Curb Your Enthusiasm returned for its 9th season after a six-year hiatus. Next to Dallas and Seinfeld, it’s my favorite show of all time. Like his most well-known creation, Seinfeld, Larry David’s Curb has such a connection with its audience. The reason for the connection is because as pointed out in the episode, “Palestinian Chicken” (my favorite), Larry is a social assassin. Larry says the things to people we wish we had the courage to say.
While Larry certainly has views about people that are far to the extreme of me (wondering if an adopted Chinese baby is prone to chopsticks for example), I feel like a silent Larry David. People who can’t park between two lines (Larry called one a pig parker), that annoys me. People who take too many samples and can’t figure out what they want on line, that annoys me. People who chat, just to cut in the line, that annoys me. If someone would say LOL at me, that would probably annoy me too. There are so many things that annoy people or could annoy people and that’s why Curb Your Enthusiasm is so loved and popular. While it doesn’t get the Emmy love that it deserves, it’s the best comedy show on when it airs. For a show that premiered in 2000, it’s only in its ninth season. Genius takes time to produce.
Aside from Larry, my two favorite peripheral characters have to be Leon Black and Marty Funkhouser. Leon, played by J.B. Smoove reminds me so much of Larry, just a lot cruder. When Leon gets upset that Larry told his friend that Leon said his wife was good looking, we find out Leon is having an affair with his friend’s wife. Leon tells Larry is part of the problem now and is interlocked like Lego with him. Bob Einstein’s Marty Funkhouser is such a treat because he’s the friend that Larry always buts heads with. Nothing is funnier than Marty being so upset that Larry stole flowers from his mother’s roadside memorial, that he says: If you weren’t my best friend, I’d pop your head off…” Of course, Larry retorts that Marty isn’t his best friend.
While I’m the silent Larry David, the moments where I verbalize my inner Larry, I often land in trouble. I caused a family civil war because a family member was insistent on buying a birthday present that I was insistent they not get for my daughter’s first birthday. I caused a civil war in my synagogue because the President and former President controlling him were insistent on hiring an unqualified member to be secretary. The fact that this member was a friend who didn’t tell me she was up for the job (I was Vice President) and she had a penchant for gossip. I didn’t need what I donated to the synagogue to be announced all over town. Then again, based on what I did contribute, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea. I’ll never forget when my mother asked me why it bothered me that my sister’s boyfriend would spend the entire weekend at our house and just lounger around, I told her why: because it did. That’s why I love Curb Your Enthusiasm, there are so many things that bother Larry and he has the courage and lack of social skills to verbalize it all.
