busywork going on — a rift between Cheryl and Susie. Who even knew they had been friends? And Cheryl’s use of a product called “Colon Cleanse” that causes her to run out of a car wash and head for a toilet. Is it just me, or does Larry David seem to try to humiliate Cheryl these last episodes, first with the pubic hair story and now with diarrhea? But all of it leads to opening night at Bobo’s.

Orchestral music swells. We see the restaurant packed with people, including many familiar faces from episodes past, like a sort of homecoming. Customers look happy as they ring their little bells for the waiters. The investors are glowing. Even Larry’s discovery that the numbers on the chef’s arm have been written with a pen doesn’t spoil the mood. And then . . .

The chef begins to shout obscenities. He stops just as suddenly but the restaurant has grown silent. Everyone is stunned, appalled. And then Larry makes his move.

Earlier in the episode Larry had seen a group of boys who had shaved their heads in solidarity with a friend undergoing chemotherapy. He’s been touched by their act and now, remembering it, he does the same by shouting out his own obscenities. Understanding, Jeff does the same. And then Michael York. Cheryl swears too — only Susie, just entering, thinks Cheryl is swearing at her. Soon everyone is joining in. Even Larry’s father calls out, “Tuchus-licker!” Barbara the widow, Richard Lewis, and Jeff’s parents all join in, swearing and laughing and raising their glasses. Bizarrely, it’s actually a very sweet moment.

And there is Larry, smiling, in the middle of it. For this — all of this — has he made.

Season Four

EPISODE ONE

Mel’s Offer / Original Airdate: January 4, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles

In an Italian restaurant, with Cheryl looking more glamorous than usual in a black dress and pearls, the Davids talk about their upcoming tenth wedding anniversary. Cheryl wants them to renew their vows and is surprised when Larry actually agrees. But the reason for his being so amenable soon becomes clear; he remembers a promise that Cheryl made to him before they were engaged.

Flashback ten years, Cheryl with curly locks and Larry with enormous glasses and brown hair. Cheryl addresses Larry’s hesitancy about getting married by saying that if they do she will give him an unusual tenth anniversary gift: permission to have sex with another woman just one time. Back to the present, Cheryl laughs at the memory but sticks to her promise for the simple reason that she thinks Larry is incapable of picking up a woman. Later when he tells an astonished Jeff, Larry says, “She actually challenged me to do it. She was laughing at me.” And so Larry’s pursuit of a one-night stand begins. The question viewers might ask themselves throughout this little adventure is: does Larry really want to sleep with another woman? Or is he too decent, or sensible, or puritanical, or frightened (or a combination of all four) to go through with it?

Larry and Cheryl set off for a karaoke party that Larry, rather surprisingly, is looking forward to. (In real life, Larry David dislikes karaoke, which means having to look like you’re enjoying yourself.) When they walk in, Mel Brooks, looking fit and energetic, is crooning “Just in Time.” Jeff sends Larry over to a pretty woman to practice his pickup skills and his hilarious monologue on bowling — or more specifically, on buying a bowling ball — bores her into silence.

Larry’s own turn up at the microphone singing “Swanee River” shows him in surprisingly good form. (The choice of the popular 1851 Stephen Foster song is perhaps in itself a joke, since it was usually sung in blackface.) Larry’s performance earns him a meeting with Mel Brooks, one of his “idols.” He and Jeff go the next day. Mel’s receptionist is just one in a long line of receptionists and secretaries whom Larry alienates, and this time when he hears that the unsmiling woman has a “partner,” he gets off one of his most memorable phrases about marriage. “I have a wife,” Larry says. “Not exactly a partner. More like a rival.” Worthy of Bartlett’s Quotations, that one.

The meeting gets delayed when Mel Brooks smacks a door into Larry’s head, opening a wound requiring stitches. The doctor turns out to be the same actor who played the infamous library cop on Seinfeld, Philip Baker Hall. But when the meeting finally takes place Mel offers Larry the part of Max Bialystock, made famous first in the original film version of The Producers by Zero Mostel and then in the Broadway musical by Nathan Lane. Larry is understandably hesitant, but Mel assures him that he’s got what it takes. What’s more, he’ll be playing opposite Ben Stiller in the role of Leopold Bloom, which Gene Wilder played in the original movie and Matthew Broderick on Broadway. There is a Seinfeld connection: it was, of course, Ben’s father, the squat, powerhouse of an actor Jerry Stiller who played George’s father in Seinfeld. It is, indeed, a small world that Larry David lives in.

Mel may have confidence in Larry, but his associates do not. “Giant fucking mistake,” says one of his two elderly henchmen, played by the film director Paul Mazursky (Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Nor is Ben Stiller so thrilled when Larry and Cheryl run into him and his real wife Christine Taylor at the Los Angeles production of the show. “May I ask you something? You act?” Ben asks skeptically. If only Larry hadn’t refused to shake Ben’s hand after Ben sneezes — the first in a series of perceived insults that doesn’t bode well for their relationship, on or offstage.

In the production that Larry sees (and falls asleep in, due to a painkiller he has taken) the roles of Max and Leon are played by Lewis J. Stadlen and Don Stephenson, who were indeed in the show.

This is a good first episode and it’s fun to see Mel Brooks, master of comic improvisation, in his early act with Carl Reiner. Also enjoyable is Stiller, performing his well-known tightly wound persona. There are some minor subplots (one involving a man in a wheelchair) that do what they’re supposed to do even if they’re not that funny, but for the most part this episode is intended to set up the fourth season’s two arcs. It’s what comes after that counts.

EPISODE TWO

Ben’s Birthday Party / Original Airdate: January 11, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

The first two seasons of Curb gave the viewer more opportunities to cringe with embarrass- ment for Larry. But there’s no question that the scene for which this episode is named has the highest cringe factor rating of any scene to date. It’s an excruciating festival of jerkness. And when Larry’s not being a jerk, he’s being unbelievably thoughtless.

The scene has already been set up by Larry’s response to Ben’s invitation to the party. Since Ben’s actual birthday was two weeks ago, why is he bothering to have a party now? Then when he and Cheryl arrive, he discovers that he is the only one to have taken the insistence on “no presents” seriously. He tries to chat up the attractive Cady Huffman who plays the sexy Swedish secretary Ulla in The Producers (in real life, Huffman won a Tony award for the role) by complaining about Ben having a party too late. We really can’t blame her for becoming first annoyed, then bored, and finally walking away.

After that social success, Larry joins Susie and a bunch of kids in a game of broken telephone. But when a boy whispers to Larry and he has to tell everyone what he has heard, he comes up with “I love tits.” After Susie tells him off, Cheryl drags Larry away. But it seems that Larry hasn’t made enough of an impression. First, he refuses to sing “Happy Birthday” and then, holding a kabob skewer, he demonstrates a golf swing to Jeff and smacks Ben in the eye, scratching his retina.

Some of these faux pas aren’t intentional, but enough show Larry off as ungenerous and mean. Some people are forgiven for such flaws because of their enormous talent, but in the rehearsal hall for The Producers Larry doesn’t prove himself one of them. “Thank God you stopped,” says the gay choreographer Steve after watching Larry dance. At a later rehearsal Larry seems to have a series of dance steps down, but then Steve tells him the tempo has to be much, much faster. Larry tries, his face straining with effort and worry. He looks like a hopeless amateur and, for a moment at least, we feel the pressure and sympathize with him. His failing efforts to learn his lines are equally painful to watch.

This is one of those episodes without a single dominating story line. One involves Richard Lewis whose friend’s daughter wants to have breast implants. Richard calls on Larry to help him talk her out of it. Also going on is the story of Michael, the blind man from season one who has turned out to be the rehearsal pianist for the show. A short, round, balding man with a whiny voice, Michael (played by Patrick Kerr, best known for his role of Noel Shempsky on Frasier) nevertheless insists that his girlfriends must be beautiful. The only problem is that his current squeeze, Rhonda, has lied to him about being a model. In reality she’s, frankly, less than ordinary. Larry naturally tells him the truth but says, “What’s the difference what she looks like? You can’t see her anyway. That’s one of the advantages.” Eventually Michael dumps Rhonda and Larry has to be her substitute, food shopping, taking Michael to buy shoes, even taking him out for lunch (where Larry steals bites of his dessert). Larry and Cheryl go to a nightclub to hear Michael play piano and sing show tunes, but his voice is so awful that he chases everyone out of the place — everyone except Larry.

This is one of those episodes where the viewer can hardly decide whether to feel repulsion for Larry or sorry for him. Toss a coin.

EPISODE THREE

The Blind Date / Original Airdate: January 18, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles

One of the upsides of Larry’s bluntness and his lack of social grace is that he often treats people equally. And so when the blind Michael says that an attractive woman should like him because it’s what’s inside that counts (at least for her supposedly), Larry replies that he is the most superficial person he has ever met, “blind or sighted.”

Sometimes it seems that if he doesn’t think one story line is strong enough, Larry David will pile on three or four more, and this is one of those episodes. Larry’s deteriorating relationship with Ben Stiller continues when Ben gives Larry a lift and Larry refuses to move from the back seat to the front passenger seat. “I’m not going to drive you around like I’m your chauffeur. Get in the fucking front seat,” yells Ben. Hearing the two of them call each other “a baby” is not exactly mature, but it is amusing.

Then there’s Cheryl’s little cousin Stuart, a boy of perhaps thirteen. Stewart knows a card trick, which he fools Larry with. But he won’t reveal the secret, insisting that Larry is not a magician. The kid, played by Anton Yelchin (later the star of the film Charlie Bartlett), does a good deadpan. Jeff reveals to Larry that when he was masturbating the other day, Cheryl “popped” into his head, a bit of information that for some reason he thinks will flatter Larry. Larry insists that Jeff never think of her again but Jeff says a person just isn’t in control of who might “pop” in. This truth will come back to horrify Larry when, pleasuring himself at the thought of Cady Huffman, the image of Susie “pops” into his own head. Not just Susie, but Susie in a dominatrix outfit that she wore for Halloween. For Larry, sex seems to be fraught with dangers — even sex with himself.

Anxious to find a new girlfriend for Michael that will get him off chore-duty, Larry hits upon the idea of setting him up with a charming woman he meets who happens to be Muslim and wears a burka. With her face covered nobody will be able to know what she looks like, therefore giving Michael a “level playing field.” It isn’t surprising that Larry makes no effort to depict a devout Muslim authentically, since he depicts Jews, Catholics, and other groups in equally unrealistic ways. It’s a shame the date doesn’t end well.

As if all that action isn’t enough, Larry befriends a group of mentally challenged adults who are holding a car wash. The friendship is a rather long setup for a couple of lame jokes. In one, Larry is mistaken for being mentally challenged himself by Mel Brooks’s assistants. And in the other, one of the men (Judah Friedlander who plays Frank on 30 Rock) figures out the card trick that has baffled Larry. Hey, even retarded people are smarter than Larry!

Larry isn’t exactly disappointed to hear that Ben Stiller has quit The Producers. Or that his place will be taken by David Schwimmer from Friends. Bring on those guest stars!

EPISODE FOUR

The Weatherman / Original Airdate: January 25, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

This is another mishmash episode, made up of various story lines. It also continues with a theme that Larry David has been developing over the series — that the humiliations of the mind are closely related to the humiliations of the body. This episode touches on tooth decay and plaque, urination, stomach upset, back pain, and the biggest humiliation of all — death.

The first humiliation involves the mouth, for Larry has lost a crown. The dentist, Saul Funkhouser, takes a photo of the raw tooth that will end up being seen by Jeff and Susie’s daughter Sammy who will scream in terror. Saul’s elderly uncle Leo has Hodgkin’s (“yeah, but it’s the good Hodgkin’s,” Larry insists, distinguishing it from the more fatal form) and there is going to be a testimonial for him at the golf club. (Leo’s son Marty is played by Bob “Super Dave” Einstein.) The second humiliation is that Larry — who has begun to pee sitting down, believing it to be more convenient — falls into the toilet one night when the seat is left up. He has to hobble with a cane. Next comes Cheryl’s awful stomach ache, a result of Susie’s bad cooking.

In Larry’s small world of major and minor celebrities (and the people who service them), everyone knows everyone. Even the television weatherman, who Larry decides has been deliberately giving false reports of rain in order to keep other golfers off the course. The weatherman, who happens to be invited to the testimonial, denies this accusation. Although Larry seems to be right, the one day he defies the weatherman’s prediction he ends up on the golf course with Stu Braudy, playing in the pouring rain.

Humiliations of the body are, of course, often sexual. It seems unlikely that any situation comedy in the history of television has ever focussed its attention quite so often on the penis of its star. In season one, episode one, it was the pants tent. In season two’s “The Doll” it was a rash. This time Larry pets a happy Oscar the dog, only to appear to Susie as if he’s using pressure from the pooch to get himself aroused. Alas, poor Larry. He is accused of being erect when he’s not. And things don’t usually go well when he is.

EPISODE FIVE

The 5 Wood / Original Airdate: February 1, 2004 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

What is it really like to be Larry? To find yourself preoccupied by such trivia as the elasticity of shirt sleeves or, as in this episode, the number of cashews in a snack bag? The snack bag in question is made by “Health-Glo,” a company owned by David Schwimmer’s father, and the bag that Larry buys has lots of raisins in it and only four cashews. Of course he brings this up with David, who tells Larry that there is a cashew shortage and that his criticisms aren’t needed: “stay in your element.”

The episode opens with Larry and David with top hats and canes, singing and dancing a number from the show. It looks pretty amateurish but Steve the choreographer praises Larry to the skies. Suddenly the two are buddies — so much so that Jeff tells Larry that he has taken on Steve’s gay mannerisms. “You’re Steve the gay choreographer!” he exclaims. Like Seinfeld, Curb is not a gay-negative show. But that doesn’t mean its straight male characters are absolutely comfortable around gay people, and they do seem a touch afraid that gayness might rub off on them.

Leo Funkhouser has died from the “good” Hodgkin’s disease and Larry and Cheryl, along with many of their friends and acquaintances, attend the funeral where Larry encounters a writer from the television show Party of Five, which happens to be his source of information about Hodgkin’s disease. (Larry David used to watch the show with his nieces and claimed to have found it quite involving.) That Larry is as willing to play fast and loose with Judaism as he is with other religions is highlighted by the open casket. Jewish funerals never have open caskets, but Larry David needs one for his plot, which has Larry noticing that the diseased is holding Larry’s own 5 wood golf club, which is irreplaceable. Larry then schemes to get it out of the dead man’s clutches, replacing it with one of Jeff’s. All seems to go well, and Saul the dentist gives a very funny eulogy about the deceased, a man who “loved ginger ale.” But when Saul notices the switched club, Larry, Jeff, and their spouses are kicked out of the country club.

“You’re fucking narcissists,” Susie tells them at home. “It’s all a game, a big fucking game.” She and Cheryl — whose presence rather pales next to Susie’s — are genuinely angry at losing the center of their social lives. Now they will have to apply to the Beverly Park Country Club, a place that has “three Jews” in it by Susie’s count. The funniest scene in the episode has Larry and Cheryl undergoing their interview in the club’s stuffy office. Larry presents himself as a Hummer driver, a Yale man, and a Ronald Reagan fundraiser, not to mention a Moose and an Elk.

This episode is as good a place as any to notice an interesting trend in the show: the emphasis on Larry’s Jewishness. Like being a former Brooklynite in California, being Jewish marks him as different. It makes him comfortable around his best friends (Richard and Jeff are both Jewish), irritable around his gentile in-laws, and at odds with much of the rest of the world. It sometimes draws him closer to other minorities, at least in his own peculiar way, be they black like Krazee-Eyez Killa or gay like Steve the choreographer.

We can’t leave this episode without mentioning yet another sexual humiliation, and a rather painful one: Oscar the dog bites Larry’s penis. It seems like a bit of juvenile humor, although in keeping with the show’s phallo-centricity. And it prevents Larry from having a rendezvous with a sexually hungry dental hygienist, causing him to lose another chance at claiming his tenth anniversary gift from Cheryl.

EPISODE SIX

The Carpool Lane / Original Airdate: February 8, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

It’s been a while since Larry David has outlined an episode that doesn’t fire off in all directions but this one is built on a single, if convoluted, narrative that has Larry trying to get to a Dodgers game.

The urge to see the Dodgers comes from Larry not having anything to do, having been kicked out of the golf club and not yet accepted at the new one. Failing to pry a pair of tickets from the mourning Marty Funkhouser, he gives up only to be presented with a pair by Cheryl. Larry gets out of jury duty by making himself look like a racist, picks up some marijuana from a dealer to ease his father’s glaucoma, and heads for the stadium. But when he hits traffic and realizes that only by using the carpool lane will he get to the game on time, Larry picks up a large but lively black prostitute named Monema (played by Kym E. Whitley). He offers her $750 and a ticket to come in the car with him.

The real pleasure of the episode is seeing Larry and his unlikely companion making jokes together, sharing popcorn, and arguing like Laurel and Hardy. He sees the officials from the new club and hardly seems to care that he’ll never get in now. Marty, also at the game, is having car trouble. Larry gives him a lift to the airport to pick someone up and Marty, holding Larry’s Seinfeld jacket, gets nabbed for marijuana possession. Meanwhile Larry and Monema head for Larry’s father’s apartment where the three of them get high. Little old Nat David, who has never smoked marijuana before, delights in its pleasures, telling Monema (who has supplied it) that it’s “good shit” and teaching her to swear in Yiddish. Shelley Berman is, as usual, a delight, proving that cute little old men can get away with almost anything. Larry, though, is having one bad experience, his face sweaty, his eyes bulging, as he tells himself off in the mirror. In the next scene he’s in court, having gotten Marty off the hook by confessing to owning the marijuana in the jacket. He sees that the judge is the same one before which he appeared as a prospective juror and made himself look like a racist. But Larry has a solution for this pickle as well: he faces the judge with his arm around big Monema.

Monema is a fun character and Larry’s ease with her is certainly the engine that runs the episode. Despite his self-professed discomfort around black people, once more he gets along well with a black person who falls into one of the cultural “types” that he can recognize — the rapper, the prostitute. In fact, it’s the uptown, well-educated blacks that he seems to have trouble with, as if he can’t comprehend a black person in the same socioeconomic category as himself. On another note, it’s almost shocking how mean he is to Marty, mocking him for being in mourning for his father. Feeling another’s pain is not Larry’s strong point.

EPISODE SEVEN

The Surrogate / Original Airdate: February 22, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles

The episode opens with a scenario that is not likely from real life. In bed, Larry and Cheryl are watching Seinfeld (“The Puffy Shirt,” one of Larry David’s scripts) and laughing. The implication is that this is a bedtime ritual. Jeez, Mr. David, I know we all like the reruns, but do you really make wife Laurie watch it with you every night?

Here’s another question: is it possible that Larry is more a ladies’ man than he lets on? One of the story lines in this episode involves yet another new girlfriend for Richard Lewis. Forever the optimist, Richard replays his hope for true love over and over. Here it’s an attractive black woman who happens to be a nurse in Larry’s doctor’s office. Richard is worried because of that old rumor that black men have much bigger penises. How can he compete? Richard asks Larry if he’s ever slept with a black woman and Larry casually mentions that he has slept with a couple. A couple? Larry who is terrible at two things, picking up women and drawing?

Renée, the nurse, proves to be a bit of an unexpected problem for Larry. At the doctor’s office where he is taking a physical in order to be insured for the Broadway show, he walks the treadmill while hooked up to a heart monitor. But when Renée leans over, showing her cleavage, Larry’s heart rate spikes. The doctor can’t give him a clean bill of health and Larry has to wear a “heart halter” for twenty-four hours to monitor his rate. The halter turns out to be a very useful, if unlikely, protection, when a driver with a crowbar later goes after him.

But the main story has Larry in one of his awkward social positions. He and Cheryl are invited to a baby shower for a wealthy couple who are using a surrogate. Larry buys the gift, a “biracial” doll, which he makes the mistake of calling a “mulatto.” He is also the only one who brings a gift for the surrogate, a large stuffed panda. A misunderstood conversation between the surrogate and Larry (when he talks about giving up a “baby” he’s referring to a script) causes her to decide to keep the child herself.

The incident is almost as uncomfortable as it is funny. Larry is the only one (including Cheryl) who even recognizes the woman who is carrying the child, and the difference between her inferior position and that of the receiving couple, surrounded by piles of gifts in their splendid home, is startling. Larry is no social crusader, but in his own brusque and fumbling way he does manage to illuminate some dark places.

Our concern for Larry the Broadway star deepens as he continues to stay “on book” — theater talk for needing a script because one hasn’t memorized the lines yet. Is the show heading for disaster?

EPISODE EIGHT

Wandering Bear / Original Airdate: February 29, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Many an episode of Curb has touched on the subject of sex — wanting it, not wanting it, fantasizing about it, worrying over it. But this is the first episode that is largely about sex, not in one way but in several different ways.

Up first: pornography. Larry and Jeff both see a cable TV commercial for a porno film called College Girls Gone Wild and decide they want to see it. (The choice seems deliberate; the idea of older men getting excited by women who are hardly out of childhood will be distasteful to many.) Larry orders it to be sent to his office, where the package is opened by his generally idle secretary Antoinette.

Up second: premature ejaculation. Antoinette is in distress, for her boyfriend Marv has dumped her, leaving her an emotional wreck. The reason, Larry discovers, is that he has no lasting power in bed and the shame has driven him away.

Up third: unfulfilled desire. Cheryl complains that she and Larry haven’t had sex since the dog bit his penis.

Up fourth: the proper use of “protection.” Cheryl is no longer on the pill so Larry has to use a condom, the very thought of which flusters him.

Up fifth: unexpected hazards. Jeff gives him some “Everlast” condoms that have a numbing agent on them, but in his haste Larry puts it on inside out, resulting in Cheryl suffering a “numb vagina.”

The real problem of Antoinette’s distress is that it makes her an incompetent secretary, provoking some criticism from Larry that causes her to quit, threatening to tell people all of Larry’s dirty secrets. Unlike the rest of the episode, these secrets aren’t, however, sexual. They’re mostly about Larry lying to people to make his own life easier.

Another story line centers on a Native American named Wandering Bear who, being immune to poison oak, is hired by Larry to cut down a patch in the backyard. Treating him as a shaman or “medicine man,” Larry consults Wandering Bear for a solution to Cheryl’s numb vagina. Not only does Wandering Bear have a cure for that, but he also heals Oscar, who has suffered a bruised larynx after being hit by Larry’s car. As soon as he’s cured, Oscar goes once more for Larry’s privates.

While the show is no doubt about physical as well as social humiliation, it seems that Cheryl has been coming in for special treatment. Last season there was the matter of her pubic hair being caught in Larry’s throat. Then came her “colon cure” that caused her to rush through a carwash to get to a bathroom. And now there’s the “numb vagina” — a subject that Larry has no reservations about sharing with a number of people.

EPISODE NINE

The Survivor / Original Airdate: March 7, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles

This season has two big days — opening night on Broadway and this one, the renewal of Larry and Cheryl’s wedding vows. We don’t expect things to go smoothly and we aren’t disappointed. There is a running gag in which Larry keeps getting stains on the suit he has bought for the ceremony. And there is still the matter of Larry cashing in on his anniversary gift, with time quickly running out.

Feeling some guilt about the thought of sleeping with another woman (yes, Larry does have some normal human responses), he consults the rabbi who is going to renew their vows. The rabbi (played by Barry Gordon, whose voice you may recognize as that of Donatello from the kids’ TV series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) points to the story of Abraham and Sarah from Genesis, where Sarah gives her husband permission to sleep with another woman so that he might have a child. “I think you can look at that as a very real precedent,” the rabbi says. Amazed, Larry answers, “I’ve got to start coming to temple more often.” But does Larry truly feel free to enjoy a strictly hedonistic pleasure?

Days before the ceremony, the Davids hold a dinner. The rabbi is invited, of course, and asks if he might bring a friend who is a “survivor.” Larry suggests to his father that he bring his own friend, Solly, who is also a survivor of the Holocaust. But the rabbi’s friend turns out to be Colby Donaldson, a real-life participant on the Survivor television series. Solly, mean- while, is played by Allan Rich, a veteran actor black-balled during the McCarthy era who found his way back into decades worth of TV and film character roles. During dinner Colby talks about the dangers of filming in Australia where there were many venomous snakes. “That’s a very interesting story,” says Solly in a heavy Yiddish accent. “But let me tell you, I was in a concentration camp. You never even suffered one minute in your life compared to what I went through.”

What follows is a ridiculous, distasteful, and extremely funny argument between the two in which Colby talks about having “no snacks” and not being able to work out in a gym. Larry David neatly manages not to disparage the memory of Holocaust victims even as he shows how people can use suffering as a kind of badge of honor.

Larry and Cheryl have some trouble over their personal vows, in which Larry doesn’t want to say that he and Cheryl will be together for eternity. “I guess I had a different plan for eternity,” Larry says with hesitant seriousness. “I thought I’d be single.” This is a man with serious reservations about the married state. But the ceremony goes ahead and Larry, forgetting his notes, tells Cheryl before witnesses that their marriage is “pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.” The vows, however, don’t prevent him from trying to cash in on his pass go/have sex card. While getting his suit cleaned, he makes arrangements for a hotel tryst with a sexy orthodox Jewish dry cleaner named Anna (played by Gina Gershon). Jeff tells Larry that orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in a sheet (Jeff is steering his friend wrong here; it’s a myth) and so Larry brings one with him. “What kind of fucking idiot are you?” Anna asks, sounding less than traditionally orthodox. In any case, their time is interrupted by an earthquake that forces a sheet-wrapped Larry out into the street.

This is one of the funniest episodes in the season, from the rabbi taking emotional advantage of the fact that his brother-in-law died on September 11 (hit by a bike courier) to Cheryl’s father asking if he can shout “yippee” instead of “mazel tov.” And Larry does, in the end, commit himself for “eternity,” if reluctantly. Cheryl looks happy and satisfied to hear her husband do the right thing. If only it would last.

EPISODE TEN

Opening Night / Original Airdate: March 14, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

It’s hard to believe that Larry David can pull off a season closer as good as last year’s transcendent restaurant opening, especially since overall the fourth season isn’t quite as strong as the third. But he does. And we get to witness Larry’s opening night on Broadway.

The episode begins with Larry nervously packing for New York and unable to remember his lines. The three days leading up to opening night (which, coincidentally, is Larry and Cheryl’s anniversary and the deadline for his anniversary gift) are full of funny business. There’s a running gag about Larry not having proper change for tips in the hotel. There’s the continuing bad blood between him and David Schwimmer, here centering on David’s lost watch, which Larry finds and promptly loses again, with David asking that he replace or pay for it. There’s cousin Andy needing a ticket for the show. There’s the woman in the hotel bar who works as a fellatio teacher and who claims that spicy food makes a man’s “cum” taste delicious. (In his excitement Larry puts so much hot sauce on his food that he chokes and sweats while eating, revolting her.) And there’s Larry, making one last-ditch effort for his gift, trying to bed voluptuous Cady Huffman.

Jeff, bless his soul, has given Larry a leg up. Cady has OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) so Jeff tells her that Larry suffers from it too. Cady immediately warms to him and Larry encourages the connection by doing such things as arranging and rearranging objects on the table at a cast meeting. Things are looking good for Larry — except for one thing. He’s freaking out about having to actually perform on a Broadway stage. His name is on the marquee and his picture in the full-page New York Times ads. There’s a priceless scene on the day of the opening in which Larry has a hysterical fit, screaming and crying that he can’t do it. And who is there to talk him down but Nathan Lane, the show’s original star. “You can do it!” Lane says in his best Broadway voice.

Just before curtain, Larry makes up with David Schwimmer and then has his chance to sleep with Cady Huffman. At least until he sees a photograph of George W. Bush on her desk and realizes that she’s a Republican. Come on, Larry! Is this an excuse or what? You can’t go through with it, can you? Despite all that you might imagine or want yourself to be, the fact is you’re a faithful husband if not always a good one.

And then the overture begins. Mel comes into the wings of the St. James Theater to wish Larry and David luck. We see the chorus sing the opening number in full set and costume, just as it’s done onstage. And then Larry appears in cape and enormous glasses and gives his first line: “The reviews come out a lot faster when the critics leave at intermission.” Nice laugh from the audience and then cut to him singing, “I used to be the king of old Broadway.” And here we are actually seeing Larry singing and dancing as Max Bialystock in the Broadway production. Incredible.

We see the first scene when David Schwimmer, as the nervous and esteem-challenged Leon Bloom, enters Max’s office. The scene is going well until Larry gets stuck on a line. It doesn’t come to him, and doesn’t come to him, and he begins to badly ad-lib. In the audience we see Jerry Seinfeld (his first appearance on the show) making an uncomfortable face. And still Larry can’t find the line. People begin to get up from their seats and head for the exits. So it seems that the show will be a disaster after all, just as we have expected. But then Larry steps forward and he begins to talk to the audience. He talks like the stand-up comic he used to be, pointing out his cousin Andy and joking that he’s the “primary reason for anti-Semitism.” Larry begins riffing on the various uses of the turban worn by another audience member. He’s funny and the audience, laughing, turns and sits down again. Then he finds his line and he and David continue the scene.

Nearby Mel Brooks and his real wife, the fine actress Anne Bancroft (who has since died), are talking about the show. In a brilliant comic turn, their words echo a scene in The Producers. Like Max, Mel actually wants the show to flop. Not to make money but so that he can finally be free of it and return to his normal life. “How did you know that [Larry] could ruin the show?” asks Anne. Mel answers, “Everything he touches he dooms.” Then they toast the death of the show.

Only the show is going great. The audience has been won over and at intermission they pour into the bar where Mel and Anne are camped out. And just as in The Producers, they overhear the audience rave. “I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.” “I thought I’d split my sides.” The lines are right out of The Producers. Larry is a hit.

Larry and David receive a standing ovation as they take their bows. In the audience, Cheryl is glowing. It is quite a feat, making Larry David believable in a Broadway show, but Curb has done it. True, he’s really only barely passable, but with the strong dancers and singers surrounding him, the lights, costumes, set, and the cheers of the audience, he somehow just . . . works. Larry is a success. Yes, despite his social brusqueness, his inability to understand the needs of intimate relationships, his tendency to insult people, get into trouble, cause anger and disruption wherever he goes — in spite of it all, Larry triumphs yet again. And we join in the standing ovation.

Season Five

EPISODE ONE

The Larry David Sandwich / Original Airdate: September 25, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

A beautiful cerulean blue ocean beach. A lone individual swimming. The camera zooms in on Larry. (Never mind that in a previous episode Larry expressed his dislike of going to the beach and didn’t go in the water.) Suddenly a big wave appears and knocks him under. He struggles, is hit again and again, his body being pushed under while symphonic music swells. At last he manages to stagger onto the sand, breathless.

This near-death has a big effect on Larry. It is reminiscent of what happens to Woody Allen in his film Hannah and Her Sisters when a possible sentence of cancer is suddenly lifted. It is a life-changing experience. Many of the questions of life, death, and identity that occur in the fifth season feel Woody Allen–like. On the other hand, these are big questions that are dealt with — both comically and seriously, if not always in a Jewish intonation — by many artists. Larry is so affected by the incident that he believes there was a divine purpose to his swim and his being saved, as he tells a household of guests at a party. He disagrees, however, with Susie’s suggestion that he now treat people in a more “respectful” manner. But he does want to attend synagogue for the high holidays.

The only problem is that Larry has no holiday tickets. Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah are the most crowded days at any synagogue and tickets are sold as a way to raise funds. Jeff says he will try to get him some.

A life-changing experience isn’t, as it turns out, exactly the same as a personality-changing experience. When Larry finds out that a sandwich has been named after him at Leo’s Delicatessen, he is delighted, but his delight turns sour when he hears what’s actually in it: white fish, sable, capers, onions, cream cheese. Still, he takes his proud father to Leo’s, but when his father chokes on a bite of a Larry David Sandwich and has a stroke, he is rushed to the hospital. It is here in the hospital bed that Larry thinks his father whispers to him the words, “You’re adopted.” Perhaps the best moment of the episode is the look on Larry as he leaves the hospital — a look of wonder, amazement, and liberation. Maybe he is not the son of Nat David. Maybe he does not bear the burden of being a Jew. Maybe he is someone else entirely, a freer, happier someone.

One Jewish critic has noted that the world of Curb is much like the old eastern-European shtetl, or village, of the Jews, where everyone knew everyone else. Larry resorts to buying tickets from a scalper and the scene at the synagogue — attended also by Jeff and Susie, Richard Lewis, and others in Larry’s circle — does indeed make Los Angeles seem like a small village of well-off show business Jews. Larry can’t find the right page in the prayer book, cleans his glasses with his yarmulke, and then gets into an argument with Richard who is jealous about the Larry David Sandwich. Everyone looks their way until finally a security guard throws Larry and Cheryl out for buying tickets illegally. So much for a profound religious experience.

Once he’s better, Nat denies that he ever told Larry that he was adopted. Trying to discern the truth, Larry engages in one of his close staring matches with his father. These staring matches, always accompanied by the same music, usually occur when Larry accuses someone of deceiving or betraying him. As always, the staring match doesn’t prove anything.

The sandwich saga continues, with Richard Lewis managing to get his name on the menu of Leo’s instead of Larry’s, then Larry trying to get his name on the sandwich called the Ted Danson. But let’s stop and think about this a moment. What does it mean to have your name on a sandwich? It means acceptance, celebration, recognition of who you are and what you have done. It’s like having your name carved on Mount Rushmore — only instead of rock, you are immortalized in corned beef or chopped liver. A kind of culinary immortality. But who exactly is this “Larry David” who wants a better sandwich to bear his name? What if he is someone else altogether?

So Larry might find out, if only he would pick up the telephone. The woman at the other end, the old nanny of his childhood, knows the truth. But Larry is having sex with Cheryl, and Cheryl has made it known that Larry is no longer to interrupt their sex with phone answering. The old nanny expires, taking the secret with her.

EPISODE TWO

The Bowtie / Original Airdate: October 2, 2005 / Directed by Larry Charles

After the big setup of Larry’s near-death experience, a viewer might expect some follow-up in the next episode. But while Larry does hire a private investigator, a bowtie-wearing black Muslim named Omar Jones, to investigate the question of adoption, the rest of the episode is devoted to Larry’s relationship with three distinct communities: lesbians, blacks, and the handicapped.

The most minor story involves Larry using a handicapped bathroom stall and getting yelled at by a guy in a wheelchair, beginning a series of washroom incidents that run through the episode. (I can unofficially pronounce that Larry is shown needing to use a washroom more often than any sitcom character in history.) The second has Larry and Cheryl getting a dog named Sheriff that barks only at black people. Wanda has a very funny scene where she growls, “Where’d you get this dog, a klan meeting?” When Larry asks her about black men wearing bowties she says, “I’m not your link to the black world, okay? Stop asking me shit.” Larry himself adopts the bowtie look, only to get into an argument with some noisy black people dining next to him at a party celebrating Marty Funkhouser’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. One of them calls him “Tucker Carlson” and while Larry the character may be the sort to stay out of politics, it’s clear that he, like his creator Larry David, has enormous dislike for such people as the conservative Fox television commentator.

But the funniest story involves Larry as a “friend o’ lesbians” as he puts it. Larry claims to be loved by gay women, who believe him to be their greatest friend — an assertion that seems proved by the warm hug he gets from Jody Funkhouser, Marty’s daughter. But when Marty mentions that Jody is now seeing a man, Larry’s effusive congratulations make him a traitor to the lesbian community. Soon women everywhere are giving him dirty looks or snubbing him completely. But then Larry meets Jody’s new boyfriend and unnerves him by going on about how it’s hard as a man to compete with Jody’s former women lovers who better understood the “equipment.” The relationship breaks up, Jody goes back to her girlfriend, and the lesbian community — including Rosie O’Donnell — embrace Larry once more.

It’s worth noting a small, seemingly unimportant exchange between Larry and Cheryl during the episode. Larry returns to the house they are renting while their own is being renovated and Cheryl says, “Larry, we need to talk.” “It’s over?” Larry says, wrongly jumping to the conclusion that Cheryl is leaving him. Cheryl accuses him of lighting up at the very thought and although Larry denies it, we’ve seen it too. As last season proved, even with permission Larry is unable to sleep with another woman while he’s married. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a significant part of him that bridles at being under the yoke of marriage. Of course, that may be true of most married people, men and women both, who manage to hide it better. But for Larry, as we shall see, breaking up is like adultery — pleasant in fantasy but something else entirely in real life.

EPISODE THREE

The Christ Nail / Original Airdate: October 9, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

It is often noted that Larry David says things that other people think but will never admit to. This is particularly true when it comes to some of his observations as a secular American Jew. For the truth is that many Jews just don’t understand how Christians can hold to their beliefs. The virgin birth? The Son of God? It all sounds a little crazy. Maybe this is how most people think about faiths not their own.

Cheryl’s parents represent, for Larry, everything that he finds foolish or incomprehensible in Christians. When her father tells him near the start of this episode that he has a “personal relationship with Christ,” Larry just can’t get it. Maybe, he says, if Jesus had been a woman. “I’ll worship a Jane,” he says. “But to worship a guy — it’s a little gay, isn’t it?”

Being a Jew — or the wealthy Los Angeles version of one — plays a far bigger role in this season than ever before, and far bigger than it was ever allowed to play on Seinfeld, a show that the executives had worried might be too Jewish for a mass audience. Larry’s father is coming to visit and, wanting to please the old man, he decides to put up a mezuzah — a small metal or clay holder that contains a rolled-up parchment with a passage from the Torah in it that is nailed to the outside frame of the door. “So every anti-Semite will know we live here in case they want to burn down the house,” Larry jokes. Of course, being a wealthy Los Angeles Jew, he doesn’t actually put it up himself but asks the ironically named Jesus, the husband of their housekeeper Maria, to put it up for him.

There is a second theme that runs in the episode along with the question of religion. Breasts. Actually breasts have played a significant role in several previous episodes, usually in the form of cleavage spotted by Larry at inappropriate moments. This episode takes a more practical approach. Maria, the housekeeper, is a somewhat overweight woman with heavy breasts. However, she doesn’t wear a bra, which Cheryl finds distracting and mildly offensive. Her answer is to tell Larry to fire her. Cheryl comes off as rather cruel and haughty, and her asking Larry to do the dirty work isn’t flattering either. Larry, however, thinks of another way; he will buy her a bra. Bras figured in several Seinfeld episodes, from “The Doorman” in which Kramer invented a male bra to “The Caddy,” which had Elaine giving a bra to her friend Sue Ellen Mischke, who wore it without a top. And of course there was George’s job as a bra salesman — a job that Larry David once had in real life.

The question is, then, what size? Larry looks at Cheryl’s bra (the size disappoints him) and then manages to look at one of Susie’s, who he believes (quite implausibly) is the same size as Maria. He even holds the bra against himself and juggles it around, a little routine that will naturally come back to bite him when he is caught on videotape. He does, in fact, get Maria a bra that she likes, but at the expense of upsetting her husband, with consequences.

But let’s return to the theme of Jewish/Christian misunderstanding. Cheryl’s father wears around his neck a nail from the movie The Passion of the Christ. Many non-religious or non-Christian people were amazed by the enormous success of the Mel Gibson film, which spawned equally popular souvenirs — including, yes, a nail on a leather thong. Gibson himself was suspected by the Jewish community to be anti-Semitic. Later in the episode, when Larry’s father Nat is pulling up in a car and the mezuzah has still not been put up, Larry looks about for a nail and spies the necklace around his dozing father-in-law’s neck. Using it to put up the mezuzah is extremely funny even as it offers the viewer multiple strange meanings. Does it mock Christianity, Judaism, or both? Does Nat’s approval as he kisses the mezuzah upon entering the house show that symbols mean only what we believe they do, regardless of their actual origin? Is it a sly way of reminding viewers that the Christ story has its origins in the Jewish religion? Is it Larry’s way of commenting on the film?

As a side note to go along with our recognition in the last episode of the number of washroom stops Larry makes, perhaps there has not been another sitcom character who has suffered so many aches and pains either. Back, neck, and now feet as Larry goes to a podiatrist and gets a pair of orthotics. Medical practitioners are an important subset of people who are necessary in Larry’s world, just behind waiters and household servants.

EPISODE FOUR

Kamikaze Bingo / Original Airdate: October 16, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Time for Larry David to leave the Jewish/Christian antagonism alone for a while and focus his attention on some other worthy group. How about the Japanese? How about old people? Fun is sure to ensue.

At a sushi restaurant Cheryl is meeting a Japanese sculptor friend named Yoshi. Being a self-enclosed world, it’s not surprising that Yoshi’s father is in the same nursing home where Nat now lives. When he hears that Yoshi’s father was a Second World War kamikaze pilot, Larry voices some skepticism. After all, didn’t they crash their planes into American ships? Why is the man still alive? Did he perhaps veer away at the last minute, deciding that “this kamikaze business may not be for me”?

This suggestion of his father as a coward (or merely self-preserving) is a loss of face for Yoshi who subsequently tries to kill himself. Larry finds out about Yoshi during a poker game at the house of Kevin Nealon, an SNL veteran known more recently for his character on Weeds. It just so happens that Kevin’s girlfriend is Yoshi’s sister. Kevin runs off to the hospital while Larry and company happily continue playing poker and eating pizza — at least until Kevin returns and throws them out.

The second plot involves the nursing home bingo games. Larry is naturally competitive and when a bingo win is taken away from him he suspects that the caller, Lenore, is fixing the game. Meanwhile, Larry’s apology to Yoshi isn’t accepted because he is eating pistachio nuts at the time and so Kevin challenges Larry to a game of bingo. At the bingo game an angry mob of old people wielding canes threaten Larry. But they leave him to Yoshi’s father who, in his motorized wheelchair, finally gets to fulfill his destiny as a kamikaze pilot as he lays on the speed and heads straight for Larry.

Cultural stereotypes have always been useful for comics and the depiction of the Japanese here is just such a use. Viewers might notice that there has been no development of the adoption story arc and the season is almost halfway over. But that second arc is about to begin.

EPISODE FIVE

Lewis Needs a Kidney / Original Airdate: October 30, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

The title of this episode pretty much sums it up. Due to his earlier years of alcoholism (or so it’s implied), Richard’s kidneys are shot. He needs a transplant, but the only possible relative, the improbably named Louis Lewis, has refused. “The only other option is if a good friend or a buddy comes through,” Richard says pointedly.

The thought of seeing if he is a match to donate a kidney sends Larry into a moral and personal tizzy. He’s not all selfish — he knows that he ought to willingly give up a kidney for his friend. But fear of the operation and its consequences puts Larry — who, after all, would rather not give someone else a lift, never mind a kidney — into a difficult situation. But talking to Cheryl he decides to take the test. Richard Lewis, however, remains insulted that Larry didn’t instantly volunteer.

Jeff doesn’t want to take the test either, but he comes along and it turns out that both are matches. How to decide which one of them should make the sacrifice? Marty Funkhouser is called on to toss a coin. (Bob Einstein has to do very little to be funny and any appearance is welcome.) The coin toss doesn’t work out and they start on eenie-meany-miney-moe. But Susie makes the decision by screaming at Jeff that he can’t give a kidney. What if one day their daughter needs one? Besides, he’s too fat and unhealthy. It’s a loving sort of abuse and the result is that Larry’s the one.

Most of the funny moments in this episode are quite incidental, such as a little verbal sparring match between Jeff and a nurse over the expression “Good night nurse.” Another plot has Larry meeting a man who turns out to be a known felon after Larry locks himself out of a car. The two of them eat at a Jack in the Box, the scene reading like an ironic product endorsement. Then later, while robbing another fast-food restaurant, the felon shoots Richard’s cousin Louis Lewis, putting him into a coma from which he is not expected to recover. Larry jumps for joy; if the cousin dies, his kidney can go to Richard.

EPISODE SIX

The Smoking Jacket / Original Airdate: November 6, 2005 / Directed by David Steinberg

The funniest actors on Curb are not always the regular stars — Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, Wanda Sykes — but are sometimes the less prominent recurring roles. One of those is Cousin Andy (played by Richard Kind) whose delivery of even straight lines can make a viewer smile at his excessive emotion, his enormous mouth and exaggerated pronunciation, his new-world version of Yiddish sentimentality. Here on a visit from New York he commiserates with Larry over his father’s increasing deafness and confusion . . . and you just want to laugh. But Andy is quite feisty and opinionated in his own way, often getting into arguments with Larry. Here a package arrives at the David household for their cousin and it turns out to be Nat’s favorite smoking jacket. Larry is sure that his father meant to send it to him, but Andy says that Larry just can’t accept that Nat “happens to love me.” The only way that Larry can get it from Andy is by inviting him to the Playboy Mansion, where Jeff has been invited. At first Larry declines the invitation himself, saying that Cheryl is already mad at him. But Jeff explains to him the “double transgression theory”: if you’re already in the doghouse you aren’t going to be punished more for doing something else bad.

Andy isn’t the only hanger-on to the land of the bunnies. There is also a kid named Wilson whom Larry meets in the hospital. The Make-A-Wish Foundation has turned down Wilson’s wish to see a naked woman so the boy convinces Larry to take him to the mansion. The visit (filmed at the real mansion) takes them to the famous grotto where topless women, frolicking in the water, take one look at Larry and run screaming. In the house he meets Hef himself who examines the smoking jacket and declares it a great knockoff of his Italian original and then mistakenly takes it as his own. There is one of those funny scenes of Larry making small talk, here to a couple of Playboy bunnies about dental hygiene, the danger of monkeys, foot odor, and ventriloquism.

Larry and Wilson met when Larry went to see the comatose Louis Lewis in the hospital, hoping to hear that he won’t last long. Amusingly, the doctor is played by James Pickens Jr., chief of surgery on Grey’s Anatomy. Wilson feels that Larry has ruined his trip to the Playboy Mansion, but his wish will be fulfilled when, returning to the house with Larry, they find Cousin Andy — awkward, funny-looking, pants-too-high Andy — in bed with a gorgeous, and quite naked, bunny. The grin on young Wilson’s face says it all.

It should be noted that the episode also contains a cameo by golfer Gary Player. Larry David does like to bring in the sports figures he admires whenever he gets a chance. And on another important note, Oscar the dog is played by another dog actor! A new dog, Rhett, has taken over the role.

Perhaps the original Oscar asked for too much money.

EPISODE SEVEN

The Seder / Original Airdate: November 13, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

Maybe this season doesn’t have a story arc like the previous ones. Maybe instead it has variations on a theme that might be called “Larry Acts (Sort of) Like a Jew.”

In this episode he does it with the help of his shiksa wife Cheryl who, looking like a real “Jew girl” as Larry graciously puts it, has agreed to hold a Passover seder so that they might invite Nat. (First the high holidays, now Passover. Next a bris?) But there are other guests too: Jeff, Susie, and Sammy, along with Susie’s sister, right-wing brother-in-law, and kids; Ethel and Mac, the grumpy old neighbors from across the road; Mark, a plastic surgeon whom Larry thinks is stealing his morning newspaper; and Rick Leftowitz, a sex offender.

“A sex offender?” screams Cheryl (understandably) when she finds out. But Larry is adhering to the tradition that it is a good deed to invite to the seder Jews who have nowhere else to go. The offender, Rick, has recently moved into the neighborhood and Larry isn’t at first thrilled when the man offers to help him with his groceries. But when Rick recognizes Larry and tells him that “The Puffy Shirt” is his favorite episode of Seinfeld then asks where the idea for the Low-Talker came from, Larry is smitten.

While Curb mostly uses Italian music in the spirit of its theme instrumental, Larry David does like to draw on other musical forms, especially those with a certain comparable ethnicity. Here Jewish klezmer music is used to accompany the seder scenes, as complementary as gefilte fish and horseradish. Nat conducts the service (his Hebrew sounds pretty, pretty, pretty good) and then Larry hides the matzoh for the kids to find, the winner getting a dollar. The right-wing brother-in-law’s son finds it, but Rick tells Larry that he saw the guy tell his son where to look; it seems that when it comes to the small things in life Rick the sex offender is a man with a strong moral conscience, not unlike his friend Larry. As can be expected, the seder ends in shouting, accusations, and hysteria.

About three decades ago the members of the television comedy troupe SCTV did a satire on a family seder that mocked both the traditions and the way that American Jews carried them out. Larry David uses the seder as an occasion but does not treat the ritual dinner itself with any disrespect. He is kinder to the sort of practices that he grew up with than he is to either the ways of orthodox Jews or Christians. Both seem to him like aliens from another planet.

EPISODE EIGHT

The Ski Lift / Original Airdate: November 20, 2005 / Directed by Larry Charles

Larry David as orthodox Jew? We get a taste of this alternative reality when Larry tries to help Richard Lewis get a new kidney without offering up one of his own.

The problem is that Richard is low on the list for kidney donations. But when Larry runs into George Lopez, the Mexican-American comedian who had a kidney transplant in real life, he finds out that it might be possible to influence the keeper of the list. So Larry sets out to woo the orthodox Jewish Ben Heineman (played by Stuart Pankin), the man in charge of the kidney list.

He does it by bashing into Heineman’s car and then arranging to meet at a kosher deli to apologize and make reparations. Larry comes in wearing a yarmulke, speaking in a Yiddish-inflected voice, waving his hands about. He tells how he was listening to a conversation about Israel on “Jewish radio” and got so heated up that he lost control of the car. When Heineman says a Yiddish expression, Larry makes vague gutteral noises in response. This is good stuff.

In order to really win Ben Heineman over, Larry invites him and his daughter to a chalet for skiing. The obviously gentile Cheryl won’t do as a wife so he has Susie pretend instead. While she describes how they met at a “Hillel mixer” (Hillel is a Jewish campus social organization), Larry talks about his early days as a Jewish folk musician playing such songs as “Gefilte Fish Blues” and “My Freakin’ Back Is Killing Me and It’s Making It Hard to Kvell.” Ben falls for Larry’s dubious charm, but his sour adult daughter is suspicious. And when she gets stuck with Larry on a stalled ski lift at twilight, rather than be alone with a man after sunset she jumps into the snow below. Larry’s plan comes to naught. The real orthodox community can only sigh in relief that Larry David is not one of theirs.

Previously I touched on what seems like a series of humiliations to the female body in the show, mostly in reference to Cheryl. There was the pubic hair, the colon cure, the numb vagina. In this episode add one more — the “big vagina.” In fact, the big vagina is, according to Jeff and Larry, the hidden truth behind unfair accusations of small penises. The issue comes up when a former date of Jeff’s accuses him of not being adequately endowed. But Jeff claims that the problem, as it is so often, is the woman. He and Larry even start to use a gesture — hands together in a wide “V” — to indicate the big vagina problem. The accusing woman, a nurse in the hospital where Louis Lewis is lying in a coma, denies that she is anything more than average, but later — in a moment that some viewers may find funny and others a tad misogynistic — it’s shown that the nurse has been stealing objects by hiding them, yes, in her big vagina. We hear Larry’s cell phone ring in there. You be the judge.

EPISODE NINE

The Korean Bookie / Original Airdate: November 27, 2005 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

You have to wonder how it is that Larry gets invited to so many events given his negative attitude. This time it’s a campfire beach party held by Mark and Marla, and Larry is very vocal about his opinion that roasting marshmallows is “idiotic.” The couple announces that they are going to get married, but all Larry can think about is the audacity of Marla going into his car and taking his jacket to wear because she was cold. Not only that, she stains it with dripping s’mores. Knowing how offended he is, Marla sends Larry a check for $150.

First it was the Japanese and now it’s the Koreans. Sang is a flower seller who also works as a bookie on the side, taking bets from Larry. Of course he also provides the flowers for Mark and Marla’s wedding, for in the world of Curb everyone knows everyone else and service people serve everyone. When Oscar goes missing, Larry is certain that Sang has kidnapped the dog for its meat, which he believes is a Korean delicacy.

Larry’s obsession with minutiae takes on truly Talmudic proportions in this episode when he discovers that Ben Heineman has not used the $1,500 that Larry gave him to fix his car for the designated purpose. Instead, he’s used it to help pay for breast-enhancement surgery for his daughter (performed by Mark). Larry argues that it is unethical for Ben to use the money for anything other than its designated purpose, while Ben insists the money is his to use as he wishes. But Larry is shown to be rather inconsistent when it’s discovered that he himself hasn’t bought a new jacket with Marla’s money but instead has bet it on sports. Larry is extraordinarily mean to Ben’s daughter, Rachel, when he sees the size of her breasts. He says she looks like a “freak show.” This is at least the second time that the show has criticized breast implants.

Just as he spoiled the beach campfire, so Larry wrecks the wedding ceremony on the same beach when he believes that the dish Sang has brought is made from ground-up Oscar. He shouts it out to everyone and the guests begin to spit and vomit. Soon after Oscar turns up, very much alive.

In this rather eclectic season, this episode is a stand-alone, with virtually no links to either of the story arcs or the recurring theme of Jewishness. Perhaps after the previous seasons, Larry David wanted to have the freedom to take more episodes in whatever narrative direction struck his fancy. But the arcs do need to reach their climaxes, and they certainly do in the big closer that follows.

EPISODE TEN

The End / Original Airdate: December 4, 2005 / Directed by Larry Charles

Larry David has written some ambitious, surprising, and re-markably satisfying final episodes for Curb seasons. This one is certainly ambitious and no wonder, for it has to catch up on both lagging story arcs.

Larry’s last hope for some other kidney for Richard fades when Louis Lewis chooses to live. He has woken from his coma and proves himself to be far more annoying awake than he was unconscious. In the hospital corridor Larry sees Richard slouch by, dragging one foot, pasty-faced, a deathly look on his face as he stares at Larry without speaking. “I’m haunted by that look,” Larry tells Cheryl later. Yet still he tries to justify his hesitation, claiming that although he has known Richard for forty-four years they are really just acquaintances.

But everything changes when Omar Jones, the PI, tells Larry that his birth parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cohn, live in Bisbee, Arizona. Stunned, Larry goes to find Cheryl, hugging her. Then he is in an airplane, about to take off for Arizona. There is an extremely funny conversation with a stewardess about sitting by the emergency exit. Larry insists on moving, saying that he can be no help during any “non-traditional landing or traditional landing.”

The Cohns turn out to be the Cones, a Christian couple living in a pretty, modest home. “Oh my God,” Larry says. “I’m gentile.” What follows is a sequence that can hardly be topped for hilarity as Larry turns himself into a non-Jew. We see him in a TGIF T-shirt, shorts, white socks, and fanny pack, meeting small-town folks, fishing, hunting, and even riding. One moment he’s under the chassis of a car, the next fixing the roof — a play on the stereotype of Jewish men being totally unhandy. Then he’s in a pub chugging beer with the encouragement of a chanting crowd. On Sunday he’s in church belting out, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” When the priest preaches about the “bond of friendship,” Larry knows what he must do.

Back in California, Larry is ready to give his kidney to Richard. He disturbs Cheryl by telling her, “I love you so much” and saying that he wants to have children. He and Richard are both on hospital beds being wheeled to the operating room when Omar Jones runs in. There has been a mistake. Larry isn’t adopted after all. A rather creaky plot device, but it works. Larry panics. “Get me the fuck out of here!” But it’s too late. The transplant will go forward.

The scene jumps to “two months later” where we see Richard on a beach frolicking with a beautiful woman, having recovered his health. Meanwhile Larry is still in hospital, hooked up to machines, breathing laboriously. Clearly he is on his deathbed and those closest to him — Cheryl, Jeff, Susie, and his father — are by his side. Also in the room are a rabbi and Larry’s business manager to deal with last-minute spiritual and financial responsibilities respectively. His last words are true Larry; he accuses Jeff of lowballing him on a car that he bought from Larry, tells the rabbi that he thought God only took good people to die young, and asks Cheryl if he can fool around in the afterlife until she gets there. His visitors, none of whom look terribly stricken, begin to argue among themselves. Then Larry flatlines.

Hollywood has long enjoyed depicting heaven. There is a tradition of characters being sent up before their time and coming down again (such as the aptly named 1943 Ernst Lubitsch comedy Heaven Can Wait). Larry finds himself in the clouds with two angel guides to lead him, played by Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen. He encounters his mother whom we never saw alive, played by a gaunt but still fierce Bea Arthur (Maude, 1972–1978). There’s some funny business with Dustin, who has always been a fine, fussy-mannered comic actor, which ends with Dustin and Larry saying “Fuck you!” to each other before Larry is sent back to earth to finish out his life. Larry David had asked Hoffman to appear in the first season, but the actor had felt uncomfortable playing himself and declined. Only the urging of his family had changed his mind.

Leaving the hospital, Larry says that he is a “changed man,” a “completely different person.” But when he gleefully tells off someone for using the handicapped washroom, we know that he hasn’t changed at all. And let’s face it, people rarely do change in the long term.

Larry, it’s good to have you back.

Season Six

EPISODE ONE

Meet the Blacks / Original Airdate: September 9, 2007 / Directed by Larry Charles

Larry David has said that one of his major writing challenges is pushing forward the season’s story arc while writing a self-contained episode at the same time. Here he begins the first one with the arrival of the Blacks — a family displaced by a hurricane — weaving it into a complicated series of events exploring that interesting social phenomenon of the party.

Neither Larry nor Jeff bothered to go to Marty Funkhouser’s party, but neither of them told Marty that they weren’t going to show up, an obvious social infraction. (Marty is one of the few continuing characters who was not established very early in the series. No doubt Larry David has found Bob Einstein’s presence to be as funny as the audience does.) Jeff comes up with a solid excuse (that Sammy was sick), but childless Larry is unable to do the same. He comes up with the idea of knocking on Marty’s door that night as if he got the wrong date. Then he and Cheryl can go on to Ted Danson’s party. Not surprisingly, the plan backfires when Marty insists that they come in anyway. Larry and Marty actually tussle when Larry tries to leave. Jeff and Susie show up at the door, Jeff having decided to steal Larry’s idea, and all of them are forced to play the Newlywed Game during which Larry gets into hot water for saying that he’d like to sleep with Richard’s new girlfriend Cha Cha. And they miss Ted Danson’s party.

Cheryl will forgive Larry only if he agrees to take in a family left homeless after the devastation of Hurricane Edna. (The real Edna struck the East Coast of the United States in 1954, but Larry David uses it as a stand-in for Katrina.) Cheryl is as excited as a kid getting a new puppy about the idea, but on the way to the airport Larry insists on stopping at Ted’s and pulling the same stunt. Once more they are dragged into the house, where Ted talks about a cyst in his mouth, but at last they get away. Late, they head for the airport and find the Blacks at an empty luggage carousel: the pretty single mother Loretta, the wide Auntie Rae, and the kids, Keysha and Daryl. Remarking on the fact that they are black, Larry says that it’s as if his name was “Larry Jew.”

Loretta is established early as a woman who doesn’t feel she has to express endless gratitude, or take Larry’s guff. When she sees him eating from a cake in the shape of a huge black penis, she puts her cigarette into it. Larry himself didn’t buy the cake at the erotic bakery; Jeff did, not realizing its shape, and brought it to a party that Cheryl wanted to throw to introduce (or perhaps show off) the Blacks to their friends. But if a cake tastes good, what does it matter what it looks like? Unless of course you actually happen to be black.

Loretta’s cigarette leads to a house fire that leaves Larry, Cheryl, and the Blacks standing on the sidewalk with their smoldering furniture around them. The first episode of any season is not traditionally one of the stronger ones, and this one, although busier than most, falls somewhere in the middle. Vivica A. Fox, the actress who plays Loretta, is a promising addition. Fox got her start in television with guest spots on China Beach (1988), Arsenio (1997), and appeared in popular films like Booty Call (1997), Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998), and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003). As she says at the end of the episode, “So what we gonna do now?” Good question.

EPISODE TWO

The Anonymous Donor / Original Airdate: September 16, 2007 / Directed by Robert B. Weide

This is the only episode this season to be directed by Robert B. Weide. The documentary director, who helped Larry conceive the original special, was the dominant director for the first four seasons and was still active in season five. No doubt during season six he was busy directing his first feature, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, which would be released in 2008 to poor reviews and small receipts. After that he would return to the documentary field, with a film about the late Kurt Vonnegut.

In this episode, a disgusted Cheryl finds a semen stain on a guest bedroom blanket and wonders who could have done the illicit deed. At first Larry accuses Leon, Loretta’s brother who has also moved in with the Davids (to a new house because of the fire). Leon doesn’t know the word “ejaculate” but once he understands he denies the accusation, insisting that “I brings the ruckus to the ladies.” Leon is played by longtime SNL writer, J. B. Smoove, who is magnificent in this scene.

Larry David has named Woody Allen as someone whose work he admires. No doubt he has noted Woody’s frequent praise of masturbation in his films. (“Don’t knock my hobbies.” “Masturbation is sex with someone I love.”) Before Woody Allen, masturbation was a subject that applied only to horny teenage boys; the idea of grown men doing it — married men, no less — was far too distasteful. Of course, in “The Contest” episode of Seinfeld Larry David already tackled the subject (which could not be named on network television). It has come up again and again on Curb, and in this episode it once more raises its ugly head, pardon the expression.

In fact, it wasn’t Leon. It was Jeff, who freely admits that he got a little randy during Passover dinner and went into the guest room to relieve himself. “What’s the big deal?” Jeff asks. “It’s not like it was Yom Kippur.” (Poor Jeff Garlin; the deeds he has to own up to on the show.) Larry himself may be disgusted, but he doesn’t hold it against Jeff. Unfortunately, Cheryl finds out and does, banning Jeff from the house. Then Susie finds out, accuses Jeff of infidelity for casting his seed in the abode of another, and promptly bans Larry in retaliation. Meanwhile, Anna (Gina Gershon), the sexy orthodox dry cleaner, gets the job of removing it.

None of these repercussions would have happened if Ted Danson hadn’t told Cheryl about Jeff. Of all Larry’s friends, Ted usually comes off as the least likable — snooty, chilly, and without the requisite sense of humor. Often he’s more an enemy than a friend. Here Larry is annoyed because of the flirting that goes on between Ted and Cheryl, and how they constantly phone each other to talk like a couple of “girlfriends.” (Could this be a sign that the character of Cheryl is increasingly unsatisfied in her marriage? In retrospect, it will seem so.) But what bugs Larry even more is that a donation from “Anonymous” has matched his own donation of a wing to the Natural Resources Defense Council building. Everybody knows Ted is “Anonymous” (including real-life Senator Barbara Boxer, who happens to be both a Democrat and a Jew), which means that he gets doubly praised — for his generosity and his supposed lack of egotism. Larry is upstaged.

The episode adds some other business as well. Larry dresses up as a ghost to chase the kids, only to be tackled by Auntie Rae who mistakes him for a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Larry’s favorite Yankees baseball shirt is given to the wrong person at the dry cleaners and Larry refuses to accept the unwritten dry cleaning rule that sometimes you lose stuff there and sometimes you get stuff that’s not your own. In the end, Larry manages to have his name removed from the donated wing, receiving the praise he desires when he also becomes Anonymous. “I don’t need the fanfare,” he says, basking in approval. This is a much funnier episode than the first one of the season and it’s one of those where, in the end, things work out nicely for our Larry.

EPISODE THREE

The Ida Funkhauser Roadside Memorial / Original Airdate: September 23, 2007 / Directed by David Mandel

The only sitcom that I can think of that has had more deaths than Curb is M*A*S*H — and that one was set in the Korean War. Here the casualty is dour Marty Funkhouser’s mother, hit by a car while in her wheelchair. A roadside memorial is set up for her and it provides the opportunity for one of Larry’s most despicable acts.

The truth is, most of the time Larry isn’t that bad. He’s not generous, he hates doing anything that he doesn’t want to, and he likes to make life easier. But he does have a moral compass, albeit one that tends to point toward the most insignificant social transactions. Only once in a while does he do something outright awful, and this is one of those times. He steals three bouquets from the roadside memorial.

No matter that he wouldn’t have had to steal the bouquets if the woman in the florist’s shop would have taken the fifty-dollar bill that Marty Funkhouser gave Larry to pay off a golf bet. But Marty had the fifty in his jogging shoe and nobody wants that bill. Perhaps all rich people walk around with insufficient cash in their wallets; Larry certainly does. He needs flowers to give to the dean of admissions of the private Dryden School. Cheryl and Larry want to send Keysha and Daryl there, and Susie and Jeff want to send Sammy, but Larry has angered the woman by mocking her in an ice cream shop for being a “sample abuser.” He gives her a bouquet and Cheryl and Loretta flowers too, only to be discovered by an angry and disgusted Marty. But Larry’s career as a petty thief isn’t over. He also steals a bottle of Belle Fille perfume that had belonged to Marty’s mother so that he can give it to Cheryl, hoping for the reward of sex. In this too, he is discovered, but Larry manages to create a diversion using that smelly fifty-dollar bill.

It’s interesting how the Black family has quickly become an accepted and integral part of the household, virtually part of the David family. There’s a pleasing ease between Larry and all the Blacks (he makes a better father substitute than might have been expected) and the Davids’ somewhat chilly household has warmed up considerably, if for no other reason than their house (always huge, no matter which one) feels more inhabited. Larry and Cheryl are no longer just a rich, overindulged, under-obligated couple.

EPISODE FOUR

The Lefty Call / Original Airdate: September 30, 2007 / Directed by Alec Berg

Larry David has said that he needs a great idea or premise to write a great episode. Although this season has two good premises for its story arcs (one of which has still to begin), some of the episode ideas are a little less than brilliant. This episode is an example.

Idea one: at work Larry doesn’t want to chat with Richard’s girlfriend Cha Cha every time he goes to the washroom (she has a new job with a desk right by the door). So he goes to a washroom on a different floor, where the tremendous flushing sound from the toilet causes severe pain in one ear.

Idea two: a waiter in a restaurant, not wanting Susie to give her leftovers to Oscar the dog, laces the food with a laxative.

Idea three: Larry and the Blacks don’t want to use the eco-friendly toilet paper that Cheryl uses because it’s too rough, so Larry sneaks the good stuff into the house, only to be caught.

None of these are great ideas, although they do all have in common the subject of excretion. Perhaps sensing that they aren’t quite up to snuff, Larry David throws in a couple of side dishes: a skinhead who makes an anti-Semitic remark, and Larry offending the father-in-law of a woman who has had a miscarriage by suggesting it’s for the better since she already has nine kids. The latter does have the dubious honor of being perhaps Larry’s most offensive comment ever. He deserves the vicious towel-smacking that he gets as a result.

EPISODE FIVE

The Freak Book / Original Airdate: October 7, 2007 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

Larry might not exactly be a man of the people, but he sometimes likes to pretend. That is, this fabulously rich man with celebrity friends sometimes likes to imagine he has another life, one where he is working class, ordinary, and even has to deal with the public. So he tries to become a car salesman (season two, episode one) and gets as excited as a kid going to summer camp. Or in this case, a limo driver.

But first that age-old subject of death returns yet again. In this small shtetl-like village of celebrities, people dine, party, pray, and even get buried together. Larry and Cheryl have bought cemetery plots for themselves alongside their friends Jeff, Suzie, Ted, and Mary. Now isn’t that cozy. . . . At least until Larry and Ted have yet another falling out. This one happens at Ted’s birthday party, where Larry first embarrasses himself by laughing hysterically at a photograph book of human “freaks” that he has given Ted and then by insisting that the driver that Cheryl hired to take them to the party be allowed to come in. The driver gets drunk, smashes things, and even gropes Mary. Ted throws Larry out. (Being thrown out is a constant refrain in Larry’s life.) Angry at Ted, Larry no longer wants to be buried alongside him.

Needing to drive the drunken limo driver home, Larry ends up with his car. The view we get of the limo driver’s life — a shabby house, an overweight and unhappy wife in a wheelchair, a miserable father-in-law shouting from another room — is a surprising bit of kitchen-sink realism. When the driver can’t get to a customer the next day, Larry agrees to make the pickup. Wearing a dark suit and chauffeur’s cap, Larry looks like the real thing as he picks up former tennis star and notorious on-court screamer John McEnroe. Like Larry and Cheryl, John is heading to a Paul McCartney concert. Putting on a heavier than usual Brooklyn accent, Larry is very funny as he bombards the morose McEnroe with questions: does he have allergies, believe in God, like to garden? Make-believe Larry revels in the life he might have had if he had never gotten past his real-life job as a limo driver.

Complications naturally ensue: a mourning Italian family and a guest-only party at the concert. Larry and John — wait for it — get thrown out of the party and it’s a thing of wonder to see them screaming “Fuck you!” at each other while an astonished Cheryl, Susie, and Jeff drive by. As for the cemetery plots, Larry settles the matter by buying a new one and giving away the old one to the limo driver so that his wife can bury her just-deceased father. Putting this lower-class man beside Ted the snob is Larry’s idea of a joke from beyond the grave.

EPISODE SIX

The Rat Dog / Original Airdate: October 14, 2007 / Directed by David Steinberg

Larry David has given the blind, the wheelchair-confined, and the mentally handicapped the special treatment. Now it’s time for the deaf. Not to mention lovers of little dogs.

Jean (played by Deanne Bray who has had roles on Heroes and The L Word) is a deaf mother of a kid at Newton Academy, the school where Keysha, Daryl, and a taller and older looking Sammy are now going. Larry not only insults her by saying that her lapdog looks like a rat, but he also insults her black husband (SNL’s Tim Meadows) by making a hand motion that turns out to mean “cocksucker.” Meanwhile Cheryl is in bed with an awful cold — her invalidism turns Larry on — and Leon and Loretta both have job interviews. Larry hopes they might be able to move out.

It’s been a while since Larry’s father Nat has been in the picture. Larry decides his father needs something to improve his mood and sets him up with a masseuse named Lisa who will finish the massage with a “release.” Naive Nat believes the woman “likes me, maybe even loves me” and wants to buy her something nice. He even takes her to the school musical.

Cheryl is too sick to go to the musical, so Larry ends up taking the exterminator he meets at Jeff’s house, a pleasant, rotund man who looks remarkably like the late SNL comic Chris Farley. (It’s his younger brother, Kevin.) The exterminator acts like he’s going on a first date, dressing up and sounding nervous while romantic Italian music plays in the background. But things don’t go well at the school. When Jean’s little dog gets loose, Nat yells “Rat!” and the exterminator goes into action, stomping it to death. Even so, he tells Larry that the night out has been “pretty fun” and almost looks as if he’s trying to plant a kiss.

This is a funny enough episode, but the most important moment in it may be one easily overlooked. It’s Cheryl lying sick in bed, feeling that Larry is neglecting her. We are more than halfway through the season but the second, and more important story arc is only about to begin.

EPISODE SEVEN

The TiVo Guy / Original Airdate: October 21, 2007 / Directed by Jeff Schaffer

There is a famous short story, “The Country Husband,” by the American writer John Cheever about a man who is on an airline flight that almost crashes. Afterward his wife doesn’t understand how shaken up and moved he was by the event and the result is an estrangement between them. The groundbreaking drama Thirtysomething borrowed the plot to good effect, although changing the ending. Whether or not Larry David knows the short story (he’s not a big reader of fiction) or ever saw the old television show isn’t known, but, whether by influence or coincidence, this is his semi-comic version of the same narrative. I say semi-comic because there is a serious side to the story as well. Marriage breakup is not something just to play for laughs.

The person who has the life-shaking experience is Cheryl. Caught in a lightning storm, the airplane she is on shakes, plummets, and struggles through the air. Frightened, she uses the phone in the seat back in front of her to call Larry, hoping he will say some endearing, and possibly last, words.

But Larry is at home with the TiVo repairman, trying to get the television working properly. He’s preoccupied and because of the bad connection he can’t hear what Cheryl is saying. So he asks her to call back and hangs up. Cheryl, fearing for her life, takes the hand of the man sitting next to her.

When Cheryl walks into the house Larry has no idea what is about to happen. In fact, he’s proud of himself for making a dinner reservation at Primo’s. Cheryl says: “I’m leaving.” And then “I can’t do this anymore.” Larry is stunned. He tries to explain, rather lamely it must be admitted, but Cheryl says that the incident is only the last straw. “You can’t do anything like a normal person,” she says, more sadly than angrily. She complains of his many bad habits, including talking about inanities during sex. She tells him about speaking to the man in the next seat, a “soulful conversation” of a kind that Larry is incapable of. Larry tells her he loves her, but she leaves to stay at her sister’s.

The deserted Larry is a mess. He might have often fantasized about being single (both in life and in the afterlife), but the reality pulls the rug out from under him. He goes to see Susie and Jeff and finds Marty, his wife Nan, and their daughter Jodi there too. All of them sympathize. Marty says that people are going to choose sides and they have to stick with Larry.

The social world of the Davids does indeed pick sides. First Larry is uninvited to a party because Cheryl is coming. Then the Funkhousers “choose Cheryl,” as does Ted Danson. Even the housekeeper leaves Larry. There’s a funny and pathetic scene where Larry is eating alone in a restaurant and so annoyed by a man on a cell phone at the next table that he begins talking loudly to an invisible companion.

Cheryl almost immediately begins dating the man who was next to her on the plane. “I wouldn’t care if she left me for a bald guy,” Larry says, not exactly dealing with the real issues. Needing affirmation, Larry quickly goes into bachelor mode, managing to win a date with no less than Lucy Lawless, the former star of Xena: Warrior Princess. He’s actually almost charming as he tells her, “I’m not a cool guy or anything,” but though the date begins well it ends badly when Larry jumps the gun on the question of sex — which he can’t actually have, due to a groin injury. (Another humiliation in that particular area for Larry.) In the end, poor Larry, abandoned by Cheryl and his friends, sits at home with an ice pack on his groin trying to watch television while the TiVo is on the fritz.

A note on Larry’s injury. Hurting himself, he goes to the doctor who says his scrotum is rather lengthy — “long balls” is Leon’s term for it. Having gotten caught in the fly of his underwear, Larry is told to start wearing No Fly Zone underwear instead, a brand without a fly and which happens to be manufactured by the man who was sitting in the plane beside Cheryl. Larry resists the idea of going “over the top” to urinate, adding yet another phrase to the modern lexicon.

The episode performs an extraordinary balancing act between pathos and humor. Larry looks truly stunned and then deeply wounded by Cheryl’s leaving. When he acts like the old Larry — trying to get Cheryl to phone the doubting hostess of a restaurant and confirm that he cancelled their reservation because Cheryl left him — it seems like a mixture of desperation, adolescent reversion, and denial. And it’s still funny. The way the separation has a ripple effect in their social world says some interesting things about marriage as a kind of social glue that binds like-minded people together. As for Cheryl, she comes off sympathetically — her voice when speaking to Larry is softer than usual — but also remote, as if she has already disconnected from him.

EPISODE EIGHT

The N Word / Original Airdate: October 28, 2007 / Directed by Tom Kramer

The separation with Cheryl causes some interesting behavior in this episode, not all of it directly linked but easy to read as a result of this rupture in Larry’s life. Why else would he clear a space in the backyard for Aunt Rae to plant a vegetable garden unless he needed to replace his lost family with a new one? And when Aunt Rae hugs him, would he have got an erection if Cheryl were still around as wife and sexual partner?

And why is Larry suddenly even more conscious of being bald than usual, so that he thinks a waitress is discriminating against him? Could it be that as a single man his appearance is much more important than it used to be?

And then there’s the dating thing. In a hospital cafeteria — he’s there with Jeff who is going to undergo surgery to stop his snoring — Larry flirts with a woman doctor named Sheila and ends up making a date. During their evening out she continues to act like a doctor: her living room looks like a reception area and she sends Larry to her bedroom to take off his clothes and wait for her. In the bedroom Muzak plays and there’s a weigh scale against the wall. Larry waits in his T-shirt, underwear, and socks as if expecting to be examined. Alas for Larry, they are interrupted by the arrival of relatives.

The middle of the episode has Larry overhearing a white man on a cell phone use the word “nigger.” When he recounts it to Sheila, a black doctor overhears the word and takes Larry for a racist. Upset, the doctor mistakenly shaves Jeff’s head before his surgery. For the episode, Jeff Garlin really had his head shaved, and the effect isn’t flattering. But when Jeff discovers that people start ignoring him because he’s now bald, and a potential new client, Ben Stiller, decides not to sign with him, Larry says, “Welcome to my world.”

Larry gets another chance to bed Sheila, but for once in his life he can’t get an erection, due to some estrogen that he’s mistakenly taking. That makes him zero for two in the dating game. As for Cheryl, she never appears in the episode, except in a series of flashbacks as Larry thinks back on their life together.

EPISODE NINE

The Therapists / Original Airdate: November 4, 2007 / Directed by David Mandel

In episode seven Cheryl left Larry. In episode eight he tried dating. And in this episode there is an attempt at reconciliation.

Usually when estranged couples try to find their way back, both admit to faults that have contributed to their unhappiness. But not in this marriage. There is no question that the unhappy partner has been Cheryl and the fault has all been Larry’s. But not anymore. Because Larry is a new man.

“It’s a mystery to me. How you could have lived with that maniac for so long,” Larry says about his old self. He and Cheryl are in a bar having a drink. He is dressed in “proper” adult clothes, wants to go to Europe with her, and says he no longer cares about golf. Cheryl laps it up. And why not when he’s trying to be everything she wants?

It turns out that Larry is being coached by his new therapist, Dr. Bright, well played by the English comic Steve Coogan of Hamlet 2 and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Actually, Coogan is more like a dating counselor than a therapist and he advises Larry to hold her hand, tell her he loves her, and then say she has until Monday to decide whether she wants to move back in. After that the offer expires. Larry is skeptical, but he does as he’s told. And he’s got Cheryl beaming with pleasure, at least until the ultimatum. She immediately says no and tells him never to call her again.

A heartbroken Larry tears a strip off Dr. Bright then drags him to Cheryl’s front door to admit it was his idea. Cheryl turns out to be living in a lovely beachfront house and although she believes the therapist story, she still isn’t sold. What to do? Larry knows that Cheryl is taking the advice of a therapist of her own and decides he needs to get this woman on his side. Yes, the old Larry comes roaring back. He devises a scheme where Dr. Bright, posing as a thief, tries to steal the therapist’s bag. Larry will rescue her, making himself a hero.

The scheme goes well for Larry, less well for the doctor who gets nabbed by the cops. In fact, Larry does so well that his scheme backfires, for the therapist decides she wants him for herself. He has to extract himself by claiming to have Alzheimer’s. She agrees to tell Cheryl she should reconcile.

Larry and Cheryl have a wonderful date at an amusement park and all looks resolved. At least until Cheryl’s therapist finds out that she’s been conned. The look on Cheryl’s face as she receives the therapist’s call tells us that the old Larry isn’t going to cut it.

This is certainly one of the season’s best episodes, with high emotional stakes and high humor too. Coogan proves himself to be one of the few guest actors who can hold the camera’s attention equally with Larry and he does so by underplaying the part. A minor note: Jeff Garlin’s hair is starting to grow in, showing that the episodes have indeed been shot in sequence.

EPISODE TEN

The Bat Mitzvah / Original Airdate: November 11, 2007 / Directed by Larry Charles

While the Black family has become part of Larry’s household — and a good thing too, given his loneliness for Cheryl — what their fate is to be hasn’t yet been addressed. Nor do we know what will happen to Larry and Cheryl’s marriage, although the signs aren’t good. This episode has an unusual opening scene in which Larry is not present. Instead the Black family has gathered in the kitchen. Leon has telephoned Jeff to tell him that Larry is depressed and won’t get out of bed. “Mopy Dick,” Leon calls him.

Jeff arrives for an intervention and finds Larry moaning, “I’ve fucked up my life.” He’ll never meet another woman like Cheryl. To make matters worse, Cheryl is bringing the man from the airplane as her date to Sammy’s bat mitzvah. Jeff says that Larry must bring a date too and Larry agrees to pull himself together.

What little stability Larry has collapses when Loretta tells him that their house is ready for them to move back into. But the episode needs some story of its own and gets it in the form of a bad television director (played by Michael McKean of This Is Spinal Tap) who wants Larry to put in a good word for him to direct a pilot that Richard Lewis is making. As well, Larry suffers from yet another odd and embarrassing ailment, this one a tickle in his anus. When he tells an insistent medical secretary that he has a “gerbil up my ass,” the rumor spreads through small-town L.A. that Larry has actually inserted a rodent into himself for some kind of perverse pleasure. (This plot seems to derive from the the urban legend, since debunked, that actor Richard Gere was admitted to hospital several years ago with just such a medical problem.)

Hoping to find someone to take to Sammy’s bat mitzvah, Larry goes out on a double date with Susie and Jeff and a woman he met in the proctologist’s waiting room, but unfortunately the woman seems to be suffering from the same squirm-inducing problem as Larry. At the last minute he asks Loretta who has never even heard of a bat mitzvah but is happy to go.

The bat mitzvah scenes look like the real thing — happy guests toasting the bat mitzvah girl (Larry’s own toast offers too much information about his tickle) and having a good time. Loretta, it must be said, looks smashing in her dress and with her hair done, all showing off her natural good looks. Things look like they might go bad when Larry spies Cheryl and her new beau, Glenn, and goes to speak to them. And when Cheryl and Glenn get up to dance Larry looks pretty upset. But then — miracle of miracles — he sees Loretta who’s a vision of loveliness and a look of realization crosses his face. He asks her to dance, they hold one another romantically, and the moment (don’t ask me how) practically trembles with emotion. Could the two really be getting together?

And then in an amazing montage we see the new life of Larry, Loretta, and the family. The two wake in bed in the morning when the children pounce on them. Larry is yelling at Daryl’s soccer game. Larry and Loretta are driving with the kids misbehaving in the car, just like a regular family. Susie comes to the door to tell off Larry, only to have it slammed in her face by Loretta. And the final shot: a Christmas photo of Larry, Loretta, the kids, and Auntie Rae under the Christmas tree.

The ending is breathtakingly effective because it is so unlikely and surprising, and such a delicious wish-fulfillment. Here is Larry with a beautiful young partner, a family that needs him, no longer sinking in his own petty concerns but living life fully. It is funny, certainly, but the remarkable thing is that it is more than funny. Because in the end we want Larry to be happy. Once more Larry David has pulled off a brilliant season ender.

Season Seven

EPISODE ONE

Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister / Original Airdate: September 20, 2009 / Directed by Larry Charles

The honeymoon between Larry and Loretta has not, it turns out, lasted long. She is bossing Larry around, making him feel like Cinderella to her evil stepmother as he fetches her soup, endures the high thermostat she prefers, and awaits the news of her biopsy — for Loretta may have cancer. What does that mean to Larry? That he has twenty-four hours to break up with her. If her diagnosis is positive, he’ll never be able to get out of the relationship.

It’s not hard to imagine what Larry David is thinking. The Blacks provided a terrific story line for last year, and the joining of Larry and Loretta was a fine ending to the season. But enough is enough; it’s time to move on. And he does it in a couple of episodes. The only member of the Black family that will remain is Leon. He and Larry make a great vaudeville team so why not keep him living in Larry’s house?

Marty Funkhouser comes over and, with an expression that alters about as much as Boris Karloff’s in Frankenstein, is as funny as always. His opinion that it’s okay for people in your home to go into your fridge for “liquids” but not food sounds like it should be made an official social rule. Marty’s sister Bam Bam has been living in a mental institution and he takes Larry up on his offer to visit her, despite Larry insisting it was “an empty gesture.”

Catherine O’Hara plays Bam Bam, the second alumnus of SCTV to be on the show (Martin Short was the first). Larry and Jeff go to visit her and when Larry returns from helping himself to the contents of Marty’s fridge, he hears Jeff — who does not exactly set the bar high when it comes to extramarital sex — behind a closed door with the crazy Bam Bam moaning, “Fuck me, fat boy!” (Actually, this is the first transgression we know of since Jeff and Susie reconciled over a pregnancy that was later dropped as a story line.) The old joke that all so-and-so really needs is to get laid comes true; Marty can’t believe how Larry and Jeff’s visit has picked up Bam Bam’s spirits.

But to Jeff’s unease, Marty brings Bam Bam to a dinner party that he and Susie are having. When Bam Bam offhandedly mentions the sex, a desperate Jeff says that she is crazy. When Marty says her delusion means she’ll have to go back to the institution, Larry tries to suggest it isn’t necessary, but Jeff heartily agrees, an unusually cruel action on his part.

Viewers may have been wondering if Cheryl is simply gone from the show. But Larry runs into her, and she’s looking lovely. What’s more, she’s no longer seeing the No Fly Zone guy. And the seed is planted for the season story arc when she mentions, “It was different when you were working on Seinfeld.” Larry says, “I get that. Too much Larry. We can reduce Larry.” The hope of getting Cheryl back makes the need to break up with Loretta even more urgent.

Alas, he doesn’t beat the doctor back to the house and the news isn’t good. Loretta has cancer. “This is really where the hard work starts,” he tells Larry. But he offers what he thinks is hope: “In two, three, maybe four years hopefully she’ll be fine.” To Larry, that’s a death sentence of his own.

EPISODE TWO

Vehicular Fellatio / Original Airdate: September 27, 2009 / Directed by Alec Berg

Having cancer has certainly given Loretta the upper hand in this relationship. Larry has become her servant. She wants him to take her to the salon to get her nails and hair done even though he has a golf game. Why can’t Loretta drive? “Because I have cancer and I want you to drive,” she says. Argument over.

Nor is Loretta exactly fitting into Larry’s world. When Larry reluctantly asks if she wants to come with him to dinner with Jeff, Susie, Richard, and Richard’s latest girlfriend, she asks, “Any black people gonna be there?” If not, why would she want to go? Larry’s acid reply — “Might be some people with cancer” — is harsh but illuminating. Can we only be friends with people who are in a group that we ourselves identify with?

The episode’s story line is based on an act more identified with adolescent sexuality, or perhaps sex for sale, than it is identified with middle-aged couples: oral sex in a car. Jeff tells Larry that Richard’s new girlfriend performed on him while he was driving to the restaurant, which has the effect of making Larry not want to kiss Beverly or try her drink. (Beverly is played by Lolita Davidovich who began her career in an episode of Three’s Company and made her mark in 1998’s Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters.) This slight by Larry causes some serious problems for Richard, who of course demands that Larry make up with Beverly to save his new oh-so-important relationship.

Larry is far more interested in shaking off Loretta. He takes her to a doctor who believes that women with cancer should leave their spouses who are unsupportive. During the consultation, Larry is very, very funny as he makes noises, points out the African art on display to Loretta as if she might relate to it, and imitates an old Jewish man. The plan seems to be working, but then Loretta sees the doctor going down on her husband while he’s driving and the act turns her off the doctor’s advice.

But there will be two more acts of oral sex in cars before the show is done — one illusory and one real. The illusory one has Larry in his own car with a married woman whom Leon has been sleeping with and now must hide from her husband. When Loretta wrongly thinks the woman is giving Larry some vehicular satisfaction, she leaves him. Victory! The second, and real, act, between Susie and Jeff, is simply a comic denouement. But it’s a good thing that Larry has come along to help pull them out of the ditch after they crash. Larry was right, fellatio in a moving car is dangerous. A helpful hint for us all.

EPISODE THREE

The Reunion / Original Airdate: October 4, 2009 / Directed by Jeff Schaffer

“You know,” Larry says, “those reunion shows, they’re so lame . . . the actors are ten years older. It doesn’t look right . . . and Jerry would never want to do it either.” But NBC continues to bug Jeff about the possibility of one. Wouldn’t Larry come to a meeting and tell them face-to-face that there’s no possibility of a Seinfeld reunion show?

So Larry goes, only to run into Cheryl who is auditioning for a part. It has never been made clear what sort of career Cheryl had before marrying Larry, but the indications in episodes this season is that it wasn’t much of one. When she hears about the reunion show meeting, Cheryl says opportunistically, “You have to write a part for me. No kidding.” Is she preying on Larry’s longing for her, which she’s well aware of?

A fantasy of Larry directing Cheryl in a part and having her look at him with adoration prompts him to tell NBC that he’ll do a reunion show. Now all he has to do is convince a skeptical Jerry Seinfeld who makes his first speaking appearance on Curb. Jerry remembers how Larry would watch other shows and put on his “very judgmental face.” All that Larry can say is “We’ll do it in a way that won’t be lame” and tell of his story idea: George, now divorced, is trying to win his wife back. Hmm, that sounds familiar. But Jerry decides to trust Larry and agrees. And who does he think would be good for the part of George’s ex-wife? Meg Ryan.

Next Larry has to convince Jason Alexander, who doesn’t think the audience will believe that George, “a jerky, schmucky little character,” ever managed to get married. But he too agrees in the end, musing that “It could make up for the finale, that’s for sure.” (Larry, however, refuses to accept that the original Seinfeld finale was a dog.) And who does Jason Alexander think would be good for the role of the ex-wife? An actress with a funny voice — Jennifer Tilly or maybe Kristin Chenoweth.

The story idea for the Elaine character that Larry presents to Julia Louis-Dreyfus is that she cuts the hair off a little girl’s doll. The idea for Michael Richards — the only one of the group who is appearing on Curb for the first time, looking older and very spacey — is that he picks up a prostitute so that he can drive in the fast lane. In other words, Larry the character is pulling ideas out of his life — ideas that themselves came from Larry David’s own life. Many viewers will be reminded of the show that Jerry and George created on Seinfeld that also drew on stories from previous episodes.

Larry is delighted to have set the reunion up, only to have it go off the rails temporarily when he tells an NBC executive to “fuck himself” for giving Larry and Jeff crummy seats to a Lakers game. Julia and Jason are also angry at him while Michael Richards, it turns out, has no idea what’s going on. But Larry makes right with the cast and offers a “very begrudging” apology to the NBC exec. The light turns green again.

EPISODE FOUR

The Hot Towel / Original Airdate: October 11, 2009 / Directed by Alec Berg

If you dated a woman years before and go on a date with her now, can you pick up with her (sexually, that is) where you “left off”? That’s the question that Larry has for Jeff, who answers a resounding yes. This is a stand-alone episode that feels like something of a throwback to last season. For one thing, although Larry is trying to get Cheryl back he decides to continue dating. Here the woman is Mary Jane Porter, played by Sherry Stringfield. Is it possible that this return of an old girlfriend is a playful take on Sherry Stringfield’s career? Stringfield is famous in Hollywood for being the member of the original cast of ER who quit the show and then, years later, returned.

None of the other story lines dominate the episode. Our favorite library cop, Philip Baker Hall, returns as Dr. Morrison, whom Larry cajoles into giving out his home telephone number, something he will definitely regret. And then there is Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen’s party, where an appalled Larry witnesses Christian Slater scarf down more than his rightful “allotment” of caviar, breaking what Larry calls the “unwritten rules of society.” Larry gives Ted and Mary a $300 gift certificate to an Italian restaurant ($300 seems to be the amount that Larry spends on gifts for friends, in case you were wondering how much you should spend), only to become angry when he discovers that Ted and Mary use the money to treat Jeff and Susie.

Larry’s old girlfriend Mary Jane turns out to have a boyfriend from whom Larry must escape at the last minute. And he would too, if not for a vengeful Christian Slater, smarting because Larry has told on him about the caviar. This episode, half comedy of manners and half sex farce, adds up to something of a dog’s dinner. It’s a bit of a mess, but the dog is happy to eat it anyway.

EPISODE FIVE

Denise Handicapped / Original Airdate: October 18, 2009 / Directed by David Mandel

Has Larry gone bohemian? In this episode, instead of the usual middle-of-the-road or upscale restaurants, delis or diners, we see him in a rather cool-looking café. Later in the episode he’s even drinking an espresso!

Otherwise it’s the same old Larry. This episode has echoes of “The Terrorist Attack” from season three with Alanis Morissette. Here it’s the renowned violinist Chee-Yun who is slated to give a house concert and Larry happens to be invited. He uses the concert to snare another date, this one with a woman in the café named Denise. Only when she pulls away from the table does Larry realize that she’s in a wheelchair. (Although Larry has used actors with disabilities on the show, the actress here, Anita Barone, is not wheelchair bound in real life. She is another woman who appeared on Seinfeld, however.)

Dating a handicapped woman has its advantages, Larry discovers. For one thing, Denise carries a parking permit that allows Larry to leave his car right in front of the restaurant when they go out on a date. For another, it gets them a table immediately. Best of all, it raises Larry to a whole new level in the eyes of friends who see them together. It even gets him re-invited to the Chee-Yun concert after he had insulted the homeowners by suggesting to them that one of the biological parents of their adopted child might be “psychotic.”

Denise is the first woman other than Cheryl who we know for certain has sex with Larry (although we can also count Loretta surely). There’s a good scene between Larry and Leon in which Larry confides that Denise didn’t seem to get aroused during sex. Was it his technique or her handicap? Leon’s helpful response: “You should have broke that ass in two pieces.”

A little mishap on the beach — Susie throws Larry’s BlackBerry into the ocean — results in his losing Denise’s phone number. By good luck, however, he meets a second woman in a wheelchair and takes her to the concert instead. The only problem is that Denise is already there. Both of the women go after him, aided by none other than Larry’s lesbian friend Rosie O’Donnell, who is angry at Larry for a different reason altogether.

This and the previous episode (“The Hot Towel”) are the least focussed and the weakest of the season. Even if they weren’t, most viewers would be anxious to get on with the Seinfeld reunion plot. It starts up again in the next episode.

EPISODE SIX

The Bare Midriff / Original Airdate: October 25, 2009 / Directed by Larry Charles

Years ago Larry David suggested that Seinfeld should be based on what he and Jerry talked about to one another, the kind of banter they used to have about trivial things. To know where the idea came from, all you need to do is watch this episode. The scenes in which Larry and Jerry talk about urination, telephone hang-ups, and hospital visits will show you exactly what Larry David had in mind. Plus they’re terrific scenes; these two funny guys are just great together.

In order to write the Seinfeld reunion, the two old friends now have an office together, with facing desks. They also have a receptionist, a young, pleasant-looking but chubby woman whose short shirt exposes her navel — and her spare tire. Both Larry and Jerry find Maureen’s attire to be distracting and a little distasteful. Larry is elected to tell her. Her response is to quit in a huff.

The only problem is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus suggested her in the first place and now demands that Larry patch things up. At Maureen’s house, Larry meets her mother Madeline who claims that Larry is the spitting image of her late husband, who was murdered in 1962. What follows is a flashback scene that feels like a bizarre combination of the sensibilities of Larry David and Martin Scorsese. The husband (played jauntily by Larry) is driving in a big-finned sixties automobile with the radio blaring. He honks at a car that cuts him off, the two pull over, and when the husband gets out the man from the other car beats him to death with a crow bar. The audience doesn’t actually see the beating: a spray of blood covers the windshield of the car. It’s too bloody to be funny, too playful to be gruesome, and yet somehow it’s both these things.

There is a priceless scene in a restaurant in which Jerry and Larry are in a booth waiting for Richard Lewis to arrive. When he does, the two already sitting debate which one should move over to let Richard sit down. Richard gets so disgusted that he leaves. Seeming disconnected from the main plot, it is actually important later on when Larry and Richard, in two separate cars, unwittingly reenact the murder of Madeline’s husband. This time the murder weapon is not a crow bar but a signed Joe DiMaggio baseball bat, which Lewis is taking from his trunk to give to Larry but which Madeline fears is meant as a weapon.

The main story, however, and the one that caused religious groups and various conservative commentators to condemn Larry David, begins in the scene when Larry visits Madeline’s home. He has been taking pills that cause him to urinate in a mighty stream (like Seabiscuit, notes Jerry) and in the bathroom he accidentally splashes a large picture of Jesus on the wall, which begs the question, who would keep a picture of Jesus beside a toilet? Maureen and her mother see the splashes on Jesus’ cheek and think they are tears. They decide to buy an RV and travel the country, sharing this “miracle” with others.

Larry David isn’t so much interested in religion as with its symbols and trappings. The idea that an image can have such power for people is what fascinates him, as well as how easy it is for some to look for signs of the divine. Of course, he turns this interest into comedy, just as he did with the Christ nail and the mezuzah in season five. The description of the episode — “Larry urinates on a picture of Jesus” — sounds highly offensive, but the episode itself is not. If anything, it’s Larry who comes off looking ridiculous. Maureen and her mother are perhaps too anxious to believe, but they are not mocked for their beliefs. (It’s her weight that Maureen is mocked for; chubby people apparently have no right to want to feel sexy.)

A subplot in the episode concerns Larry’s excessive use of paper napkins. When he takes more than allowed by a snarling restaurant owner behind the counter, the owner sics the police after Larry. He ends up in a lineup but, fortunately for Larry, the owner can’t distinguish between him and one other bald man with glasses. The other man is black. “All I see is bald,” the restaurant owner says. Sometimes stupid jokes can be very funny.

EPISODE SEVEN

The Black Swan / Original Airdate: November 1, 2009 / Directed by Bryan Gordon

While deaths have been common in Curb, episodes six and seven of this season are notable for murders. Only in this one the murderer is none other than Larry himself. And the victim? A swan.

A black swan is the pet of the golf club owner Mr. Takahashi (played by longtime character actor Dana Lee). When it attacks Larry on the course, he defends himself with his club. Larry makes Jeff, Marty Funkhouser, and Cousin Andy swear to secrecy. Andy gets dumped on by the others for saying that he tells his wife everything, but he too agrees, a promise he doesn’t end up keeping.

This episode, with no connection to the story arc, feels like it belongs in the first season. There’s a second death in it, this one being Norm (Paul Mazursky), a slow golfer whom Larry shouts at. Norm, who had high blood pressure, is found dead on the course and Larry is blamed for his demise. It is only Larry who later realizes who the likely murderer of Norm is: none other than the black swan.

Like Marty, Cousin Andy seems to add to the comedy of any scene simply by his presence. Yet the two are so widely different: one dry, insistent, even humorless, the other broad, expressive, emotional. Larry generously offers to pay for Andy’s young daughter’s college education, which naturally thrills his effusive cousin. But then Larry balks when Andy asks him to pay for his wife to go to cosmetology school. “This is her calling,” Andy insists. “She’s great with lotions.”

Another story line has to do with Larry asking the stone mason to fix a spelling mistake on his mother’s gravestone. (Actually, it isn’t a mistake. Letters cost fifty dollars each and Larry’s father has tried to save money.) The bad feeling that rises between Larry and the stone mason over their opinions of a baseball player isn’t itself that interesting. But it culminates in Larry enjoying the opportunity to use an expression that one just doesn’t hear often enough. “Hoisted by my own petard,” Larry muses.

Print that on a T-shirt, Larry.

EPISODE EIGHT

Officer Krupke / Original Airdate: November 8, 2009 / Directed by David Steinberg

It’s official: Larry likes musicals. In “Ben’s Birthday Party” (season four, episode two) he is the only person to enjoy the blind pianist Michael’s club date where he badly sings show tunes. He belts it out in The Producers. And in this episode a chance encounter with a policeman named Officer Krupke inspires Larry to sing the West Side Story tune of the same name.

This episode is also a good opportunity to note Larry’s relationship with children. In an interview, Larry David has commented on how children are supposed to be treated — as if they’re sweet, charming, wonderful creatures. But of course children don’t treat one another that way and Larry, who quickly finds his inner child in the presence of a real one, can be competitive, mean, fierce, righteous — just like a real kid. What spurs him on here are some kids holding a lemonade stand who are selling an inferior product. Larry gets in quite a huff about that, setting off alarm bells in the children’s mother (played by Carol Leifer, the comic who was the basis for Elaine and later became a Seinfeld writer) who ends up calling on none other than Officer Krupke himself.

It’s a good thing that the officer is called, for it allows Larry David to finish another story line, one that begins when Susie finds a pair of women’s panties in Jeff’s glove compartment. Perhaps his experience with Bam Bam triggered off his near sex addiction, for it seems that he is straying once more. To hide his tracks he tells Susie that the panties belong to Larry. Not because he’s kinky, but simply because he finds panties more comfortable.

Larry agrees to go along with the lie, although he’d rather pretend that he’s got some transsexual interest, an idea that seems to intrigue him. In either case, Susie doesn’t believe Jeff, so it’s a good thing (for Jeff at least) that she is there to witness Larry’s later encounter with Officer Krupke. The lemonade kids’ mom has called him, but the officer is interested in a different crime. Seeing that Larry is wearing a pair of trousers with a security tag on it (he took them from a Banana Republic after the store lost his own pants), the officer insists that he remove them. Larry does, showing off a nice pair of red panties. The long setup isn’t hard to spot early on, but it works nicely anyway.

The story arc gets kicked forward when Cheryl comes in to audition for the part of George’s ex-wife Amanda in the reunion show. Cheryl’s reading is all right, but her friend Virginia (played by Elisabeth Shue, who starred in Adventures in Babysitting, Leaving Las Vegas, and Hamlet 2 alongside Curb guest Steve Coogan) does much better and gets the part. Larry’s jealousy also kicks in when he finds out that Virginia’s husband has asked Cheryl to participate in a threesome. Virginia, however, injures her neck (by going down on Cheryl, Larry is sure) and so Cheryl gets the part after all. Larry’s plan to win her back is finally in place.

And the final two glorious episodes have, at last, been set up.

EPISODE NINE

The Table Read / Original Airdate: November 15, 2009 / Directed by Larry Charles

This is what it must have been like back in the days of Seinfeld. On the set, dozens of people mill about, waiting for the writers, the director, and the actors to take their seats at the long table for the first read-through of the script. “It’s like going back in time,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus says. Jason Alexander voices skepticism about Cheryl in the role of his ex. When Larry says her audition was the best, he replies with “Who was the next best?” As for Michael Richards, he’s too worried about the possibility of having Groats disease to focus on anything else. To ease his mind, Larry says he’ll have Marty’s cousin Danny Duberstein give Michael a call. Duberstein had Groats too. The only problem, as Larry soon finds out, is that he died from it.

We get glimpses of other Seinfeld regulars — Estelle Harris as George’s mother, Steve Hytner as Kenny Bania, Wayne Knight as Newman. The table read begins and the show is . . . funny! It sounds like a real episode, only with the characters some ten years older. Elaine has a child, from sperm donated by Jerry. George is not only divorced but has lost over $2 million in the Madoff financial scandal. When the people listening laugh, it feels totally genuine. Quite likely they are hearing the script for the first time.

Just as in the pilot episode of the show that Jerry and George create on Seinfeld, Larry has used moments from his life for the story. Some of these moments in Larry’s fictional life came from Larry David’s real life, a strange postmodern commentary on reality, fiction, and creativity.

Larry, however, is distracted by Jason Alexander, who has borrowed a pen that he is sucking on and then sticking in his ear. (Jerry says: “You don’t lend Jason anything. Anything that can be inserted.”) Throughout the episode Larry is bothered by text messages from the nine-year-old daughter of a crew member. Also, he needs to come up with a Danny Duberstein to make Michael Richards believe he’ll be all right. Who does he choose to play the role? Leon. It’s one of J. B. Smoove’s finest performances, as he tells Michael that a Jew has to have a bar mitzvah every thirteen years. He describes the symptoms of Groats disease, something he knows nothing about: “Everything I ate tasted like peaches” and “I forgot how to multiply.” And when he’s on set, he takes one look at Julia Louis-Dreyfus and says to Larry, “So Jerry tapping that ass, huh?” Larry David had good instincts, keeping Leon Black around.

The episode whets our appetite for more scenes from the Seinfeld reunion but also for the shenanigans going on around it.

EPISODE TEN

Seinfeld / Original Airdate: November 22, 2009 / Seinfeld scenes directed by Andy Ackerman / Directed by Jeff Schaffer

The two story arcs — winning back Cheryl and making the Seinfeld re-union show — both come to splendid fruition in this extended-length episode. As it opens we see George and Amanda (Jason Alexander and Cheryl David) in Tom’s Diner doing a scene about how Amanda pulled her money out before Madoff went under. Cheryl isn’t very funny and no doubt Cheryl Hines is deliberately making her a mediocre actress.

Larry, however, tells her she’s “fantastic.” She’s not so sure but she is impressed by Larry’s importance on the set. “It’s your thing,” she says with amazement. “You’re the man.” This is just how Larry was hoping to look. Things get even better when Cheryl asks him to come to her place tonight to work on her lines, but when Larry gets stuck in traffic (due to a subplot involving the set’s coffee guy whom everyone calls Mocha Joe as if that’s his actual name) Cheryl asks Jason Alexander to come over instead.

Jason? Larry begins to suspect some monkey business between Cheryl and him. As it is, Larry isn’t getting along with Jason, perhaps because Larry finds his other self a little too like him for comfort. At a launch party for Jason’s book Acting Without Acting both Larry and Jerry mock him for publishing a book as thin as a pamphlet. Meanwhile, Cheryl and Jason seem to be growing closer. When Larry tries to take Cheryl out for lunch, he discovers that Jason has beat him too it. In rehearsal again, he tries to re-block a scene in which Amanda and George cozy up to each other, putting Jason in the bathroom instead. At last in desperation Larry shouts at Cheryl, “You’re not attracted to him, you’re attracted to me. I’m George!” Freaked out by his behavior, Cheryl takes a hike.

It looks like Larry’s grand scheme has come to nothing. In despair, the artiste rewrites his script, changing the ending so that George and Amanda don’t get back together. “It was all bullshit,” he says, refusing the happy ending. But Jason Alexander is so “invested” in the old ending that he quits the show. Even Jerry has had enough. The actors on the show are all “icons” he says. Except Larry. “He’s a no-con.” Larry insists he can play George’s part. He and Jerry rehearse a scene and Larry does a bad imitation of George. Larry gives them permission to do the old ending and then walks out on the show.

Some viewers prefer it when Larry is his aggressive, trivial, ridiculous self, but Larry David has found a way to bring some emotional weight to some of the episodes and this is one. Larry seems truly devastated by the loss of Cheryl and at the same time fed up. He’s tried his best and failed, and now he can do nothing but give up. The fight is lost. But what Larry doesn’t know is that Cheryl overheard him tell Jeff on the phone that he had only been doing the reunion to win her back. Eavesdropping is an old device, especially in love stories (see Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) but when it comes to romance, sometimes the tried and true is best.

How much time has elapsed? None that we can tell, yet the Seinfeld reunion show is being broadcast on television. It begins in the traditional way with Jerry doing stand-up. We see a montage of totally credible Seinfeld scenes, complete with laugh track. Some of them we’ve seen in rehearsal, others are new, and all of them work. George looks like he’s wearing the same jacket as he used to, but he does use a new catchphrase — “Pretty, pretty, pretty good.” (That must have been fun for Jason Alexander to deliver.)

We see Larry watching from his sofa, smiling and laughing at the scenes. But when Amanda comes in — played not by Cheryl but by Virginia — he looks surprised and disconcerted. In a moment of perfect timing the doorbell rings and he finds Cheryl herself at the door. She tells Larry that she quit the show. “After you left . . . it wasn’t the same,” she says. Larry invites her in to watch and they both hear Virginia deliver the commonplace but still powerful truth, “You have to be away from something to really appreciate it.”

The show is over, Larry and Cheryl kiss, and their words tell us they are back together. Larry’s happiness is our happiness. And we are just as happy to discover that he is still the same Larry, for when he realizes that it was Cheryl who left a ring stain on a table in Julia’s house (something Julia accused him of), he insists that Cheryl phone immediately to tell her.

A taste of Seinfeld, a love story with a happy ending, and the return of the Larry we know and cringe at. Now that’s a satisfying season closer.

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Photo Section

A boyish but already balding Larry David during his stint as a writer and performer on the Saturday Night Live knockoff Fridays.

Connections made on Fridays would be important for the future. Among the cast members was Michael Richards (top right), who Larry later cast as Kramer on Seinfeld. Several other cast members got Seinfeld guest spots.

Larry performs in a Fridays sketch. His on-camera presence was raw and unfocused, but the beginnings of the Larry of Curb Your Enthusiasm are visible.

The table read of Larry’s script for the final episode of Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld is laughing, but viewers and critics would not be as amused. The table read in season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm would create a fictional version of just such a moment.

Hooting the finale of Seinfeld. Although Larry didn’t direct Seinfeld (Andy Ackerman helmed the final episode), he was a major presence on set.

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld chuckle over the script for the “The Pilot” episodes in season four of Seinfeld. He would again comically explore what he knows best — television-making — in seasons two and seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Larry David walks with writer/director Woody Allen and co-star Evan Rachel Wood while shooting Whatever Works. Larry doubted his acting ability, but idol Woody convinced him he could do it.

At the June 8, 2009, premiere of Whatever Works in West Hollywood, California. The film, and Larry’s performance, would be generally well received.

Bearded Larry looks dour about the airing of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s first season. After the poor reviews of his film Sour Grapes and the Seinfeld finale, the first warm reviews of Curb would prove a relief.

The gang’s all here: Susie Essman, Jeff Garlin, Richard Lewis, Larry David, and Cheryl Hines at a theater screening of the season five opener in September 2005, a few days before the HBO broadcast. The show had turned them all into recognizable faces. By then each new season was eagerly anticipated by viewers and critics.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Imprint

Dedication

Introduction

The End of the Beginning,

An Unfunny Kid

Larry’s Corner

The Real Seinfeld

A Show and a Phenomenon

Sour Reception

The Unspecial

JEFF GARLIN

CHERYL HINES

The First Season

JEFF GREENE

CHERYL DAVID

RICHARD LEWIS

SUSIE GREENE

The Real Larry:

That Championship Season:

Larry David, Auteur:

Television Is Funny, Life Is Not

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good

Episode Guide

Season One

Season Two

Season Three

Season Four

Season Five

Season Six

Season Seven

Sources

Photo Section