Why we’ll miss ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
Larry David’s character revealed the world is filled with absurdities but also offered catharsis
If there’s one thing we can say for certain about Larry David, it’s that he’s unlucky.
Not the real Larry David, of course — who, among other achievements, has been nominated for nearly 30 Emmy Awards and won two for “Seinfeld” — but his onscreen counterpart, whose cringe-inducing trials and tribulations have been on full display for more than two decades in the show “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
We have watched that Larry (played by Larry David) stumble his way through every faux pas known to man and come out the other end mostly unchanged, ready to blunder once more.
Unlike the feel-good shows that largely made up 1990s comic television — think “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” — “Curb Your Enthusiasm” set its sights on admonishing its characters and society at large.
With the first season airing at the turn of the 21st century, “Curb” has remained a constant presence in the comedy space, outlasting some of TV’s most revered comedies: it already had four seasons in the bag when “The Office” aired its first episode in 2005; six when “Modern Family” premiered in 2009. And while those shows experienced peaks and valleys before arriving at definitive ends, “Curb” has continued. The latest season — its 12th and final one — premiered in February and ends on Sunday.
The show follows a fictional Larry David who, like his real-life counterpart, is the well-known co-creator and writer of “Seinfeld.” In “Curb,” however, his focus is more on critiquing the minutiae of everyday life than his career in the entertainment business. Each episode sees Larry annoyed about something benign: a store policy, bowling alley shoe rentals, where a friend keeps their garbage in their house. Due to bad luck and an inability to let things slide, Larry’s annoyance spirals out of control into a convoluted tangle of misunderstandings.
His bad luck is what makes the show so interesting: it seems the universe never lends him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he always finds himself caught in awkward situations, with people walking in on him at the worst moments or overhearing out-of-context quips.
In the very first episode of the show, for instance, Larry jokingly called his wife Hitler for being controlling while on the phone with his agent Jeff (Jeff Garlin, a show regular). Unbeknownst to him, Jeff was on speakerphone while driving with his parents, who were related to Holocaust survivors. Larry’s reluctance to apologize and his failed attempts to dig his way out of this awkward hole only landed him in deeper trouble with Jeff’s parents and his own wife, as he tried to appease the former without revealing the situation to the latter.
Larry’s ethos can be summed up neatly by a quip from Season 11. Responding to his friend Richard (played by the late, great Richard Lewis), who was offended that Larry hadn’t attended his Broadway show, Larry announced: “We have an obligation imbalance: I don’t do anything to invite you to, but you do things to invite me to.”
For Larry, life is about balance and rules; reciprocity and structure are essential, and when there’s a perceived fray or injustice, he has to complain about it. The show delights in poking fun at flimsy social conventions; one finger jabbing at said rule, the other at Larry for getting so worked up about it.
You would think that watching 12 seasons — more than 100 episodes — of a curmudgeon making his way through life would grow tiring, but creator David struck a golden balance by deriving satirical comedy and social commentary from the series’ cast of sharp personalities, led by David, the character.
It’s a formula whose influence you can feel in many of the great comedy shows that have premiered in the past two decades.
HBO’s “Veep” (2012-2019) follows a similarly crabby protagonist in Selina Meyer (Julia-Louis Dreyfus) as she tries to game the political system to become the American president while finding herself in one ridiculous scandal after another, both due to her own bad luck and stubbornness, and the general ineptitude of her team.
Then there’s “30 Rock” (20062013), lighter and kinder than “Curb” and “Veep” but similar in its metafiction and satire, as lead Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) runs a sketch comedy show in a direct allusion to Fey’s own long tenure as writer and actor on “Saturday Night Live.”
Most of Nathan Fielder’s work (like “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal”) follows a fictionalized version of Fielder who traverses a wide range of improvised scenarios that offer funny critiques of different social conventions. And bad luck is a major factor in the satirical hijinks of the gang in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” which debuted in 2005.
There’s no doubt that Larry David’s presence on TV will be missed once “Curb” airs its final episode.
Who else will bemoan popcornsharing etiquette or airplane seating policies? With a prolific collection of grievances over the last 24 years, Larry has achieved two things through “Curb Your Enthusiasm”: revealed that the world is filled with absurdities and irrationalities but also offered us some catharsis in watching a cranky old man make it his life’s mission to shake his fist at an entity that doesn’t care that he exists.