Curb Your Enthusiasm recap: Larry is as "Disgruntled" as ever

You know, an alternative title for Curb Your Enthusiasm could very well be Disgruntled:Larry so often is. And, as always, he has a few different reasons to be. We get a few little plots to follow. Most of them are revealed during an early golf club restaurant scene featuring Larry, Irma, Jeff, and Susie.

The main thing, the titular thing, is the “Disgruntled” letter, shown in close-up in the very first shot of the episode. It was pinned to the men’s bathroom bulletin board at the golf club, signed “Disgruntled,” and it contained a lot of Larry-like grievances. In Susie’s words as L.D. tells her about the thing, “It is something you would kinda do. You have to admit.” He responds, “I’m not ‘Disgruntled.’ I mean I’m disgruntled, but I’m not ‘Disgruntled.’” (This is a big running joke of the episode, and it gets just a little old by the end, but it’s also mostly forgivable.) Mr. Takahashi, determined to uncover this grumpy person’s identity, certainly has Larry high on his list of suspects, “funny guy” that he is. Uh oh. He’s watching him now.

As the four wait to have their orders taken at the golf club restaurant, Jeff tells Larry that Willie Geist is interested in doing a profile on him, thanks to the Atlanta thing. (Sounds good, right? No way Larry could mess that up?) And when the server arrives at their table, Larry discovers a new-to-him nuisance: these guys won’t serve breakfast past 11, not even at ten after. Larry scrambles for a breakfast loophole, using Cobb salad ingredients to cobble together a breakfast dish (à la Five Easy Pieces, the Jack Nicholson movie) and the server calls him on it. But Larry doubles down, showing her that he has even brought his own eggs to the restaurant, ensuring that they’ll have at least one key ingredient (but also because they’re organic and Larry thinks the ones at the club contain antibiotics). She grudgingly accepts Larry’s assertion that the chef knows about his egg thing and preference for breakfast after 11, and he and his whole table get their breakfast. Everyone else in the restaurant is jealous and pissed off.

As they continue to sit, Irma shares that her sponsor, “a big bear of a man who looks like Hoss from Bonanza,” suggested she and Larry get couples therapy. When he protests the idea, she invokes her recovery, insisting that he has to go to therapy support her in it. A vision of Larry’s relationship countdown calendar, with Irma’s sponsor’s face superimposed over it, appears in Larry’s mind’s eye. “6 months, Larry,” the hovering face intones, and Larry relents. They’re going to therapy. (And, as we later discover, Jeff and Susie are inspired by this, and they’ll be going, too).

"Disgruntled"

C+

C+

"Disgruntled"

SEASON

12

EPISODE

4

But first, another quick reveal: As they finally leave the restaurant, Jeff admits to Larry that he’s the guy who wrote the “Disgruntled” letter. Now they’ll have to keep this secret all episode. Larry congratulates Jeff, saying this is “the best thing [he’s] done in his life,” that Jeff hasn’t done any other good things, and this is the only one. Jeff is feeling pretty good about himself, but also afraid that he may be kicked out of the golf club if discovered. So yeah, that’s the major conflict, but we still have the couples therapy thing and the Willie Geist thing. Back to those.

These couples therapy sessions are pretty funny, but also a bit on the sexist side when you really dissect them. They’re basically what men’s nightmares are made of: these women go in there and straight up rail on their guys, pointing out every annoying little thing about their partner, down to the tiniest, most embarrassing detail—nothing that a therapist couldn’t possibly even remedy. For example, Irma goes into how Larry has “a thing about phallic shaped vegetables,” and brings up his “long balls.” She says she can hear them at night when he goes to the bathroom “slapping on his thighs... [sounding] like flip-flops at a Mexican resort.” Worst of all, Larry knows this therapist. While she goes by her maiden name professionally, she’s married to someone who used to write for Seinfeld with Larry, a guy named Hobie Turner (played by Rob Riggle), and they make plans to go to lunch at the golf club (where else?)

When they leave, Jeff and Susie are next in line for therapy, and Susie spills the tea about Jeff having written that “Disgruntled” letter. The therapist keeps insisting it’s a completely safe space, though Jeff and Susie clearly hear sneezing from the other side of the wall. Jeff checks the board at the building and sees that Arnold Velcheck, Takahashi’s best bud, occupies the next office over. Jeff worries that Velcheck heard everything, will tell Takahashi, and he’ll be kicked out of the club for sure.

Turns out Velcheck is a urologist, and Larry comes up with a scheme to make Leon an appointment to go see him for a check-up at the same time Larry and Irma have couples therapy to see what he can hear through the wall. Jeff and Larry assure him that all he’ll have to do is pee in a cup. Leon’s response? “I love peeing in cups. You know what I’m saying? I like peeing in big-ass bowls, but I’ll pee in a cup.” But yeah, it’s not just peeing in a cup. “You ain’t no piss doctor! You a ass doctor!” they hear Leon scream from the other side of the wall when the time comes. (Yup, he’s getting a prostate check.) And just like that, the therapist is exposed: she’s not as confidential as she has claimed. This comes back again, too.

But first, the Geist thing. When in the planning stages for the profile on Larry, Geist admits that one person he had spoken to in his research for the piece did call Larry an asshole. Larry wants to know who, but Geist refuses to tell him. Obsessed, Larry proceeds to guess, and in doing so tells on himself over and over again. He asks if it was Ted Danson, asks if it was Troy Kotsur, as he explains that whole golf ball/bagel situation to him in brief. Hearing these tales, Geist begins to suspect that Larry himself is “Disgruntled.” Yes, Geist, in his research, has heard about the whole letter thing (?) In fact, he starts to pivot toward that as the focus of his story instead of the Atlanta thing. Larry keeps trying to pivot to the breakfast grudge at the club: the most compelling thing in his world right now. Finally, when they record the interview, Geist interrupts Larry trying to make the whole thing about food to ask if he’s “Disgruntled,” which Larry denies. Then, after they’ve wrapped and he’s about to leave, Geist asks to use the restroom... and for a recommendation to a good urologist. Seems like we might know where this is going?

And now for the moment that ties all the loose ends in a neat little bow. Hobie confronts Larry on the course about being rude to his wife during therapy sessions, which Larry insists he’s not supposed to know, due to confidentiality. He accuses Larry of being “Disgruntled,” and just as Takahashi is about to kick him out of the club, Jeff admits to it. Then everyone else at the club admits to it, Spartacus style. Hobie comes straight to his wife’s office from the golf club to pick her up to go to lunch. “It’s getting fucking weird over there,” he says, and tells her about the whole episode with everyone claiming to be “Disgruntled.” She immediately corrects him and outs Jeff as “Disgruntled,” citing his therapy session with Susie. Meanwhile, Geist is in his appointment with Velcheck the urologist, both men hearing the whole thing—plus the little detail that the chef at the club has been eating all of Larry’s organic eggs, an accusation of Larry’s that Geist had previously dismissed. Geist grins: he has his story at last.

So... I guess this confirms that Geist really abandoned the whole Atlanta/water bottle story in favor of golf club gossip? The therapist saying that the chef at the golf club has been eating Larry’s organic eggs is proof that this is actually happening and it’s not just an instance of her regurgitating Larry’s own paranoid delusions? Sure, why not? It’s Curb, and we’re here for the laughs. Not everything is going to track perfectly. And overall, I’d say I’m not too small d disgruntled about it.

Stray observations

• I like that the “Disgruntled” list of complaints ends with “Shame! Shame on you!” as a bullet point. There are some funny gripes about the dress code being oppressive and their bread being fit for a “penal colony,” but that reprimand getting its own special spot stands out.

• When Larry suggests his little breakfast loophole to the server at the club, he and Susie mention a scene from the Jack Nicholson movie Five Easy Pieces. If you’re curious about it, like I was, here it is.

• “Larry could grow breasts,” Irma says, because of the antibiotics in the club’s eggs. Susie doesn’t want to imagine it, but Larry insists he’d be “pretty cute… pretty, pretty, pretty cute,” in his signature cadence—you know the one.

• Okay, there were some pretty good lines in this episode, but my favorite part is still Irma singing the J.G. Wentworth song, for the second time this season, and bringing Larry into it. She says, “Do the other guy. I’ll be the woman,” and he busts out a weird baritone. It’s so unexpected that he plays along with her, but kind of… nice? I like to imagine them getting along sometimes.

• “The man who makes corn chips on the cob is going to be a fucking millionaire,” Leon says to Larry and Jeff as he snacks, then he mimes crunching chips off the cob to illustrate his point. This makes me think of Tina Fey’s story on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend about when J.B. Smoove was a writer at Saturday Night Live and would always pitch a sketch idea about a guy smoking a long cigarette—the whole premise being that the cigarette was long—to whoever was hosting the show each week. This whole corn chips on the cob thing has to be an idea like this that he’s had for a good while.
  

• Tracey Ullman is an absolute killer this episode. She describes her “rock bottom” moment as an alcoholic as when she came naked into the city council chamber, saying how she remembers “the air on [her] nipples,” and, “the looks of admiration and horror.” Good for her to note the admiration! Very body positive of her.