The Problem With Curb Your Enthusiasm Now

The simple genius of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, now in its 12th season on HBO, was about the difference several hundred million dollars makes in one’s life. David is, of course, one of the creators of Seinfeld, and he famously served as the inspiration for the character of Jerry Seinfeld’s friend George Costanza. George, the show’s resident schmo, was heavy, short, balding, and not particularly handsome; a low-level sociopath who was happy to prevaricate in any situation for a marginal advantage, he had little to offer the world and viewed it with a barely repressed anger. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, we can watch Larry David at his most George. The fictionalized character of Larry David is a lot like the real Larry David: He’s a guy who created Seinfeld and is living a very comfortable existence in Santa Monica. The lancing joke of Curb is that Larry is, like George, a man at war with the world around him—but, since he’s rich, few of the daily indignities George suffered apply to him, and when they do, he still gets to go home to his spacious L.A. mansion. Much of his life is, basically, as the comedian himself might put it, “pretty, pretty good!”

Larry’s position now allows him to go on the offensive, to pursue the same petty and sometimes deranged crusades George might go on. “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” wrote Sartre—“Hell is other people”—and Larry would agree. He battles with everyone from waiters to dry cleaners to studio executives over the flimsiest things. He’s also willing to go to outrageous lengths to get what he wants, like sleeping with a repulsive city councilwoman in order to get a local ordinance hanged. It’s not a particularly flattering character portrait, but that was another of the show’s charms: David never spared himself, instead freely acknowledging that he, like just about every other human, was a bad person. He took it as a point of pride that he, at least, was honest about it, and he accepted the consequences. Thus each season would lead to the same outcome, with Larry, having been hoisted mightily by his own petard, ending up in a bruised heap when he fell back to earth.

But no show can last forever, and fewer still get to go out on a high note. The truth is that Curb should have ended with its last season. The current one has been a disaster of epic proportions, a disheveled, unfocused, annoying mess.

Curb’s comedy formula—a fairly complex web of storylines stemming from Larry noticing a minor social construct and then fixating on it, much to the consternation of everyone around him—has worked for 11 seasons partly because, as I noted, David doesn’t spare himself. Another conceit that has kept the show afloat is that in its universe, there’s a certain class of people who, like Larry, carry an explosive rage hidden just below the surface. Once or twice an episode, Larry and someone else like this will meet, face off in a paroxysm of anger, and then, sated after having found each other, go quietly about their business.

But in this season, the scale, setup, and authenticity of these confrontations are off. There was a hilarious routine in Season 10 about a fancy restaurant that Larry suspected of seating less-attractive patrons in the rear. This season, there’s an extended scene involving a fight with a waiter about … when the restaurant flips over to its lunch menu. It’s not like the waiter has any control of such things, and the restaurant isn’t doing something unfair or unexpected. It just comes down to the world not being precisely as Larry wants it.

In another new episode, a housekeeper comes into Larry’s five-star hotel room, looks around, and then rolls her eyes a bit at the—if we’re being honest—barely untidy state of it. Larry jumps on her about the eye roll, but the whole scenario feels contrived and out of left field—and yet David and the large band of executive producers behind Curb plow ahead like they’re working with some cosmic social standoff. Compare that to previous seasons, when David’s humor cut to the bone. In one older episode, Larry, talking to one of his acquaintances at his swanky golf club, offers his condolences about a sick relative. “Pray for him,” the man says, nodding in acknowledgement. This is a classic example of the bland social niceties most of us let slip by. Larry refuses to. He tells the guy he isn’t going to pray for his relative. A classic fiery Curb argument ensues. Larry says prayer doesn’t work. “How do you know it doesn’t work?” the man yells. Responds Larry, in an incandescent rage: “Because I’m bald!”

Or think back to another one of my favorites: David, Jewish himself, reserves a special scalpel for Jews; in one episode, Larry ends up on a ski lift with a young Orthodox woman. The ski lift malfunctions and the pair are stuck up there together in the cold for hours. Evening approaches, the pair get hungry, and the woman, who is utterly humorless, tells Larry she’s not allowed to be alone with him after sundown. Larry rolls his eyes, but is soon distracted by a pair of edible underwear (don’t ask) he finds in his ski jacket, which he munches on contentedly. The increasingly agitated woman tries to get Larry to jump out of the lift to save her that exposure. Larry gives her the response you’d expect. She finally jumps herself. We hear a satisfying thud. Larry marvels at her convictions for a precise half-second before taking another bite of his edible underwear.

But this season, over and over again, the conflicts and situations are just weird, way beyond the generally accepted bar of “eh, sure, I guess.” One is about an actress who, as part of her performance in a movie, stuffs her face with fruit while she’s talking. When she’s having trouble in another acting job, Larry suggests she try eating fruit in it as well. But actors don’t get to make those decisions, and no director would allow it in any case; it’s just as outlandish as it sounds. In another, Larry’s big problem is that he has nothing to do while he’s peeing; this all proceeds as if there were no such thing as either magazines or cell phones. Another scenario involves a billboard for his manager’s wife’s boutique. The billboard, which has her picture on it, is defaced with a big penis. The three spend the episode standing around talking about it, as if the wife of a prominent entertainment manager in Hollywood wouldn’t just get it immediately repaired.

When it’s not just being grasping and inconsistent, the new season makes the series as a whole feel repetitious and worn out. Larry has always found a way to disrupt social events like weddings and funerals. When we hear he’s going to his neighbor’s house for a memorial service, we know that a whole lot of nonsense is coming. Another episode opens with an “all you can eat” sign at a restaurant. Your heart sinks a bit: It’s a heavy-handed signal that someone’s going to be parsing what exactly “all you can eat” means, which is exactly what happens.

A bigger problem is that too many of the plot turns have a secondhand feel, relying on lazy he-saids and she-saids. In the first episode, Larry has created a new TV show, and it’s a hit. He is invited, for money, to appear at a guy’s home in Atlanta. His manager, Jeff Greene, played with a burbling self-satisfaction by Jeff Garlin, tells him the host is African. Larry gets to the party and it turns out the host is white; he’s from South Africa. David treats this like the guy is pulling a fast one, like he’s trying to pass himself off as African. Part of the reason this contrivance is so unpersuasive—besides how out of character going to this party is for Larry—is that the show doesn’t share the source of the misunderstanding with us. We don’t get to hear how an assertion as unlikely as “I’m African!” came up in the conversation. We just have to take one of the characters’ word for it.

Another example: One of Larry’s aging golf buddies, played by Vince Vaughn, tells their group of friends at the country club that the couple next door needed a sperm donor, but they wanted it to be done naturally, so Vaughn has been having sex with the wife. Comedy is entitled to some suspension of disbelief, so I’m happy to go with the premise of a couple with whatever kinks taking that route. But why would they want the paunchy fiftysomething guy next door in the mix? It’s another example where the comedy isn’t shown, but rather related by one of the characters, so we have no idea about the motivation of the request. It feels like a cheat.

There’s also a crudeness in David’s approach to more sensitive pressure points, like race and gender. Part of his appeal is that he’s always been happy to open fire on members of what you could call marginalized groups—women, minorities, the disabled, and especially his own fellow Jews. In a gesture toward equal opportunity of some kind, such individuals are just as capable of getting into a screaming argument with Larry over a social misunderstanding as one of his golf buddies. But, over the years, David’s take has begun to feel a little coarse when it comes to folks who aren’t straight white males. The show is riddled with Asians who drop their definite and indefinite articles and talk in a gruff cartoony voice. Lesbian and gay couples are rigid and snippy and always there for Larry to bring up some sensitive issue that lays bare their hair-trigger sensitivities. I recognize that the humor is based on the fact that Larry in the show is actually the asshole. But there’s also a “gotcha” feel to the situation.

In handling characters like Larry’s friend/roommate Leon Black, played by the profane comedian J.B. Smoove, you can almost feel David’s mind working these days: Let’s see … Black guys, Black guys… What if a Black guy’s last name … was Black? How about watermelons? How about Black people being poor tippers? How about big dicks? A lot of the time there’s some complicated construct that finds the well-meaning Larry caught in a position that makes it seem like he’s being racist, and a bunch of Black folks are there to catch him, which is funny because he’s really not racist. This season there are elaborate hijinks involving a Black jockey statue, which inevitably winds up in the back seat of Larry’s car for a group of Black people to discover. There’s also a full-figured Black woman who literally runs around with her hands in the air saying things like “Lordy, Lordy!” I suppose the writers feel like they are taking taboos head-on, but these scenes increasingly feel more like itches that David can’t help scratching.

In the late 1990s I was in Las Vegas and had a chance to see George Carlin at a casino. It was a $100 ticket, a lot of money back then. The show began, and it seemed like all Carlin could go on and on about was the hassle of going through security lines at airports. It was pretty sad to see a comedy icon left with nothing to riff about but the minor inconveniences of his life traveling around the country getting paid $100,000 a night. That’s what Curb Your Enthusiasm feels like now. Over 11 seasons Larry sparred with everything and everyone, and has now run out of anything like a worthy target with whom to match wits. David’s riches gave him the luxury of creating a second iconic TV show, another opportunity to lay waste to the hypocrisies, the grimness and, yes, the inequalities of our lives. Both Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm remain as a testimony to his comedic genius. But Curb took one victory lap too many. Nearly 24 years in, Larry David and his writing team have run out of ideas. It turns out that, in the end, the one thing money can’t buy is something to complain about.