Photograph: HBO/© Home Box Office, Inc.
Has Curb Your Enthusiasm softened with age? In some ways, not at all. There is a scene in the opening episode of the new, 12th and supposedly final season in which Larry David is talking to a boring party guest and simply repeats her words in a silly voice at maximum volume. That woman is not seen again.
As the sitcom misadventures of the Seinfeld co-creator’s alter ego have progressed, however, Curb has smoothed some of its edge. The addition a few years ago of the phenomenal JB Smoove as Leon, Larry’s priapic freeloader of a lodger, has given the comedy a more collective vibe, since Leon has his own brand of independent thought bluntly expressed. In the old days, home life was just Larry’s then wife, Cheryl, reacting to his peculiarities. Awkward embarrassment doesn’t hang in the air quite as malevolently as it did when Curb began.
A gradual move to season-long arcs rather than tightly story-lined single episodes has lessened the claustrophobia further. We used to see two or three plots set in motion in the first five minutes and watch content, but somewhat on edge, as they entwined round Larry to form a strangling knot of disaster. These days, a Curb episode means being given a box full of trivial grievances and faux pas, and wondering which ones will collide later to cause a sequence of low-key explosions. The ongoing story does the heavy lifting.
This looser approach works just fine. Season 11, in 2021, was one of the best. If you missed it, the calamity unfolded as follows. The brother of a burglar who drowned in Larry’s swimming pool blackmailed him into casting his daughter, Maria Sofia (Keyla Monterroso Mejia), a talentless actor, in his new Netflix comedy, Young Larry. Meanwhile, in an effort to overturn a law requiring safety fences to be built around swimming pools, Larry dated an alcoholic councilwoman, Irma (Tracey Ullman), although he found her toxically irritating. Larry’s plan failed when some shoes he had stolen from an exhibit at the Holocaust museum turned out to have belonged to Irma’s grandfather, causing her to relapse and miss the crucial council meeting. Classic Curb.
A quick update manoeuvres the comeback episode into a new reality. Young Larry has been a success because Maria Sofia is inexplicably popular, which has made her twice as conceited and crass. Larry is still with the fearsome Irma, having been guilt-tripped by her AA sponsor into staying with her for the first 90 days of her recovery. Then Larry leaves the comfort of Los Angeles and travels with Leon and Maria Sofia to Atlanta, because an African businessman is having a birthday party and wants to pay Larry to attend.
Episode one sets up a huge number of minor transgressions, from Larry’s glasses being bent by Leon’s aunt who tries them on, prompting him to borrow a pair of Dame Edna-style women’s specs, to a woman called Brooke who does not allow him to call her Brookie. These tend not to include the sort of left-field social observations that used to make us side with Larry, and many of them have no payoff later. They are just indiscriminately piled up. Does that mean Curb is losing its potency? A little, perhaps, but we still feel the wriggling pleasure of witnessing a potential fiasco born in front of us.
Moreover, David and his ensemble are just so good at what they do, watching a slightly slacker Curb is like going to see a veteran rock band who have lost relevance but not their groove. Take the scene where Larry is lunching with his manager, Jeff (Jeff Garlin), and they learn that the service is slow because the waiter is in mourning. As they moan that their food will get cold, the way Garlin delivers the simple line, “I ordered a tuna melt – that’s fucked” is funnier than anything most sitcom writers will achieve in their careers because it has the weight of 11 seasons of glorious selfishness behind it. You just know that David and Garlin, who have been the best in the business for decades, will have enjoyed standing around discussing which is the funniest food that is bad when tepid, cycling past soup and grilled cheese before arriving at the correct answer: tuna melt.
Even the closing credits, backed throughout by a police mugshot of a glasses-free Larry staring you out for the duration instead of fading to black, getting funnier with every crew member’s name that flashes up over it, is a moment of effortless genius. Curb is terribly good.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm aired on Sky Comedy and is available on Now in the UK. It airs on Foxtel and can be streamed on Binge in Australia, and on HBO and Max in the US.
