Curb Your Enthusiasm

Like many people, I was a big Seinfeld fan. It was a show that defined the 90s, and was unapologetic about creating unsympathetic characters. The co-creator, Larry David, seems at his core to be interested in characters who basically hate themselves, and are repeatedly punished for their faults. The finale, which laid a critical egg, pushed that concept too far, in jailing the stars.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is in some ways an extension of Seinfeld, with David playing a version of himself--an absurdly rich comedy writer with a pretty, long-suffering wife, who is constantly making social faux pas and getting retribution for it. I had never seen an episode before, but recently watched the first season of ten episodes, and while I found it riotously funny I don't recommend watching them to close together.

Each episode follows roughly the same pattern--David, in either self-interest or a misguided attempt to be altruistic--insults someone, whether they be waiter, parking-lot attendant, shopkeeper, what have you. Later in the episode this will come back to bite him on the ass in an example of cosmic justice. David, while not as neurotic as his alter-ego George Costanza, is basically selfish and a misanthrope, perhaps best typified by what he says before a dinner party his wife throws: "What is this compulsion to have people over to your home and feed them and talk to them?"

Several show biz folks make cameos as themselves, most notably Richard Lewis, a fellow neurotic. The opening show has David in a contretemps with a woman at a movie theater who turns out to be Lewis' girlfriend. This episode starts with David's observation that his pants bunch up, making it look like he has an erection. It's appropriate that his show would begin with sartorial trivia, because the first scene of the first show of Seinfeld was about whether to button the top button of one's shirt.

As with Seinfeld, this kind of minutiae works its way through the episodes. There is the "cut-off time," that is, when is it too late to call someone at home? David thinks 10:30, but turns out to be wrong. In a throwback to the "Chinese restaurant" episode of Seinfeld, David discovers you can tip a maitre d' to get a table in timely fashion, but it is inappropriate to tip a pharmacist. We also find out what porn stars use Tabasco sauce for. And it turns out I'm not the only person who is fooled by the "beep-beep" in the AAMCO ads on radio.

These shows are laugh-out loud funny, but they can be cringe-worthy. Because David is a character who doesn't shrink from a confrontation, there is a lot of vicarious embarrassment going on. In some episodes it works brilliantly, particularly one called "Beloved Aunt," in which a good turn by Larry turns into disaster when he writes an obituary for his wife's aunt and there's a typo--the letter "a" in aunt is replaced by the letter "c." But in an episode called "Affirmative Action," in which Larry makes an inappropriate remark to a black doctor, the whole embarrassment level got to me, and it took me a while before I was able to watch another episode.

The cast is great, and they are hard-working, because they improvise the dialogue (David gives them the situation). Jeff Garlin is great as Larry's manager, and Cheryl Hines, playing a woman perhaps too good to be true, is very winning. Susie Essman is Garlin's wife, and though in later seasons her personality would be more sharply etched, she really only has one episode to show her stuff in Season 1, in an episode called "The Wire." I was waiting for her to let loose with her trademark phrase, "You fat fuck," and there it was. It was kind of like going to a concert and waiting for the hits.