Curb Your Enthusiasm
Sky Comedy, Tuesdays, 9pm
If I just told you the bald facts about the new season of Larry David’s legendary comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, I’d have to mention that it deals with the #Metoo movement, as Larry is accused of inappropriate activity with various women, while his best friend and manager Jeff constantly gets mistaken for Harvey Weinstein. You’d be fully within your rights to regard the idea of this old (bald) white guy mansplaining #Metoo as massively distasteful. And yet, when you watch the series opener, which airs this week on Sky’s new Comedy channel, it’s clear that even though Larry does somehow end up in an accidental groping situation, the show is not in any way condoning the kind of behaviour that the #Metoo movement has rightly exposed.
This is more a case of Larry being Larry – i.e. careless, smug, petty, self-absorbed, privileged and entirely selfish. The moment in the premiere when he spots a young couple with a selfie stick, grabs it from them and snaps it in half across his knee, before continuing to blithely stroll down the street is a brilliantly startling and hilarious summary of what Larry is like. He’s the man for whom social norms do not apply, and in this first new episode for three years, he trashes those norms relentlessly from start to finish. He lectures a pregnant woman about doing too much exercise, wipes his glasses on his female assistant’s shirt, and dons a Trump “Make America Great Again” cap, so he can get out of a lunch date. It would be weird if Larry didn’t get embroiled in his own inappropriate behaviour controversy. It’s what he has been doing for ten seasons to glorious comedic effect.