After 25 years and 12 seasons of curmudgeonly
comedy rooted in the frustrations of everyday life, Curb Your Enthusiasm comes to an end on Monday night. Larry David ’s painfully funny sitcom, in which he plays himself as a happy-go-lucky misanthrope who refuses to submit to the conventions of
Los Angeles showbiz circles, will for ever be remembered for its sad trombones; its championing of the antisocial; for exposing injustices like the “stop ’n chat” and people throwing birthday parties weeks after their actual birthday (“what’s the statute of limitations here?”); and the profane hysteria of Susie Greene (Susie Essman). But there is another side to Curb that is just as unique: its hilarious but authentic portrayal of male friendship . The bond between Larry and his manager and best friend Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin) is one of this show’s great joys. They’re always up to something – whether its high-jinks at the
golf club or spit-balling at a fancy restaurant. They’re one of the 21st century comedy’s great double acts – for ever cracking one another up while upholding a rigorous code of honour – which includes Larry making excuses for Jeff when he’s cheating on better half Susie. It isn’t just Jeff: across Curb’s long history, Larry has clowned around with fictionalised versions of the late comedian Richard Lewis (one of his best
Friends in real life), and Ted Danson , Leon Black (played by
Saturday Night Live star JB Smoove) and clueless Marty Funkhouser, charmingly played by the late comedian Bob Einstein. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a comedy built in the image of its star and creator, David. Since making its debut in October 1999 – ostensibly as a one-off
HBO comedy special – Curb has served as a venting mechanism for the cantankerous LA transplant, who passes his days on the golf course or hanging out with his famous friends. They’re all rich – and yet wealth has not brought them happiness. It just gives them new things to complain about. The shenanigans between Larry and his friends are the source of Curb’s most memorable storylines. For instance, when in season five Richard Lewis reveals that he requires a kidney donation, Jeff and Larry decide the best way to choose who should cough up the vital organ is via game of “eenie meenie miney mo”. Jeff loses – but his wrathful wife Susie intervenes and explains that he is under no account going under the knife. Larry and Jeff have a mutual understanding that they will cover up for each other. In a classic season two misadventure, Larry snips off the hair of a doll belonging to the daughter of a TV executive. She throws a fit (despite asking Larry to do the cutting in the first place) and so Jeff helps Larry steal the same model toy from his daughter, swaps the heads around – and leaves his own child with a decapitated doll. When Susie finds out, she waits for the pair to return and screams from the porch so loud the whole of Los Angeles can hear: “You four-eyed f**k and you fat piece of shit”. Larry and Jeff are not exactly poster boys for good behaviour – they’ve made waiters cry, used the “C” word at inappropriate times, and gaslit Susie about Jeff considering buying her a new house (as part of a complicated cover-up of his latest infidelity). That is precisely what makes Curb so good – viewers perceive in its flawed characters reflections of their own moral failings, and can’t stop laughing. When the show debuted, the world’s biggest comedy was Friends – which, although capable of immense cheekiness and a lot of male camaraderie, would never have portrayed its characters in the unfavourable light of Larry and Jeff. David has never been afraid to depict Larry negatively. It has the weird effect of adding to his charm. He certainly isn’t on the moral high ground when he tries to persuade Marty Funkhouser, grieving for his father, to give Larry his LA Dodgers tickets. Or when he refers to his wife Cheryl as “Hitler” on speakerphone to Jeff, not realising Jeff’s parents – sensitive about the
Holocaust – are listening in. It is obviously a terrible faux pas – but Larry’s flailing energy is such that you can’t help but warm to him. And even though few of us have a lifestyle like Larry’s ( Forbes estimated this week that the real David’s net worth is just under $400m), we empathise with him because of the everyman qualities of his woes. It’s easy to feel you’ve been in his shoes when he criticises two teenage trick-or-treaters for not even going to the effort of dressing up for
Halloween. Or when he goes to a Starbucks-like coffee shop and sarcastically requests his favourite brew: “Ah yes, my favourite coffee order: The Vanilla Bullshit Thing.” TV struggles with male friendship. The temptation is often to portray men as overly sincere – all bear-hugs and fist-bumps – or as useless man-babies. But Curb hits the target by showing men as both resourceful and juvenile. It feels real, because Larry’s relationship with his co-stars goes back decades. He and Richard Lewis attended high school together (and were born just a few days apart). He has known Jeff Garlin since the 90s, when they had next-door production offices in LA – it was Garlin who suggested to David that he make the mockumentary that would become the Curb pilot. Read Next Clive Anderson: 'I studied with Blair. I thought he'd be a parish councillor' There is one important exception. David did not know JB Smoove before he joined the cast playing Leon Black, an outrageous character who moves in with Larry and Cheryl after they agree to take in his sister, Loretta, a single mother who loses her home in New Orleans to
Hurricane Edna. Leon already lives in Los Angeles – but pitches up with Larry anyway. When Loretta’s family returns to Louisiana, he continues to hang around. More than hang around, actually – following the end of Larry’s marriage to Cheryl, he and Leon become a modern-day odd couple. As well as having an 18-year age gap, their backgrounds are radically different: David is a
New York Jew, Leon an African
American from the South. Unlike Jeff, Leon can open Larry’s eyes to a different way of looking at the world. In one episode, Leon goes through a box of Larry’s childhood possessions and recovers a
baseball bat, which he observes Larry might have played with when he “had polio”, to which Larry replies, “I didn’t have polio, asshole.” It feels like strange point to make about a sitcom in which a stolen child’s doll serves as a major plot point – or in which a sex worker is hired to accompany Larry to a baseball game so he can use the “car-pool” lane rather than drive solo and be caught in traffic – but Curb has a sensitive side too. If you want to know how men talk to each other about the difficult stuff, look no further than Larry and Lewis’s golf cart exchange during the final season, when the real Lewis was in the late stages of Parkinson’s . “I did Wordle again today – I’m a Wordle wizard man! I did it three days in a row,” says Lewis. “Wow,” replies Larry. “You’re really on a good streak.” Then he turns the conversation to the more important topic of his rapidly improving golf swing. Ten days after the episode aired, Lewis died . Here is one of the most poignant and truthful examples ever captured on screen of two lifelong friends saying goodbye – where the things left unsaid are as significant as what comes out of their mouths. Curb is a glorious celebration of the cynical everyman. But it is at its most uproarious when it lets Larry, Jeff and the gang off the leash. We’ll remember the show for how Larry gave voice to the grievances we all grumble about under our breaths. But we will also hold it dear for how it showed that men really don’t grow out of their boyish antics. Their carry-on was silly, childish and chaotic. It was also – to paraphrase David’s favourite catchphrase – pretty, pretty, pretty funny. The final episode of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ is on Sky Comedy at 9pm