How far would you go for a friend? A favour, a white lie, pretend to be Orthodox to help them skip the line for a kidney replacement? Lend your skills as a plain-speaking “social assassin” to tell their girlfriend to stop saying “L-O-L” out loud or their mother to cease smacking her lips in pleasure after sipping her drink? Conspire with them to steal a doll from their daughter’s bedroom? Claim to have had vaginal rejuvenation surgery to encourage their hated girlfriend to get it so your friend can – of course – avoid having sex with her for the six to eight weeks during which he still needs her political influence?
In Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the season finale made very clear, there was no hugging and absolutely no learning, a continuation of the ethos behind creator Larry David’s previous show, Seinfeld. (“I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life,” the fictional Larry told a child.) It ended with the core gang on a plane, bickering furiously over whether Susie Greene’s open window blind counts as a “community shade”. But in Curb, there were also no limits on the lengths to which this dysfunctional group of friends would go to help one another out of a fix, or even just in pursuit of a good wheeze, from mooting the viability of a car that runs on urine to starting quick-fix businesses that always backfired. The notion would probably make Larry sick, or at least strain one of those famous eyebrows, but Curb’s legacy is as much about friendship as it is the most frivolous aspects of social intolerance.
