Curb Your Enthusiasm Is Over. JB Smoove Is Just Getting Started

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“God, man, have you ever seen The Party? You have to watch it, it’s the funniest shit I’ve seen.”

Talk of comedic influences has just pushed JB Smoove into a rhapsodic digression about the brilliance of the legend Peter Sellers, specifically the 1968 film where he plays a bumbling, fish-out-of-water houseguest at a posh Hollywood gathering. “He causes chaos unintentionally, because he doesn’t know how to carry himself in a party with all these rich people,” Smoove says, animatedly but eloquently, in stark contrast to his most famous character, Leon Black from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. “It's the funniest goddamn movie—but I learned from watching that how to paint pictures onstage. Meaning I'm making things up that aren’t there, but it's there for me, and [the audience] has to imagine it being there.”

Smoove is talking specifically about Sellers’s ability to elicit full-throated belly laughs without even uttering a word—but “Uninvited houseguest causes chaos amongst the LA elite” also more or less describes what Smoove’s been doing alongside Larry David on the past six seasons of Curb.

Except Smoove’s Leon doesn’t bumble around—he moves with purpose and determination, beginning with his very first scene on the show, in which Leon waltzes in to claim a room in the David household alongside his hurricane-displaced family members, even though Leon himself is an LA local. Ten episodes later, when the rest of the Blacks are leaving, having finally had enough of Larry, Leon goes back to that room without breaking stride.

And with that casual bit of squatting, Leon suddenly became the element Curb couldn't do without. New mansions in new neighborhoods, a move to New York for a season, even a five-year hiatus—Leon and his durags have persisted through it all. And in the process, JB Smoove became one of Hollywood’s most prolific comedic character actors.

Today, Smoove—who will host GQ’s Global Creativity Awards on April 11 in New York City—is seated in a large booth in the back of Joey’s, the upscale chain restaurant that’s the preferred watering hole of his upper-class neighbors. He's dressed to the nines in a brown pinstripe suit and one of his trademark Borsalino hats; if you didn't know him from TV, you could mistake him for the mayor of Woodland Hills. He certainly has the public disposition for it: Earlier in the day, a stop at his favorite local cigar shop ended with Smoove promising three middle-aged men enjoying midday sticks that he’d return for a longer stay and treat them to a ride in his classic ’68 Lincoln, and when he gets recognized by two older women in the next booth not long after sitting down at Joey’s, he greets them warmly.

Smoove has lived in the neighborhood for over a decade, not long after Curb catapulted him from if you know, you know status on the stand-up circuit to a full-fledged star. His is one of the great counterintuitive Hollywood success stories, a post-40s glow-up that defies industry age expectations. Now, at 58, Smoove is feeling reflective as the curtain finally closes on the series that changed his life.

With Larry David having officially declared last night’s season 12 finale to be the series finale, you can now cleanly demarcate Curb into two halves, Before JB and After. The first six seasons follow a fictionalized version of David navigating the banalities of rich married life and the social awkwardness he foments wherever he goes. But in that sixth season, Larry’s TV wife, Cheryl, finally fed up after one myopic Larry rant too many, leaves him (coincidentally, or not, the same year David got divorced in real life). Across the next six seasons, Larry never remarries—there have been recurring girlfriends, an extended stint with Vivica A. Fox, even attempts to get Cheryl back, but the only constant presence in Larry’s house has been Leon Black. The show went from being a Brentwood version of The Honeymooners (or, perhaps, the thinking man’s King of Queens) to The Odd Couple.

It’s a shift no one saw coming, not even David himself when he first conceived of the character, but with all due respect to the excellent Cheryl Hines, Leon is maybe, stealthily, the spark that helped propel the show another six seasons—and propelled Smoove to the big leagues in the process.

“I feel like Leon filled in for Cheryl. Larry and Leon become this,” Smoove says, entwining his two fingers together. “It's never said. [You never hear] ‘Larry loves Leon and he's claimed Leon as his friend.’ It's apparent. The ‘Long-Ball Larry’ scene when Larry says, ‘This guy, he’s staying at my house, he won't fucking leave,’ that's the only time he ever [commented on it].”

In real life, Larry David is more forthright about it: “He made himself indispensable.”

Smoove’s subsequent push into Hollywood—cutting up with Kevin Hart, chaperoning Peter Parker on a field trip in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home—was as sudden and surefooted as Leon’s into the Curb world. But like all great character-actor stories, it was hardly that simple. When Leon’s first episode aired, 17 years ago, Smoove was 41, and had already lived a colorful life of stand-up and Almost Big Breaks. But to hear him tell it now, the near-misses never broke him. There were never any lingering doubts, anxieties, or fear of a shrinking window of opportunity.

Smoove is a born showman, always raising his voice, cracking jokes, grandly gesturing—but when he recounts his come-up, he shifts into a Zen-like demeanor that will make even the biggest skeptic a believer in manifesting one’s destiny. And sure, it’s easy to recount from the lofty perch he’s reached today, but Smoove talks with enough conviction to make you believe he really was just as much at peace then as he is now.

The trick, he says, to both his ascent and his self-assuredness, is simply falling back on his talent: He is very funny, and there’s always work for funny people. “I look at stand-up like a vehicle,” Smoove explains. “Some people tend to drive that vehicle for a long time, and some people, that's their only car, but it’s a vehicle you drive to get to other things that you want to do. Me, I used stand-up as my mode of travel, but I always told my [comic] friends, ‘Think about how far you want to go with your vehicle.’ When everybody was doing Def Jam, BET…I was doing everything plus that. I was doing the first shows on Comedy Central, I was doing pilots on MTV, I was doing Comikaze [a stand-up show], I was doing Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central, I was doing Premium Blend. I wanted the stand-up vehicle to get me out of places.”

Of course, like all comics true to the craft, stand-up remains a bedrock for Smoove—he set out for a new run of club shows at the beginning of this month. Musing on the state of stand-up now versus when he came in, Smoove says that while he doesn’t aim to push buttons with his own material, he agrees with the notion that comics “have a responsibility to stick to our guns and give you what you need. In this world where we allow anyone to say their opinion, it's up to you to listen to those opinions. It's up to you to decide not to listen to that, fine, because there are thousands of people who fucking love it.”

But while comedy continues figuring out how to navigate the so-called woke era, the legacies of comics from Smoove’s generation—Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hugley, Earthquake, Bill Bellamy, Reggie McFadden, Ian Edwards, Hugh Moore, to name a few—have been in contention. NFL player turned media personality Shannon Sharpe’s Club ShayShay series has become a haven for deep-dive interviews with Black comedians, none bigger than Katt Williams’s explosive visit, where bad business (like Cedric allegedly stealing one of Katt’s biggest jokes) was rehashed and ascents were called into question.

“It's old shit that's not going to change your trajectory,” Smoove says of all that. “It doesn't do anything for you. Here's my thing about jokes: Can't nobody take your likeness. A joke, a 30-year-old joke? You can't take old jokes with you. You make thousands of jokes,” he reasons. “Now, people do take stuff. I've had hundreds of jokes taken from me. Hundreds. But I'm writing every day. I think of something funny every day. The world changes every day. People laugh at different shit now.”

Smoove says he stood out as a stand-up because he “broke every rule,” like the cardinal edict to never turn your back on the audience. (Smoove popped behind the curtain and incorporated it into his act.) He also does bits that require the crowd to imagine, say, an unconscious person onstage, and remember it for the duration of the set as Smoove “steps” over the body. (Once again, the Sellers method of physical comedy.) Smoove attests that his improv background is what keeps him fresh—no two JB shows are the same. He’s mining the audience reactions in real time and tweaking the material minutely and majorly in response.

“Some audiences laugh at physical comedy, some laugh at your cadence, some laugh at your mannerisms, some laugh at your delivery,” Smoove explains. “They all laugh at something different, even in the same city. So I’m not changing all the material, but I will milk different things. They used to call me the Milkman because I would milk a joke, if that audience [is really into it].”

In an attempt to take the Milkman national, Smoove auditioned for Saturday Night Live in 2003; Kenan Thompson and Finesse Mitchell made it instead, but Smoove charmed the producers enough to get a writing job—and the role of warming up the audience before the show, walk-ons for certain sketches, plus a side gig appearing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. “Four checks,” Smoove recalls with a big smile.

Smoove has told the story about how he and his wife were big fans of Curb long before he joined the family, and how she more or less manifested Leon by declaring JB would make it on the show one day. But it’s still mesmerizing to hear him recount the truly existential series of events that led to his chance audition. It starts with firing his agents, then subsequently getting fired from SNL. Did he freak out? Was that the one time the unflappable Smoove optimism even wavered a tiny bit? Nope. “I had a vehicle,” Smoove says with a shrug, returning to his metaphor. “I had a car. Give me a car, I'll fucking drive it.

“Look, if one of these things doesn't happen, it changes everything,” he continues. “Okay, let's say I didn't fire my agent and he got me back on [SNL]. I would never have heard about the Curb audition. I would've resigned and I'd be sitting behind a desk, typing in New York. Two, my wife told me I was going to be on the show, all right? Three, my buddy passes away in LA. We had a jam session for him in LA. I go to LA for one day. [I’m like] Let me go and meet my new agents. They come in the room and say, ‘We got an audition here, for Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out of here. I love Curb Your Enthusiasm.’

“Four things had to happen for me to be on that show. It's hard not to believe in your journey and where you're supposed to be at eventually. And when I walked in that room, I said [to myself], ‘You control this room.’ Because here's what I believe: It's easy to pull back—it's hard to turn up. So if I go into a room turned up, they always say, ‘Oh, we love it, but can you pull back a little bit?’ Everybody knows how to pull back. Nobody knows how high to turn it up. If you don't turn it up, you don't know how high.”

Ask Curb’s producers about Smoove’s audition and they recount it with perfect clarity, even 17 years later. As he tells it, Smoove walked into the audition—which included David, star and producer Jeff Garlin, and longtime executive producer Jeff Schaffer—with his idea of Leon more or less fully formed, and one or two steps ahead of Larry himself, who didn’t have the character quite figured out yet. And he went in as Leon, reading sides that included the instantly classic “ejaculate” bit. This threw David off, but delighted him, too.

Garlin sets the scene: “This guy comes in, I didn't know anything about him. He sat down at a table at the far side of the room…and he was Leon, full-fledged in that moment.”

“JB had the part before he opened his mouth,” Schaffer says. Guest actors, he continues, often “don't realize when they're auditioning for Curb, they're auditioning with Larry, especially for the bigger parts. So sometimes people are like, Oh my God, and they act weird. JB sat in a chair as Leon and just looked at Larry, and Larry started laughing. And we were like, He's it. Then when he opened his mouth, it was like, And, this guy is an amazing improviser.”

“Larry's standing in the middle of the room,” Smoove recalls. “I said, ‘All right, Larry. Let's do this. Anything could happen. Man, I might slap you in the face. I don't know. We're improvising, right? Let's see what happens.’ I point to him, I go back to my spot to start the scene, and Larry's looking at the producers like, Who the fuck is this guy?”

“He was sitting at a table and I was supposed to call him over,” David recounts. “I said, ‘Hey, Leon.’ And then he turned and he gave me this look. He's given me this look probably every show, but it was the first time I saw it, and I really cracked up at the audition. And he had the part right then and there—he didn't have to do anything else.”

It’s easy to see why David was intrigued—Leon stands out both within the show and to the audience primarily because he isn’t David’s creation. By defining Leon on his own terms and always keeping the characters on their toes with his unpredictability, Leon—and JB—functions as a casual, Slurpee-sipping outlier, an odd man out whose dissonance always provides a comedic spark.

Smoove and David have spent the past two decades keeping that dynamic alive. Smoove keeps Leon’s motivations to himself until the moment he shows up to shoot, so David can react to them in real time. There’s a spectacular look of sheer confusion, awe, and bewilderment that dawns on David’s face when Leon speaks; watching Larry grapple with what it means to “get in that ass,” or discover that Leon will go along with his harebrained fake-mugging scene but (per Leon) “somebody gotta get fucked up,” became instant highlights of what is widely regarded as the show’s all-around best season. Viewers wanted more JB and Leon, and so did the cast.

Garlin, whose Jeff Greene was Larry’s chief trouble-enabler before Leon, acknowledges that Smoove cut into his screen time, especially at first, but says the energy his new castmate injected into the show was worth it. “My stuff was cut in half, easy, [but] I just embraced it,” Garlin says. “I want to serve the show.” Garlin likens the experience to his time on Mad About You, where his fifth-season arrival had a similar effect on series regular John Pankow. “He embraced me, and I learned so much from him as an actor that when it happened to me on Curb Your Enthusiasm, my reaction was, Great—this makes the show better.”

“Richard Lewis—rest in peace—he used to call Larry 'The Hog,’ because he won't let anybody do a scene with you but him,” Smoove recalls the late, great comedian and OG Curb recurring guest telling him. “He just fucking uses Leon and won't let anybody else do a scene with him.” It’s true: Outside of one brief interaction with Susie Essman’s character in his first episode, there’s a long stretch of Leon scenes that basically feature only Leon and Larry. (“At one point I said, What if Leon didn't exist and it's only in Larry's head?” Smoove remembers. “Because for a long time, nobody did a scene with Leon, just me and Larry. Think about it.”)

“Larry David on the show is very headstrong. Whether it's intentional or unintentional, he causes trouble and gets in trouble, and he also gets taken advantage of. That's what makes Curb Curb,” Smoove explains. “I became the voice there who can tell him, ‘You fucked up. You shouldn't have done that,’ or somebody to say, ‘Yeah, fuck that—I would have done that shit.’”

“His focus when he's walking into [any] scene is, I'm going to fuck Larry up. I'm going to make him laugh,” says Schaffer, who has also directed dozens of Curbs. “And 95 percent of the time, he succeeds. I have to make a decision sometimes whether I can [have the camera] over Larry's shoulder to JB, or whether I need to push in and be clean of Larry, because otherwise what I'm going to get is JB saying a really funny line and Larry's head going back [with laughter]. So there are times when I'm telling the camera guys, ‘You gotta move in, because Larry is going to laugh his ass off and ruin this amazing take.’”

Leon fits in a grand Curb tradition of David putting up some of his best performances, in some of the show’s best episodes, next to Black characters that might feel otherwise alien to his showbiz-rich LA enclave. Think Kym Whitley’s practical prostitute in “The Car Pool Lane,” or Chris Williams’s seminal performance as Krazee-Eyez Killa—an episode Smoove points to as one of the early favorites that put guest-starring on the show on his vision board. “When they have Black friends on the show, it's just that yin and yang,” Smoove says, while also noting that Black people tell him often that he helped draw them to the series.

“I’m just not afraid of race,” David says. “Here’s the thing: There are racial issues that are funny when brought to the surface. And a lot of that stuff I could talk about with Leon.” The beauty of their dynamic is that Smoove is always ready to spar. David recalls one rare moment when Smoove could not muster a comeback. “One time he started rattling off how bad the food is that white people eat. And then I responded with the stereotypical Black diet. And when I finished, he looked at me and said, ‘Touché, motherfucker.’”

“Some of the stuff that he says, I've taken and I use it in my life,” David adds, cracking up at the thought. “I now use ‘Touché, motherfucker.’ And in season 11, he says, ‘Can a motherfucker live?’ I say that all the time now, when anybody criticizes me for anything.”

After season six wrapped, Lewis phoned Smoove to tell him just how special his addition was. “Let me tell you something about Richard Lewis, man,” Smoove says, in a lower register than usual. “There ain't nobody like him. That motherfucker called me, and we talked two hours, and he said, ‘I know you're getting tired of talking to me. I just wanted to let you know, man, you're a fucking beast. I've been doing this for a long time, and I’ve never seen anybody like you. I told Larry, What the fuck, man? Where'd you find this fucking guy?”

It was a startling moment for Smoove, who remembers listening to Lewis’s Howard Stern Show appearances when he was in high school and working at a perfume company filling bottles. “It's crazy how you meet your heroes, man. That fucking dude is exactly who I expected him to be. [The late] Bob Einstein [who played Marty Funkhouser] was exactly how I expected him to be. [Lewis] did so much for me, because even though I did a whole season, we still didn't fucking know how far this would go, but he let me know, ‘Larry loves you. You're a fucking great addition to the show.’ The stuff he told me kept me, man.”

“There's one [moment] this year that got Larry [laughing on set], and then as we sat in the edit room going over takes and takes, it made Larry laugh 50 times,” Schaffer says. “Episode seven, when Larry is talking to the maid about, ‘If you could put the toilet paper so it falls down instead of going the other way.’ And JB says, ‘Yeah, if it goes like this, it’s like you’re unwiping your own ass.’ Larry lost it [then] and every time in the edit room. And he literally goes, ‘How does he come up with this stuff?’”

Now Curb is finally coming to an end, but don’t expect JB Smoove to get too gloomy about it. For one, he only halfway trusts Larry to keep the show on ice, which is fair; he recalls David saying way back in the season-six days that the show was a lot of work and he’d thought about ending it. But still, he’s returning back to his old analogy. “Curb is just a project, a vehicle,” he says. “You know what I mean? If you feel fresh and you feel your voice is always needed, you can change gears. I can work with anybody, I can do anything, because I open my mind up and I find a way to make myself relevant all the time. If you can be relevant, you can last forever. I just changed cars. Now I'm in another vehicle.”

Smoove’s next phase will be with his company Alternate Side Productions, which has designs on everything from film and television to commercials, brand campaigns, and animation. But Smoove gets really jazzed up at the prospect of what he himself might do next—which creator he may work with, but also the even-more-central roles he intends to create for himself. “You're going to see all that shit,” Smoove says with the utmost conviction. “I’m the greatest salesman in the world. You got to sell yourself first. Sell yourself and then you sell your game. I’ve been selling myself for years. Fifty-eight years old and I'm still [here]. I’m fucking JB Smoove, goddammit! I’m JB Motherfucking Smoove, baby. Shit, man. If you can't learn from me, you can’t learn from nobody.”

And with that, JB Smoove gets up from the booth to drive off to a birthday event with his wife—and to no doubt become the life of yet another party.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Sandy Kim
Hair by Darrin Lyons
Skin by Vonda K. Morris
Special thanks to Woodland Hills Cigar Co.

Originally Appeared on GQ