Every Episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", Ranked

[Ubiquitous]

Who knew a 1999 mockumentary titled Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm
would open the door to one of greatest sitcoms ever? Or that Curb Your
Enthusiasm would return for a ninth season after a six-year absence?
These are dark times for both liberalism and comedy, and so Larry
David has answered the call to bring his Curb band back together to
skewer everything and anything in his sight. To celebrate Curb Your
Enthusiasm’s triumphant return, Vulture put together this highly
subjective ranking of every episode during the show’s original run
from 2000 to 2011 (plus the aforementioned ’99 movie), chock-full of
enough trivial information to make you forget whichever parts you
don’t agree with. What do we look like, schmohawks?



81. “Car Periscope” (Season 8, Episode 8)





Season eight was only so many moons ago, but in a post-Waze world,
Larry probably wouldn’t consider investing in an inventor’s car
periscope. Then again, he and fellow idiot Jeff opted in after seeing
said inventor’s homely wife (the great Aida Turturro) and assuming
he’s a man of integrity. Not only is Aida aboard in this episode, but
Wanda Sykes returns to make Larry’s life miserable (“I’m still at the
same email: IHateLarry”) and steal his life-altering personal trainer
(Cheyenne Jackson). Equally good to see Grant Shaud (a.k.a. Murphy
Brown’s perma-panicked Miles), who’s in denial that his TV-judge dad
is a delirious bigot. Lenny Venito, who later played against type in
the underrated sitcom The Neighbors, menaces Larry as a one-armed
Scrabble bandit in an ongoing Fugitive riff. “Car Periscope” can be
forgiven its lack of telecommunications foresight, but by the time the
one-armed man makes haste in a cab, this late-period episode is
running on fumes.



80. “The Smoking Jacket” (Season 5, Episode 6)

If, one day, Larry were at the gates of heaven (which, this being
Curb, does come to pass), he may well gain entry as commendation for
his honesty. With his cousin Andy (Richard Kind) standing right there,
he cops to tossing Cheryl’s magazine in the trash because Andy “took
it in the bathroom and contaminated it.” Were Larry Catholic, he
wouldn’t even need confession. “The Smoking Jacket” is unusual in its
degree of nudity, but that’ll happen when you take a barely teenaged
boy to see a topless woman so he won’t tell Richard Lewis you wished
him dead for your birthday. The shenanigans with the coat wear thin,
but time can never scrub the sight of Larry attempting to charm Hugh
Hefner’s “Girls Next Door” by suggesting a game of group
ventriloquism.



79. “The Rat Dog” (Season 6, Episode 6)

If nothing else, “Rat Dog” gave us the “schmohawk,” a term that passed
down from Larry’s father and somehow didn’t originate in his own mind.
The fact that Larry can barely muster any more feeling for a deaf
woman’s puppy than a spider he’d squash on the sidewalk only gets so
much mileage. But when Tweedledee and Tweedledum, a.k.a. Larry and
Leon, accidentally switch phones and cost each other a job and social
relationship, respectively, “Rat Dog” finally has some bite.



78. “The Freak Book” (Season 6, Episode 5)

Larry has a soft spot for chauffeurs. He doesn’t leave them outside an
event without a hot meal, and in “The Freak Book,” he doesn’t leave
his and Cheryl’s driver Charlie (Halt and Catch Fire standout Toby
Huss) to Ted Danson’s birthday party outside at all. As ever, Ted and
Mary are unsung heroes, straddling a line of self-righteousness and
credible disbelief at Larry’s antics. (John McEnroe, meanwhile, plays
exactly to his reputation as Larry’s first limo passenger when he
takes up Charlie’s shift, but, yeah, long story.) Also, Huss gets one
of the season’s best zingers, locking eyes with Ted after drunkenly
destroying his property and announcing, “Happy birthday, Becker.”



77. “The Massage” (Season 2, Episode 10)

If you ever wanted to see and hear Larry David moan in ecstasy, here’s
your chance. Larry is so preoccupied with nearly reaching completion
when a masseuse goes in for the big finish, he blows yet another big
network meeting with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Amy Hill is an aces casting
choice as a prescient psychic who gets in Larry’s head, even if his
actions — and a fortuitous dining choice worsened by a stop-and-chat
snub — ensure that in this season-two finale (unlike at the climax of
season one’s “AAMCO”), he won’t be getting any.



76. “Chet’s Shirt” (Season 3, Episode 1)

Had Ted Danson been warned by Rob Reiner or Julia Louis-Dreyfus not to
go into any kind of partnership with their dear friend, he might have
avoided the eminent disaster played out over a superlative season-
three arc. Alas, Ted and Michael York are stuck debating the merits of
Larry’s notions to conceive a dining area that’s part aristocratic
quarters and part military mess hall. “Chet’s Shirt” can be tough to
watch, since Larry is objectively in the wrong or inappropriate in
every setup, e.g. tossing apple cores in strangers’ garbage cans,
hectoring a grieving widow (Caroline Aaron), and fetishizing her late
husband’s wardrobe. Though perhaps that’s why when Larry gets his
teeth knocked out by a piñata bat (score one for his most terrorized
demo, children), it’s poetically just.



75. “The Bi-Sexual” (Season 8, Episode 7)

“She’s a dyke, deal with it,” insists Rosie O’Donnell about foxy Jane
Cohen (Transparent’s Amy Landecker), who expresses interest in both
Rosie and Larry. Good thing for Larry that Leon shows up in time to
help him sort through the dilemma of Rosie’s built-in advantages with
the fairer sex. (“I would have zero interest in a person like you,” he
comforts Leon as they imagine their lives as bisexuals.) Original SNL
writer Alan Zweibel also visits as an East Coast buddy who can’t woo
Larry to lunch. (For those fond of season seven’s “The Black Swan,”
they will appreciate the consistency of his logic about the nuances of
bicoastal friendships.) The juvenilia of Rosie and Larry’s competition
over Jane boiling down to baseball metaphors is a rich vein, even
though the pointed critique of Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro may go
over some heads. Larry buying Viagra from an elderly man in the park
(David Canary of Bonanza fame) is a tad silly, but works as a New York
bookend to his clumsy L.A. pot buy in season four’s “The Carpool
Lane.” It’s really Leon, kicking back and eating Champagne-filled
croissants, who can once more consider himself the winner.



74. “The 5 Wood” (Season 4, Episode 5)

Everyone’s got the wrong idea about Larry. Dalilah the dental
hygienist thinks he’s a sexy history-professor-type (more of a
“avuncular, bald Jew,” he forewarns her), Producers choreographer
Steve (Patrick Bristow, who was so memorable in Seinfeld’s “The Wig
Master”) believes him to fancy the same sex, and a couple of WASP-y
country club emissaries almost buy that he’s of shared stock. New
castmate David Schwimmer pretty much has Larry pegged once he gripes
about the raisin-cashew balance in the Schwimmer family snack-food
line. It’s amazing anyone at the funeral for Leo Funkhouser was taken
aback that Larry would literally steal a prized golf club from the
deceased’s cold hands — an act of thievery up there with moving his
mother’s body in season three’s “The Special Section” — but “Wood”
really gets its name from another standout moment: Larry running out
of a bathroom with pants around his ankles, screaming, “The dog bit my
penis!” Now that takes balls.



73. “Kamikaze Bingo” (Season 5, Episode 4)

The irony in Larry David doubting anyone else’s dignity is that he has
no honor whatsoever. Not that he censors himself from betraying
skepticism that Japanese art dealer Yoshi’s father was an actual
kamikaze pilot (on account of him, in line with a Curb constant,
surviving). Or stops a game of poker upon receiving word that said art
dealer attempted suicide. The closing moments of Yoshi’s dad speeding
toward him in a motorized wheelchair screaming, “Bonzai!” are a fun
callback to Larry animating the ire of a Japanese waiter in season
two’s “The Acupuncturist,” but all the back and forth leading up to it
about apologizing while snacking starts to needle.



72. “The Surrogate” (Season 4, Episode 7)

Too bad Wanda Sykes wasn’t at the toy store when Larry picked up a
biracial children’s doll for their friends’ baby shower. (Okay, it was
actually for their surrogate, whom Larry then subliminally persuaded
to keep the baby as hers.) However, Wanda was nearby amid a pair of
his typically bungled confrontations with black people, per her de
facto duty as Larry’s parole officer of race relations. “The
Surrogate” spends more minutes than is necessary on the tropiest of
white-male-insecurity tropes, and entirely too many featuring Larry
shirtless or in a wife beater, but it does rack up one of Curb’s most
notable single-episode guest casts thanks to Melissa McCarthy,
Garcelle Beauvais, and former NBA star Muggsy Bogues.



71. “Mel’s Offer” (Season 4, Episode 1)

Cheryl is a fairly flexible wife. As we know from season one’s
“AAMCO,” she’s game for wagering on drive-time oral sex, and doesn’t
find Larry’s masturbatory fantasies involving other women to be a
turnoff. At the outset of “Mel’s Offer,” her promise of a one-time-
only extramarital fling on their tenth anniversary sets one of two
defined season-long arcs in motion (and treats us to a flashback of
perm-coiled Cheryl, and already-bald but not as gray Larry). Those
arcs dovetail brilliantly when Larry accepts Mel’s offer to play Max
in The Producers on Broadway (alongside a befuddled Ben Stiller, the
umpteenth individual who suffers from Larry’s lapses in etiquette)
after spying the buxom actress (Cady Huffman) playing Ulla. It’s all a
bit of table setting, but as fans can attest, the main course is worth
it.



70. “The Therapists” (Season 6, Episode 9)

Curb has always been nimble about jumping in and out of its season-
long arcs, and Larry’s painful split with Cheryl was no exception. But
their separation remains a sore spot for some viewers, which makes
“The Therapists” a particularly cruel tease for those hoping they’d
reunite. On the bright side, we get Steve Coogan as Larry’s ironically
named Dr. Bright, an idiot who underestimates the allure of his
patient’s “high-pussy percentage.” Coogan is pathetic, hilarious, and
also imprisoned thanks to helping Larry scheme to mug Cheryl’s
therapist so he can rescue her and win Cheryl back. It’s all a bit
ridiculous, and it fails miserably, but it pays off for viewers by
nudging Larry ever closer to an unthinkable near-future reprisal.



69. “The Christ Nail” (Season 5, Episode 3)

After season four’s “The Survivor,” no one was going to accuse Larry
of being the most observant Jew, but it still elicits belly chortles
when he tells handyman Jesus that a mezuzah is something they “put
over the door so every anti-Semite in the neighborhood will know that
we live here in case they want to burn down the house.” Which is
nothing compared to Jesus’s fury when he realizes Larry bought his
wife a bra to mitigate all “the flopping” happening above her waist.
He and Jesus’s climactic collision and its overtones of mock-spiritual
epiphany are a fine coda, but “Christ Nail” hammers home its best
punch lines at the expense of Larry’s childishness around women’s (and
especially Susie’s) undergarments.



68. “Wandering Bear” (Season 4, Episode 8)

There may be no bigger idiots than Curb’s Jeff Greene and Larry David,
who hatch a plan to order and screen a Girls Gone Wild VHS without
their wives being any the wiser. (“College” girls, Larry clarifies for
his horrified assistant Antoinette.) Moreover, the Everlast condoms
Jeff recommended Larry use with Cheryl — so as to insulate his dog-
bitten piece, one of the series’ funniest return gags — give her all
sorts of issues down there. You’d think, given Larry’s revulsion about
Cheryl appearing in Jeff’s masturbatory fantasies during season one’s
“The Group,” he’d never want to hear him utter the words, “I’m sorry
about Cheryl’s vagina.” In fairness, he’s a bit preoccupied with the
groundskeeper/shaman (Russell Means) who cured Cheryl’s loss of
feeling and followed up on how her lady parts were doing while
clearing fronds from their yard. A worthy circus, but nowhere near as
inspired as the episode that followed.



67. “The Weatherman” (Season 4, Episode 4)

An episode featuring Ted Danson and Shelley Berman, plus Saul Rubinek
in a guest spot, would normally suffice, but “The Weatherman” also
brought us Bob Einstein as Larry’s immortal foil Marty Funkhouser.
(Eagle-eyed TV viewers will recognize Boris Krutonog as Oleg’s
diplomat dad on The Americans.) Golf-themed arcs aren’t the show’s
most dependable, but as consolation, we get Larry peeing (and falling
into) the toilet, rumors about his inclinations toward beastiality,
and put-upon Sammi Greene being traumatized yet again by Uncle L.D.
The laughs are everywhere, even if the story is all over the place.



66. “The Group” (Season 1, Episode 10)

Notable Seinfeld alum Melanie Smith (she who spotted George’s
shrinkage in “The Hamptons”) pops up as Larry’s ex, who makes a “brief
appearance” during Larry’s masturbatory fantasy, much to Cheryl’s
chagrin. Oh, and she’s an incest survivor who asks Larry to join her
at a support group. Worst idea ever. Lucy realizes this once Larry
improvises a recollection of being molested by his uncle from Great
Neck so as to fit in. Touchy material, to be sure, and not the only
occasion in which Curb litigates survivor-dom, but at least we get SNL
original Laraine Newman in a dual role as support-group leader and
regional Vagina Monologues director. A fine, if not unforgettable,
first finale.



65. “Vehicular Fellatio” (Season 7, Episode 2)

There are plenty of sycophants in Larry’s life, but aside from
bleeding his Seinfeld money by living under the same roof, Leon is not
among them. (“I’ve never seen the damn show myself,” he tosses off
casually in conversation.) Larry loves Leon, but Loretta is wearing on
him. Whether or not you find his aversion to taking care of Lortetta
amid a positive cancer diagnosis beyond reproach, he’s dead set on
torpedoing their romance. The machinations of Larry persuading an
oncologist (Sharon Lawrence) that he’s toxic for her are mostly a
showcase for his boorishness, but “Vehicular Fellatio” is all about
his preoccupation with everyone except for him apparently partaking in
road head. Which doesn’t stop Loretta from thinking he did. Exit
Loretta, but not before Auntie Rae gets the final, “Fuck you, Larry
David.” Lawrence and Lolita Davidovich (as Richard Lewis’s girlfriend)
are great foils in a story that mostly makes room for Vivica A. Fox’s
departure so Larry can set his sights back on Cheryl.



64. “The Black Swan” (Season 7, Episode 7)

If nothing else, Larry David isn’t fearful of perpetuating stereotypes
about his own people. When his well-meaning obituary for Cheryl’s aunt
swapped the “a” for a fateful “c” back in season one, that was a typo.
Unfortunately, Larry’s dad knowingly marred his mother’s tombstone
with the misnomer “past away” on her dateline, figuring he could save
a couple hundred bucks by sanding off superfluous letters. Although
bucking conventional perceptions about “nice Jewish boys,” Larry also
has the gumption to tell Turner — a friend of Norm (Paul Mazursky,
back for the first time since season four), who dies of a heart attack
after Larry berates him on the golf course — “I thought he was a
prick.” Norm is actually the second old man Larry indirectly puts into
cardiac arrest (see: season two’s “The Acupuncturist”), though the
titular swan in this episode is his virgin exotic-fowl homicide.
“Black Swan” is a bit heavy on golf-club theater, but the closing
karma of poor Adele David’s tombstone being modified to acknowledge
she’s mother of “Larry David, an Asshole and Swan Killer,” was a long
time coming.



63. “Lewis Needs a Kidney” (Season 5, Episode 5)

The midway point is when season five finds its stride, all credit owed
to a cockamamie subplot about Richard Lewis needing a kidney
transplant. Neither Larry nor Jeff is eager to volunteer their organ,
but as Susie makes plain, Jeff is too much of a “fat fuck” and “can’t
survive the surgery.” (There’s that survival theme again.) The
repercussions pick up steam over ensuing episodes, but “Lewis Needs a
Kidney” is a must-revisit for a hysterical Mindy Kaling cameo. Extra
mention merited for an exchange between Larry and Omar’s assistant
that plays off a similar principle to Seinfeld’s famous telemarketer
rebuke.



62. “AAMCO” (Season 1, Episode 7)

How many innocent car bumpers have to suffer before AAMCO finally
foregoes its radio ads’ signature double horn honk? The good news is
that a fender bender caused by Larry’s misdirected outburst leads to
numerous scenes with undervalued Everyman Mike Hagerty as a mechanic
who’s increasingly put off by Larry’s air of superiority. On the
upside, he has far better vehicular fortune when a bet with Cheryl
entitles him to road head.



61. “The Hot Towel” (Season 7, Episode 4)

By season seven, you’d think we know all there is to know about
Larry’s personal quirks, but then he picks a pointless nit with an
airline passenger wearing shorts and it’s revealed Larry likes to
imitate horses. Sherry Stringfield of ER fame (as Larry’s ex Mary
Jane) joins Sharon Lawrence in the echelon of network-procedural vets
with season-six guest appearances, and has the honor of being stung by
one of Larry’s best asides. Turns out her pal Christian Slater is also
going to Ted Danson’s party, so she says to pass along a hello. “Eh,
no,” he shrugs. “But I’ll see him.” If she warned him that Slater is a
caviar hog, maybe he wouldn’t have been caught off guard and launched
into a lecture at Ted’s that came back to haunt him when Slater later
pointed Mary Jane’s irate boyfriend in Larry’s direction. “The Hot
Towel” is a tough watch at times, as Larry initiates one unnecessary
dustup after another (why does he care how Ted and Mary spend his gift
certificate?), but all is almost redeemed when Larry berates Sammi
Greene — whose off-key singing makes him crazy — to shut the hell up.
Poor Sammi.



60. “The Bracelet” (Season 1, Episode 4)

What’s are remarkable about Curb Larry is that, despite his obscene
wealth, he’s utterly ill-equipped at cashing in on the perks of
considerable fame. Not only does he fail to get Cheryl a fancy
bracelet without it devolving into a tussle with Richard Lewis, but
he’s initially rebuffed at the jewelry store for appearing so unkempt
as to pass for homeless. (“You look like a Jewish Ratso Rizzo,” per
Lewis.) In the course of the same afternoon, Larry and Lewis wind up
debating the relative attractiveness of penises, shadowboxing with a
demanding blind man, and besmirching a restaurant captain who felt
entitled to his own gratuity. “The Bracelet” lacks any signature one-
liners, but it is archetypal of Larry’s knack for forming intimate,
volatile bonds with his adversaries in the space of time it takes to
grab a coffee — and how his dustups are never quite finished, as
Michael the blind man would bedevil him again in season four.



59. “The Smiley Face” (Season 8, Episode 4)

Pity Larry’s long-suffering assistant Antoinette (the unheralded
Antoinette Spolar), who stays with Larry despite his absolute
obliviousness to her occasional and valid personal needs. Of course
her ailing dad would finally shuffle off the day Larry guilted her
into returning to work. “The Smiley Face” depends, as with so many
Curb episodes, on the strength of whatever taboo Larry is busting. In
this case, becoming “the Edmund Hillary of shitting where you eat”
with girlfriend Heidi (Hung’s Rebecca Creskoff) doesn’t exactly reach
the bar set by carrying on an affair with anti-Semitic Palestinian,
and largely facilitates the sight gag of his unfortunate suntan. A
more minor story with Harry Hamlin exploring the politics of sharing
office-sundry cabinets is more effectively granular, and Larry’s
principled ranting about emojis (“They’re frequently used by idiots at
the end of emails and text messages”) is awfully on the nose six years
later.



58. “The Corpse-Sniffing Dog” (Season 3, Episode 7)

After once getting his comeuppance for snubbing Mindy Reiser, you’d
think Larry would know to thank both Stu and Susan Braudy for covering
the dinner check. À la Mindy, he never did make it quite right with
Susan, and somewhere within the framework of their differences, Larry
got Sammi Greene wasted, misread her permission to take the family dog
that was making Jeff’s life miserable, and hired and then had to fire
a chef for the restaurant whom he only liked due to their shared
baldness. (Naturally, he’s very particular about whom he considers
part of that particular tribe.) Another high-noon showdown with Susie
and Sammi’s stumbling (“I thought she had a speech impediment,” Larry
swears) saves a convoluted home stretch. Plus, there’s a brief cameo
from The Office’s Kate Flannery.



57. “Interior Decorator” (Season 1, Episode 5)

“What are you listening to me for? I don’t know what I’m talking
about.” If only everyone in Larry’s path were prepped with that
advice. The nurse at his doctor’s office (played by Lisa Ann Walter)
can only roll her eyes as Larry flails his injured index digit
(“baaaad fingaaaa”) in disbelief that the office actually heeded his
suggestion to take people based on appointment times and not order of
the sign-in sheet. To think, he essentially Greco-Roman wrestled his
latest female nemesis (the terrifically sneering Marissa Jaret
Winokur) down the hallway to gain priority examination. If only he
hadn’t re-aggravated his injury by getting into an eroticized brawl
with Diane Keaton’s interior designer in the first place. It’s a busy
episode, but one with standout physical comedy and callbacks to
Seinfeld’s own beefs with high-maintenance medical professionals.



56. “The Korean Bookie” (Season 5, Episode 9)

“I don’t wanna spoil your fun, you’re having a good time. It’s just …
it’s idiotic, what you’re doing.” If there’s ever a Larry David
monument, etch that into its pedestal. “Korean Bookie” gives the yin
and yang of Larry-ness: He’s not wrong for being weirded out that a
friend went into his car to borrow a jacket without asking, but he’s
absolutely barking up the wrong tree thinking his Korean bookie (Bobby
Lee) kidnapped Oscar’s dog as an ethnic delicacy. (Nice touch having
him scarf down a hero stuffed with unidentifiable meat during their
inevitable staredown.) It’s another Curb story that might have sounded
the social-media alarms today. Although who doesn’t love a climactic
aerial shot of wedding attendees on the beach vomiting up bulgogi en
masse?



55. “Vow of Silence” (Season 8, Episode 5)

All due respect to Seinfeld’s low talker, but Vance’s (Michael
Hitchcock) spiritual resolve to mime all speech takes muted relations
to new depths. “Vow of Silence” zeroes in on Larry’s lack of true
conviction about these matters, as he calls out and then compliments a
serial buffet-line chat-and-cutter. (“Thanks,” she humbly mutters.)
But you have to hand it to him: When it comes to his commitment to a
social out — like b.s.-ing that he’s spending three months in New York
with Jeff and Susie to avoid participation in Tessler’s charity event
— the man is strictly monogamous. The tragic irony? He leaves poor
Lewis, the only friend whose repartee makes him laugh in earnest,
stranded at lunch while he relocates across the country, wedded to his
lie. Oh, and RIP Oscar.



54. “Officer Krupke” (Season 7, Episode 8)

Susie finds it fascinating that Larry knows all the lyrics to West
Side Story, don’t you? No, not really. Nor is the Officer Krupke that
bears this episode’s title amused when Larry points out he shares a
name with one of the musical’s key characters. He is, however,
sufficiently silenced when Larry takes off his pants and exposes the
women’s panties he has on underneath, and that’s without explaining
it’s all to abet his friend Jeff so Susie doesn’t think he’s cheating.
There’s ample allusion to sexual hijinks throughout “Officer Krupke,”
including Larry’s (incorrect) hunch that Virginia (Elisabeth Shue)
hurt her neck going down on Cheryl during a threesome. But hey, now
Cheryl has the part in Seinfeld! Besides, as Larry concedes when
Cheryl asks rhetorically why she’d prefer to be in a ménage with him,
“Well, you wouldn’t.”



53. “The Baptism” (Season 2, Episode 9)

It’s fairly rare that Jewish fiancés convert to their partner’s faith
and not the other way around. Hence Larry’s shock that his sister-in-
law’s (It’s Always Sunny/The Mick’s Kaitlin Olson) soon-to-be-spouse
would not only switch faiths, but be blessed by an adult baptism.
Ditto her accusation that, “You didn’t wanna lose a Jew and you know
it,” after Larry mistakes the ceremony itself as a drowning incident.
He actually couldn’t care less, and is equally unbothered when the
fiancé defects back to Judaism and a minor religious clash ensues. He
is an agent of chaos, even if “The Baptism” isn’t Curb’s most riotous
half hour.



52. “The Larry David Sandwich” (Season 5, Episode 1)

By any standard, the titular meal bearing Larry’s name at his favorite
L.A. deli is less than scintillating: whitefish, sable, capers,
onions, and cream cheese. It’s less an assignment of his stature than
designation of him being near death. He actually does almost drown at
the episode’s outset, and as a result comes close to finding God.
Temple goes down about as well as the Larry David Sandwich, but at
least his stare down with dad and the initiation of Larry’s search to
find his real parents is satisfying.



51. “Ben’s Birthday Party” (Season 4, Episode 2)

Here’s an episode where Larry can claim rightness in the face of
righteousness. Michael the blind pianist? His girlfriend Rhonda
(Jackie Hoffman, she of the recent Emmys non-controversy) isn’t quite
the model she masquerades as. Susie’s bedazzled pro-sports sweater
line? Hideous according to anyone’s taste. And thanks to Ben Stiller’s
straight-man shtick, Larry’s indignation that his new castmate throws
a belated birthday party, nevermind one with a phony “no gifts”
mandate or where there’s no spot to rest a naked skewer, comes across
as clear-headed. Maybe not so much when his breast fetish corrupts a
kid’s game of telephone. “You really have a ways to go when it comes
to dealing with other people,” Ben lectures the next day. Ah well,
can’t win ’em all.



50. “The Thong” (Season 2, Episode 5)

Rob Reiner should have known better than to seek Larry’s participation
in a charity celebrity auction, let alone one involving or benefiting
children. Ditto for Cheryl insisting Larry spend a day with her at the
beach. “I feel aggravated that I’m missing what other people are
getting,” he whines while sitting on the sand in sweatshirt and
baseball cap. That outfit turns out to be quite the antithesis to his
and Richard Lewis’s therapist, who shows up oceanside in a DayGlo
thong. Lewis is none too happy when his pal gets the jump and fires
the guy first, but perhaps that’s quid pro quo for season one’s
bracelet kerfuffle. “The Thong” might mark a slight ebb among a
stellar run of surrounding episodes, but unlike Dr. Weiss’s barely
there swimsuit, it’s hardly a capital offense.



49. “The Lefty Call” (Season 6, Episode 4)

This can’t be said for too many Curb casting choices, but no one could
have pulled off the part of snooty, vengeful waiter in “The Lefty
Call” quite like the late Taylor Negron, who passed away in 2015. It’s
hard not to side with his Daviday (of course he’s named Daviday), who
takes umbrage with Susie requesting a doggie bag for their fancy meal
to bring home for her actual pet. Then again, what does he care? It’s
not as if a liquor salesman needs to know what you’re doing with that
bottle of Cristal, so long as you spend the $300. But Daviday cares,
and Larry — who makes the less-than-persuasive claim that the
leftovers would be for him — pays big time when Daviday calls his
bluff and stuffs the grub with laxatives. This might be less of an
issue were Larry not so averse to Cheryl’s coarse organic TP at home
and freaked out by how Richard Lewis’s girlfriend Cha Cha (Tia
Carrere), who works in his office, monitors his frequent bathroom
visits. “The Lefty Call” is otherwise consumed by the gray area of
telephone greetings, so it’s easy to overlook its greatest
contribution to Curb: Leon’s advice that the next time Larry confronts
a skinhead of the sort who called him “Jew boy” and “fucking faggot”
at the doctor’s office, he “pull that asshole open, step into their
asshole, close the door behind you, spray-paint ‘Larry was here,’ fuck
his whole asshole up, leave Snicker wrappers … open that asshole
again, step out his ass, and leave that motherfucker wide open so he
know that you’ve been there.” Or just chasten a chemo patient you
mistake for said skinhead and watch in horror as Leon pounds him like
he stole a Joe Pepitone jersey. Whatever works.



48. “Ted and Mary” (Season 1, Episode 2)

We learn one very important lesson in this episode: Barneys’
salespeople are very good at their jobs, but not to be messed with.
Apart from introducing two more regulars or foils to the cast —
titular Hollywood couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen — the episode
manages a neat misdirection. After being victimized by a bowling-
alley-shoe thief, Larry ultimately retrieves his poached pair from the
guilty party. The real fallout concerns his rivalry with a
department-store employee who feels slighted as a “shoe whore” when
Larry orders, and then no longer needs to fill, a replacement set of
kicks. The numerous story lines don’t all deliver, but it won’t be the
last time Larry rubs both peers and total strangers the wrong way.



47. “The End” (Season 5, Episode 10)

Larry isn’t much of a believer in common-law relationships. (“I’ve
known him 44 years, but we’re not close friends,” he says of Richard
Lewis.) And as illustrated throughout season five, Larry is agnostic
about virtually everything, excluding golf. That changes on a dime
once he experiences a slice of alternate history as the son of
Christian small-towners the Cones (Hansford Rowe and Oscar nominee
June Squibb) — but he zags right back once Omar Jones realizes that he
erred and Larry isn’t adopted. By then, he’d already donated his
kidney to Richard Lewis, and due to complications, appeared to be
shuffling off this mortal coil (not before using his last words to
accuse Cheryl, Michael Corleone–style, of misplacing a Sopranos DVD).
The ensuing Albert Brooks–reminiscent heaven’s-gate fantasy — co-
starring Dustin Hoffman, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Bea Arthur — split
fans down the middle like the part in Larry’s amazing afterlife wig.
This season finale was not the end of Curb, but its flirtation with
Larry’s mortality and callback to ghosts of guest-stars past was a
tidy complement to the definitive and divisive Seinfeld send-off.
Season six, on many fronts, was a creative rebirth.



46. “The Divorce” (Season 8, Episode 1)

Larry should be thankful he’s divorcing from Cheryl and not Susie, who
warns Jeff that she’ll do nothing less than thumbtack his balls to the
wall if he tries to call it a marriage. Cheryl, in turn, is probably
better off for having not conceived with Larry. To wit, when Dodgers
owner Joe O’Donnell’s (Gary Cole) daughter (Kaitlyn Dever, who later
shone as Loretta on Justified) asks Larry whether he likes Girl Scout
Cookies, he replies, “I find them abhorrent.” He also proves to be far
from ideal when walking her through the process of inserting a tampon.
And then rescinds his cookie order when Joe’s offended. Amid all this,
Larry takes his eye off the ball and gets “Sweded” by a divorce lawyer
(Paul F. Tompkins) who’s Nordic and not Jewish. (“She’s gonna get
everything!” he moans.) “The Divorce” deploys a similar structure to
season seven’s “Vehicular Fellatio,” except the very future of
everyone’s relationships, not the road head, is under scrutiny, and
it’s Jeff and not Larry who feels left out.



45. “The Benadryl Brownie” (Season 3, Episode 2)

Larry can’t catch a break when it comes to his employment habits. In
season one’s “Affirmative Action,” he was accused of only hiring white
people, and in “Benadryl Brownie,” he insists to his cable guy that he
doesn’t exclusively fire black workers. Good thing he’s still friends
with Wanda Sykes, who witnesses him padding the cable guy’s diner tip.
An A-story involving Larry and Richard Lewis positively poisoning
Richard’s Christian Scientist girlfriend so an allergic reaction
dissipates before the Emmys red carpet doesn’t quite carry the
episode, but at least the late icon Joan Rivers gets its final words.



44. “The Car Salesman” (Season 2, Episode 1)

Cheryl isn’t exactly attracted to Larry’s lifestyle of lounging and
watching Maury. Not that he’s conflicted in the least: Rather than hop
back on the merry-go-round with Jason Alexander, Larry opts to sell
cars. He is comically inept, but maybe it does beat getting the gang
back together, since it means enduring Alexander dismiss his George
Costanza alter ego (i.e., Larry’s id) as “the idiot” and “the
schmuck.” Worth the down payment on “The Car Salesman” alone for one
customer’s cruel, nasally aping of Larry’s spiel.



43. “The Anonymous Donor” (Season 6, Episode 2)

One season prior, Ted Danson’s namesake sandwich at the local deli
outshone Larry’s. And now he upstages him at a museum benefit with an
anonymous donor wing. What to do? Good thing J.B. Smoove’s Leon just
got to town and saves the day. (If “rough up a dry-cleaner customer
for the apparent theft of a Joe Pepitone jersey” counts as saving the
day, that is.) “The Anonymous Donor” contributes plenty, like Jeff’s
admission to masturbating in Larry’s house on Passover (hopefully
Cheryl wasn’t in his fantasy this time), but it’s a touchstone episode
for concretizing the dynamic duo of “Larry Jew” and Leon Black.



42. “The N Word” (Season 6, Episode 8)

As Leon puts it so concisely, “What the fuck? You hug my auntie, you
stab her in the stomach?” Leon must understand: Larry has no control
over his erection after a five-second embrace. (If only that had held
true while wooing Dr. Flomm.) Leon, Loretta, Auntie Rae, and a
hospital surgeon all have trouble wrapping their heads around Larry
reiterating the “N Word” while relaying someone else’s racist screed.
Of all Curb episodes, this season-six favorite would easily provoke
the most hot-button debate, but it also has harmless fun putting Jeff
through the paces of bald bias and fleshing out a Seinfeld-ian
scenario in which a doctor’s date is treated a tad too
indistinguishably from a patient. (Trivia: See if you can spot Laurel
Coppock, a.k.a. Jan from the Toyota ads, as a patient of Dr. Flomm’s.)



41. “Mister Softee” (Season 8, Episode 9)

If Michael Richards could reap the spoils of Curb-as-public-
reclamation-project, why can’t World Series goat Bill Buckner? A
combination of omnipresent Mister Softee trucks — which trigger
flashbacks to a nightmarish memory from Larry’s youth that discloses
the origins of “prettay, prettay, prettay” — and a crazed Robert
Smigel (basically doing Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in the guise of
mechanic and softball coach Yari) give Larry some insight into
Buckner’s struggles with an unforgivable error. Sports agnostics may
get lost in the weeds of Buckner’s redemption, but letting him save
that baby tossed from a burning building was a true act of cultural
mercy. Whether Susie’s hysterical orgasm in Larry’s vibrating
passenger seat (Yari!) qualifies as such is up to the individual.



40. Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999)

It was never intended as the start of a two-decade project, but all
the elements are there: infuriating network executives, offending
Jeff’s parents, scratching the itch of a Hitler fetish, and finding
solidarity with anyone who gets an upper hand in life by eschewing
social norms. All that was missing was the fulfillment of a stand-up
special he’d promised to HBO, itself a kind of rebuke to mass opinion
that he should get back on the stage. The quality is a bit grainy, and
pacing a bit less brisk than Curb in its episodic glory, but without
this initially one-off endeavor, there may have been no Curb as we
know it.



39. “The Wire” (Season 1, Episode 6)

There are no words Larry fears more than, “I’m finally in the house
that Jerry Seinfeld built.” (With the notable exception of, “It’s
always been a dream of mine to meet Julia Louis-Dreyfus.”) But if it
means burying a neighbor’s unsightly wire underground —
environmentally consciously, of course — he’ll oblige. Louis-Dreyfus
makes the first of many Curb cameos, presaging her pugnaciousness as
Veep’s Selina Meyer, and Wayne Federman is pitch-perfect as Larry’s
presumptuous neighbor Dean, who’s less than thrilled with what he
describes as more of “an encounter” than a meeting. Good thing they
weren’t splitting hairs over whether soup constitutes a meal.



38. “The Safe House” (Season 8, Episode 2)

Funkhouser is really feeling his oats in season eight. In the
premiere, he followed Larry’s lead and got a divorce. Here, he gossips
with Larry and Jeff about Richard Lewis’s burlesque-dancer
girlfriend’s fine bosom — and promptly sums up her personality this
way, sending Jeff into a giggle fit: “She’s dumb.” Which brings to
mind two words that encapsulated Larry on his mother’s tombstone in
season seven: “An asshole.” This episode finds Larry triggering
multiple women who all happen to be taking shelter in a neighboring
safe house. When one of them, Sandra (Michaela Watkins), demands an
apology to both herself and her dog, Larry argues, “It’s very hard to
apologize to a dog, because they’re a stupid animal.” Regarding Dale,
another resident of the safe house, Larry can’t help but test his
theory that she’s big enough “to take care of [her]self” and, thus,
faking her way in. In lieu of a significant overarching narrative,
this season’s individual episodes get terribly crowded (the whole
Lewis B-story is fairly forgettable), but “Safe House” benefits from
Curtis Armstrong and Jerry Minor bringing home what would otherwise be
the umpteenth racial-confusion conundrum. And Larry may be split from
Cheryl, but he finally tells Leon, “I love you.”



37. “The Bowtie” (Season 5, Episode 2)

If you’re counting, “The Bowtie” represents Larry’s third hostile
altercation with a disabled person, though not the last. This is a
watershed Curb episode for sharing the basic David truism that
lesbians love Larry. Except once the L.A. lesbian community gets wind
that he approved of Jodi Funkhouser’s (Mayim Bialik) supposed
defection, he’s on the outs. He rights that wrong with an assist from
Rosie O’Donnell, but still manages to convince his new private
investigator Omar Jones (Mekhi Phifer), a table full of diners, Wanda
Sykes, and a petrified handyman (a very funny Larry Thigpen) that he
and/or his newly adopted dog are irrevocably racist. Not a ton of
broken ground, but a biting poke at our cultural comfort zones
nonetheless.



36. “Thor” (Season 2, Episode 2)

How could Curb possibly skate by without casting a former American
Gladiator as one of Larry’s oversize oppressors? Deron McBee, a.k.a.
Gladiator Malibu, steps into some size who-knows-what boots as
wrestler Thor Olson to stomp sense into Larry “Bald-Headed Turd” David
after yet another relatively innocent traffic misunderstanding. Though
that might be less intimidating than answering to Wanda Sykes after
driving by and commenting on her ass. To think none of this would have
happened if Jason Alexander could have just come to Larry’s office for
once. (Good thing he didn’t.)



35. “Club Soda and Salt” (Season 3, Episode 3)

How could Cheryl not love a man who describes her emoting on the
tennis court as akin to “pigs fucking”? At least now that she’s
getting chummy with her tennis coach/actor buddy Brad, she gets to
delight in Larry’s jealousy for a change. Of course, she probably
didn’t count on Brad aggressively rubbing out wine stains from her
breasts with — wait for it — club soda and salt. Larry could have
intervened, were he not being manhandled by the irate husband of yet
another retail nemesis (Laura Silverman). The first great episode of
Curb’s third season, though the best would be yet to come.



34. “The Pants Tent” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Years before Girls and Insecure broke their own boundaries with
careful placement of stage ejaculate, Curb laid down the gauntlet from
week one that it trafficked heavily and profanely in the lane of
senior genitalia. “There was something hard in there, and it was your
fucking dick,” shouts Cheryl’s friend Nancy (Robin Ruzan), furious
that Larry won’t take ownership over having been involuntarily aroused
while they were at the movies. But even Cheryl knows, and as any man
can attest, it really was just the material. Some Hitler-related high
jinks involving Jeff’s parents and a war of withering insults between
Larry and best frenemy Richard Lewis (“What, we’re doing the litany
now?” David deadpans as Lewis rattles off his disorders) further set
the tone for several years spent litigating hygiene, history, and
histrionics with his weary family and friends.



33. “The Hero” (Season 8, Episode 6)

Given what Elaine went through 19 years earlier in Seinfeld’s “The
Airport,” Larry should know the sting of being blocked from taking
advantage of coach-class amenities. He still gets to play the hero
here, accidentally tackling a boorish passenger and taking the credit
for perceptions of valor, but why split hairs? Anyway, Larry could use
a self-esteem boost. In a verbal joust with Ricky Gervais, Ricky
condescends of Seinfeld, “I love broad comedy.” So what better way to
exact revenge by rescuing Ricky and their mutual love interest Donna
(Samantha Mathis) with an oversize prop? His handiwork with that stiff
baguette doubled as an atonement for Jerry’s marble-rye mischief a
decade and a half prior. Why it took Curb nearly that long until Larry
professed, “I’m trying to elevate small talk to medium talk,” is
anyone’s guess.



32. “The Bare Midriff” (Season 7, Episode 6)

What a treat “The Bare Midriff” is, despite making light of suicide
and unquestionably mocking Catholics. Cheryl is back, auditioning to
play herself in the Seinfeld reunion; Julia Louis-Dreyfus finds
herself stuck as the lone feminist doomed to smack sense into Larry
and Jerry (both of whom are equally appalled that their new assistant
Maureen, whom Elaine referred, wears ill-fitting crop tops to work);
and then there’s the art-imitating-life-imitating-art delight of
watching Jerry and Larry collaborate, which boils down to taunts
(“What, do you got Seabiscuit in there with you?” Jerry jests upon
overhearing Larry’s considerable urinary flow) and the kinds of
childish games that Jerry and George were known for. The primary story
— Larry peeing on a Jesus painting that Maureen and her mother
construe as a miracle, only for Mom to nearly end it all when Larry
pees in Maureen’s eye — is among Curb’s cockamamiest, but Jillian Bell
(later of Idiotsitter and Rough Night) is all in as the fashionably
flabby catalyst, and Larry finally makes his strongest case that bias
against bald people transcends all divides. He even throws in a
“schmohawk” for good measure.



31. “Shaq” (Season 2, Episode 8)

Seinfeld had its share of hospital scenes, and Curb takes that legacy
for a meta-spin when Larry makes peace with Shaquille O’Neal in one of
the series’ most satisfying full circles: After injuring the NBA
superstar by accidentally tripping him from a courtside seat, Larry
wheels in every episode of Seinfeld to Shaq’s recovery room. It also
creates a scenario where Larry is now a pariah not only outside of his
usual inner circles but nationwide, as if it were his destiny. Bit
parts from Mr. Show regulars Brett Paesel and Jay Johnston, plus Aisha
Tyler, only sweeten the pot.



30. “The Acupuncturist” (Season 2, Episode 6)

With Larry, simple aches and pains tend to facilitate wounding
interpersonal dilemmas. On the flip side, his attempts at generosity
wind up inspiring animus. Maybe that’s because, as Cheryl puts it, he
has trouble saying no to people — like an old SNL writer colleague on
hard times — because he’s “a pussy” rather than a thoughtful guy. “The
Acupuncturist,” in which Larry manages to sully the honor of both a
Chinese healer and Japanese waiter, not to mention indirectly inducing
an elderly Lothario’s (Ed Asner!) fatal heart attack, overreaches a
tad. It does, however, notably conclude with the first in a long line
of Larry’s adversarial staredowns.



29. “Affirmative Action” (Season 1, Episode 9)

“I see it in a historical sense, but not in a nice-day sense.” That’s
the best poor Richard Lewis can muster in defense of Larry, who upon
meeting Lewis’s dermatologist, who happens to be black, inexplicably
quips to Lewis, “Even with the whole affirmative-action thing?” As
tends to happen in Curb, worlds collide and Larry soon has to make
amends with Dr. Grambs so he’ll prescribe something for Cheryl’s rash,
culminating in a full-circle encounter with Lewis’s girlfriend, who
calls him out for only hiring his “white wife’s white friends.” At the
end of the nice day, Larry hits it on the nose when he deduces, “I
tend to say stupid things to black people.” This is as cringey and
timely as the show gets.



28. “The Nanny From Hell” (Season 3, Episode 4)

To Larry David and the writers’ credit, they waited roughly two and a
half seasons after the show’s premiere to obsess over dicks again. In
“Pants Tent,” it was the false perception of Larry’s phallus. Here, it
happens to be the gang left agape by the true enormity of a restaurant
investor’s son’s member. Or as Larry beams to the not-quite-proud dad,
“Kid’s got some penis on him.” As for his troubles getting rid of
Looney Tunes nanny Martine (an episode-stealing Cheri Oteri), it all
goes back to his strange penchant for using the privileged bathroom at
friends’ house parties. “Nanny From Hell” has all the ingredients for
a quotable Curb, even if the sponge cakes so crucial in its final
moments could have been a bit more moist.



27. “The Doll” (Season 2, Episode 7)

Larry is childless, so he doesn’t realize that children often don’t
know what they really want. Like when the daughter of an ABC exec —
who just greenlit Larry and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new show — wants him
to snip her favorite doll’s long locks with a Swiss Army knife, she’d
instantly back that ask up if she knew the hair wouldn’t grow back (a
concept Larry of all people should empathize with). The highlight of
“The Doll” is dumb-and-dumber Larry and Jeff conspiring to snag a doll
from Jeff’s daughter Sammi, decapitate it, and swap out Judy’s
manicured head with a fully coiffed one. Everyone wins except Susie,
who steals one of countless Curb scenes by dressing down Larry as a
“four-eyed fuck” and her husband as a “fat piece of shit.” Their loss
of manhood is our gain.



26. “The Special Section” (Season 3, Episode 6)

“Terrorist Attack” was more direct, but much of season three is in the
throes of morbid humor. In “Special Section,” Larry finds out
belatedly of his mother’s passing, and chooses to honor her in his own
special fashion, by leveraging her death for get-out-of-obligations-
free cards, for sex, and for what Richard Lewis deems a case of “East
Indian giving” over a meditative mantra. “You know how people do,” his
dad (the recently passed Shelley Berman) says when Larry asks after
her upon returning from a Martin Scorsese movie shoot. Imagine his
surprise that not only is the David matriarch no longer living, but
buried with Gentiles and criminals due to an ass-cheek tattoo. That
his aptly Goodfellas-esque plot to move her body goes bust when he
pays off an undertaker with fake Scorsese-set money is, even by Curb
standards, rich irony.



25. “Mary, Joseph, and Larry” (Season 3, Episode 9)

Kudos for casting David Koechner against type as a pious church
volunteer/manger peformer, but especially for getting multiple
episodes of material out of the infamous esophageal pubic hair. (“It
kind of wrapped itself around there,” Larry’s doctor notes with a
cyclonic flash of his finger.) In “Mary, Joseph, and Larry,” David
winds up more of a stooge than one-third of a holy trinity, a Scrooge
who comes around to the Christmas spirit only to have his good deeds
haunt him. Jew and Gentile alike unite in appreciation of this
episode’s equal-opportunity skewering of holiday tradition.



24. “The Terrorist Attack” (Season 3, Episode 5)

The seeds for Cheryl and Larry’s separation were first sown when Larry
hedged around their weekend plans despite Wanda’s warnings of an
impending terrorist attack. (This was the season’s only explicit, if a
bit roundabout, reaction to the events of 9/11 a year earlier.) Cheryl
was none too thrilled, but the upside is Larry used the inside scoop
to repair his relationship with Paul Reiser’s wife, Mindy. (Alanis
Morissette also figures in a guest spot that ties loose ends and lets
her send up secrecy around her greatest hit.) “It would be nice if
there was a small explosion, something where nobody got hurt,” he
tells Mindy by way of apology when the threat doesn’t come to
fruition. Gallows humor or not, “Terrorist Attack” is, in its own way,
a bit of wish fulfillment from David, a native New Yorker.



23. “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister” (Season 7, Episode 1)

When Loretta’s doctor asks Larry how kvetching about fish could take
priority over his sick girlfriend, the answer may as well be, “Yeah,
you’ve clearly never met L.D.” Also thrust into Larry’s orbit is Bam
Bam (Catherine O’Hara), newly orphaned Marty Funkhouser’s mentally
unstable sister. And if Jeff couldn’t resist masturbating at Larry’s
Seder, there’s no way he’d resist an impromptu invite from Bam Bam to
have sex, hence the unforgettable dirty talk, “Fuck me, fat boy!”
O’Hara flashes through the episode like a comedic comet, capped off
with her flirtatiously pantomiming what appears to be a rim job for
Jeff’s benefit and/or to his mortification. Oh, and Loretta’s been
diagnosed with cancer, so Larry’s looking at four years of caretaking
with no golf. This does not end well.



22. “Opening Night” (Season 4, Episode 10)

An hourlong episode is unusually indulgent between Larry’s quest to
bed his George W. Bush–voting co-star Cady, his big debut on Broadway,
and a continuation of the theme established in season three’s “Mary,
Joseph, and Larry” that our culture of tipping has gone completely
haywire. And then there’s the twist: Mel Brooks and his wife, Anne
Bancroft, toasting to The Producers’ demise on account of Larry’s
foibles … until he truly dooms them by winning the crowd over. Stephen
Colbert and a young, pre-Chuck Zachary Levi pop up as David’s
requisite agitators, while Jerry Seinfeld finally finds his way to
Curb as a wincing audience member. Jeff, however, deserves the
heartiest applause for admonishing Larry that, “I’d fuck her with a
Bush mask on!”



21. “The Shrimp Incident” (Season 2, Episode 4)

It isn’t hard to imagine the actual Larry David getting into it with
an HBO executive over Chinese food shrimp counts, so it’s a minor
miracle we’re getting a ninth season at all. Though it’s doubtful real
Larry would declare, “You cunt! What a cunt!” when a fellow poker
player folds on a great hand, as if he were Caesar outing Brutus. And
definitely not if Julia’s last shot at selling her series was
impressing said poker player. Yeah, definitely not. As for Julia’s
wish that, “I would like to be able to say that, fuck,” we all know it
would be granted by HBO soon enough. “The Shrimp Incident” finds Curb
on its meatiest roll to that point.



20. “The Blind Date” (Season 4, Episode 3)

Is “yo,” as in yogurt, a prefix? It’s the kind of question, à la
George Costanza’s musings on “ma” and “nure,” that gnaws at Larry but
rankles those in his orbit even more. Watching him and Ben Stiller go
tit for tat brings to mind the childish meltdown between him and Laura
Silverman in season three’s “Club Soda and Salt,” like drawn-out
articulations of his eyeballing staredowns. This being Larry, his most
vexing clash in “The Blind Date” occurs opposite a preteen magician
(Anton Yelchin), though he hits it off with a group of mentally
challenged car-wash attendants and a burqa-clad Muslim stranger named
Haboos (Moon Zappa!) who lets him use her bathroom. That Michael the
blind pianist seems oblivious to the golden rule of love being just
that — echoing Costanza’s reticence toward dating a bald woman —
merely means he’s in perfect company with pitiless Larry, who probably
deserves to have Susie stalk his erotic dreams as a kind of Oedipal
dominatrix.



19. “Beloved Aunt” (Season 1, Episode 8)

The typo heard ’round the world. Larry pens a newspaper obit for
Cheryl’s “beloved aunt,” but a misprint swaps the a for a c, one of
many instances in which that particular euphemism gets Larry in hot
water. (And just as he was charming his in-laws by doing his best
post-funeral Brando impression!) Bonus points for guest appearances by
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Mick’s Kaitlin Olson as the
victim of Larry’s questionable coffin-side relationship advice and the
great Paul Dooley in his debut as Cheryl’s father.



18. “Denise Handicap” (Season 7, Episode 5)

Nothing good ever comes of Larry lollygagging around town with a
vanilla ice-cream cone. Ask “Little Orphan” Marty Funkhouser. This
time, he bumps into friends John and Jamie Fowler — who are hosting a
private recital by one of Larry’s favorite musicians — and, apropos of
nothing, inquires whether their adopted Chinese daughter has an innate
predilection toward chopsticks. “Denise Handicap” is high-level Curb
for checking off a few boxes: his wheelchair-bound love interest
Denise viewing Larry as being the disadvantaged one because of his
baldness; the still-topical satire of cavalier cell-phone-contact
shorthands; and the mindless banter between Larry and Leon about the
word “brother” that evokes a classic back-and-forth from fellow
neurotic Jew Howard Stern. Still, the episode belongs to Anita Barone
and Amy Pietz as Larry’s dueling disabled dates (neither actress is
actually disabled in real life, though Curb has historically cast
disabled actors to play disabled characters), and Rosie O’Donnell as
the latest foe to emasculate him.



17. “Meet the Blacks” (Season 6, Episode 1)

The terrific subplot of this season-six premiere is an analog to one
of Seinfeld’s best scripts, wherein George gets fired from his job but
keeps showing up like nothing happened. Here, Larry gets out of a
party at Marty Funkhouser’s place by purposely showing up on the wrong
night and claiming he got his dates mixed up. Jeff piggybacking on his
idea and both the Greenes and Davids getting stuck in an intimate
evening at the Funkhousers — and then actually missing a Ted and Mary
gathering and having to double down on their calendar mishap — is
pretty exquisite comeuppance for a misanthrope. But the gold mine is
our introduction to Vivica A. Fox and the Blacks, hurricane refugees
whom the Davids take in. (“That’s like if my last name was Jew, like
Larry Jew,” he feels compelled to quip.) Inadvertently serving an
erotic-cake rendering of a black phallus at their welcome party?
That’s just icing.



16. “The Reunion” (Season 7, Episode 3)

If there’s one string Larry has left to pull with Cheryl, it’s
enticing her back into acting. To win back his lady, he will betray
every cranky principle he’s ever endorsed by approving a Seinfeld
reunion, with a role for Cheryl as George’s ex-wife. It’s actually
sort of romantic. Larry’s justification to Jerry — people want it, so
let’s not withhold — may have been disingenuous, but the arc was a
benevolent gesture by real-life Larry that gave millions goose bumps,
even if its fictional benefactor was left positive that, “I’m gonna
hate myself more than normally.”



15. “Porno Gil” (Season 1, Episode 3)

Some premises just come out of the writers room fully formed, and when
casting snags Bob Odenkirk to play the episode’s namesake, a retired
XXX star, little direction is needed. Still, “Porno Gil” stretches its
concept to feature a lost-in-America misadventure, as Larry and Cheryl
get turned around en route to Gil’s dinner party and fail to find
anyone who can bear Larry’s anti-charm long enough to help. (The
conundrum also prompts one of his first and most effortless “prettay,
prettay, prettay, prettay good” laments.) In a social circumstance
where their host is sharing anecdotes about getting hard by putting
Tabasco sauce up his ass, Larry somehow ultimately offends by refusing
to take off his shoes. And that’s all before Jeff’s parents catch
Larry ogling an old VHS featuring a vintage Gil performance. Gil may
have fouled many a bed, but in this classic Curb, Larry made his.



14. “The TiVo Guy” (Season 6, Episode 7)

Not many pre-finale Curb episodes prove as consequential as “TiVo
Guy.” Cheryl is on a violently turbulent flight and calls Larry to say
a potentially final “I love you,” but she can’t get a word in edgewise
without him prattling on about the malfunctioning cable system. This,
along with surviving the bumpy ride next to hunky no-fly underwear
magnate Glenn (Tim Conlon), strikes her like lightning that their
marriage is kaput. (Could you withstand a union with someone who harps
on people who can’t distinguish fake crab during intercourse?) Perhaps
as karma for disingenuously using grief over his mother’s death as a
social out, a restaurant hostess calls what she thinks is Larry’s
bluff when he cancels a reservation for himself and Cheryl. That all
their friends “choose Cheryl” is far more inevitable. It’s not all
bad, though: He’s still got his true family, the Blacks, who are all
for his first date with Lucy Lawless. If only his balls weren’t “a bit
more distended than the average testicles,” things might have gotten
far less twisted at the end.



13. “The Table Read” (Season 7, Episode 9)

Larry may pull off the whole Seinfeld reunion/Cheryl reconciliation
strategy, assuming he can stop running afoul of the law. The
penultimate season-seven episode ends with one of the series’ most
twistedly funny denouements, as Larry explains to his horrified doctor
(Randall Park, now of Fresh Off the Boat), “I’ve been seeing this 9-
year-old girl, and she has a rash on her pussy.” Meanwhile, “Table
Read” allows Michael Richards a chance at redemption for the things he
said during an unhinged real-life stand-up set earlier that year. At
minimum, the Richards bit — which, admittedly, some liked more than
others — rolls out a red carpet for Leon to steal the show as a
Jewish-doctor impostor trying to snap Richards into it after his
Groats diagnosis. (That condition really gets around in Curb.)
Honorable mention to Jason Alexander for fellating a pen he borrows
from Larry, and to the actual Larry David for a script that further
satisfies those hopeful for a Seinfeld revival while illustrating
exactly why it wouldn’t work.



12. “The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial” (Season 6, Episode 3)

Most people, when craving something sweet in a cone or cup, will
sample a flavor or two and then make their selection. Any unnecessary
rumination is akin to idling behind a deliberative post-office
customer. Stuck behind a woman (the always-good Robin Bartlett)
fussing before the gelato counter, Larry flips his wig: In a stunning
Curb sequence, he’s arguably in the right about her holding up the
line. Doubly so in correcting Marty Funkhouser that senior citizens
like himself can’t self-designate as orphans. “Ida Funkhouser Roadside
Memorial” catches Larry in the act of tainting yet another deceased
Funkhouser’s funeral proceedings, exploiting the most ancient of
Jewish stereotypes and sabotaging both the Black children and Sammi
Greene’s shot at an elite school, all while adding to the running gag
of his and other men’s differing estimations of their friendship. It’s
a top-15 candidate alone for the following David maxim, while
rehashing the ice-cream debacle for Cheryl and Loretta: “She’s always
told the customer is always right, and usually, the customer is a
moron and an asshole.” Question is: Which one does that make Larry?



11. “Trick or Treat” (Season 2, Episode 3)

Come to see Larry get harassed by toilet paper–toting teen girls, but
stay for what might be Curb’s finest dry exchange, and yet another
case for the growing file that confirms Larry’s penchant for speaking
stupidly around black people. “Sir, I’m bald, I’m not offended,” says
a black policeman as he observes the “Bald Asshole” graffiti tagged on
the David home. “With all due respect, you have chosen to shave your
hair. That’s a look you are cultivating to be fashionable and we don’t
really consider you part of the bald community.” To top it all off,
Larry manages to pick a nit with a wheelchair-bound man over who
invented the Cobb salad. “Trick or Treat,” fittingly, has all the
ingredients of a Curb keeper.



10. “Seinfeld” (Season 7, Episode 10)

You’d think this particular finale would stand alone on the strength
of Larry’s reunions with both the Seinfeld gang and Cheryl. But more
important, it sparked a conversation about whether one does and should
respect wood. (Jerry is totally right that relative wood quality is
paramount.) That’s Curb and Larry David distilled: Zoom out as wide on
a subject or story line and magnify as much microscopic detail as
possible. He’s so close to having it all, but risks it by (yet again)
running afoul of apparent tipping protocol and wasting valuable time
running errands on behalf of someone who should otherwise be working
in his service. (“Mocha Joe!” is the new “Newman!”) Predictably, he
also alienates Jason Alexander to the point where he quits. (Jerry’s
line, “There’s no John, Paul, George, and Larry” is a nice echo of
season three’s “Mary, Joseph and Larry.”) George winds up relenting,
the show goes on, and Cheryl even pops up at Larry’s door with some
Mocha Joe’s to kiss and make up … until Larry David: Wood Detective
fingers his ex as the culprit who stained Julia’s furniture. Good
thing, as Cady from season four can attest, she isn’t a conservative.



9. “The Car Pool Lane” (Season 4, Episode 6)

Evidence in the ongoing “Could this show possibly withstand the
firewall of political correctness?” debate mounted in season four,
most notably when Larry gets out of jury selection by bluntly
remarking, “I don’t know if I could be impartial, given that the
defendant is a Negro.” The fact that he immediately leaves and picks
up a black prostitute (the never-not-funny Kym Whitley, recently of
Master of None) as his date for a Dodgers game so he can take the HOV
lane possibly contradicts his courtroom confession. Maybe. (Monena,
however, is not sure she and Larry are “cool de la.”) That he and
Monena wind up getting high with his father — and Larry viciously
cross-examines himself in the mirror as a “fucking faggot” who needs
to “read a fucking book” — suggests he might have been better off at
someone else’s trial after all. A brilliant, ballsy half-hour of
comedy that might have been far more heavily prosecuted today, for
better or worse.



8. “The Grand Opening” (Season 3, Episode 10)

What’s terrific about Larry firing the restaurant’s bald chef after
catching him with a toupee (which qualifies as “false pretenses” in
his moral code) is that Jeff unequivocally supports his logic. Now
these two putzes have a matter of days to replace poor Phil, a
situation exacerbated when Larry breaks a merciless food critic’s
thumbs during a game of dodgeball. Cheryl panicking in a stymied car,
an idiosyncratic new chef whom Larry mistakenly thinks is a Holocaust
survivor but definitely knows has a serious issue with expletive-
streaked Tourette’s, and an escalating series of improvised profanity
storms punctuated by a stunned Susie kissing off Cheryl with, “Fuck
you, you car-wash cunt” cap the season with something straight out of
what Caligula might sound like in Larry’s imagining. Shockingly or
not, “Grand Opening” wasn’t even the series’ most riotous riff on
Holocaust humor, though it may be its high-finale watermark.



7. “Krazee-Eyez Killa” (Season 3, Episode 8)

All roads paved by Larry’s awkward run-ins with black people led us to
“Krazee-Eyez Killa,” rewarding our loyalty with comedy gold. (There
would be an even greater payoff on this pattern when the Blacks
arrived in season six.) After befriending Wanda’s benevolent but
terrifying fiancé Krazee-Eyez (Chris Williams), he gets chewed out by
the only person more intimidating in his life, Susie, after declining
a tour of her new house. Hence, he can’t say no to Krazee’s similar
overture later that evening, even though he’s scared witless that his
new gangster-rap BFF will find out he slipped to Cheryl about his
philandering ways. This rightful fan favorite birthed “Cool de la,”
“You my Caucasian?” and wrapped with the infamous pube caught in
Larry’s throat, and is worthy of “The Contest”–level status in Curb’s
canon.



6. “The Seder” (Season 5, Episode 7)

If you’re going to cast a likable sex offender, who better than Rob
Corddry? (No offense, Rob.) Intent on one-upping the rabbi who thought
a Survivor contestant would make good dinner company alongside an
actual Holocaust survivor, Larry befriends Corddry’s Rick and saves
him a seat at the Davids’ Passover Seder. (“It just seems like a lot
of trouble you people go through for this,” Cheryl says, though Larry
prefers “you Jews.”) Stephen Tobolowsky makes his legally mandated
appearance on an HBO comedy, and Rob Huebel drops by as another
holiday guest whom Larry stares down as a possible newspaper
burglarizer. “The Seder,” one of Curb’s most expertly crafted
episodes, could have ended at Rick meekly raising his hand as the only
CPR-trained attendee who can aide young Sammi Greene, but then that
might have left a bad taste in people’s mouths.



5. “Larry vs. Michael J. Fox” (Season 8, Episode 10)

The best thing about Larry being back in New York, besides PTSD-
trigger ice-cream trucks, is having neighbors. The running gag
throughout “Larry vs. Michael J.” is that Larry can’t tell whether
Michael J. Fox is slyly exploiting his own condition to mess with him
— with disapproving head shakes, exploding sodas, booming footsteps,
etc. — or if he’s merely confusing a “Larry shake” with a “Parkinson’s
shake.” Doesn’t help that he seeks counsel from sagely Leon. Mixed
signals abound in the last Curb episode to air for six years, and what
most figured would be its true finale. Larry’s girlfriend Jennifer
(Ana Gasteyer, reprising her role from “Mister Softee”) is in denial
about her wildly effeminate son Greg (Eddie Schweighardt, who steals
the episode with his shrieking joy over Project Runway), and when Greg
sees Larry doodling a swastika, he underestimates what a charged
symbol it is and sews one on a pillow sham for Susie. (In fairness, it
might be more tasteful than Susie’s bedazzled NFL sweaters from season
four.) In the end, then–New York mayor Mike Bloomberg is crystal clear
about booting Larry from his hometown for perceiving a slight against
the unassailable Mr. Fox. If the last we ever saw of Larry was he and
Leon wandering the streets of Paris, the latter devouring Taco Bell,
it would have been a gift. That it was just the beginning of a new end
is, in hindsight, worth joyfully shrieking over.



4. “The Bat Mitzvah” (Season 6, Episode 10)

In the season-five finale, we glimpsed what Larry’s life would have
been like as son to Christian folks Mr. and Mrs. Cone. “The Bat
Mitzvah” serves up the absolute antithesis, specifically Larry as
doting soccer dad and madcap minivan maven to Loretta’s kids. And in
doing so, it grants a moment even the ovation-averse David would stand
up and cheer: Loretta cutting Susie off midstream and snapping off,
“You better get your ass out of my house, you fuckin’ bitch” before
slamming the door. Along the way, Larry lashes out at Antoinette for
sharing the news of his anal tickle, which evolves into Richard Gere–
worthy gossip; imitates a disability to deter a possible new office
tenant (a definite no-no in the post-Trump era); and chooses Sammi’s
bat mitzvah as the platform for clearing up the aforementioned
scatological scuttlebutt. Michael McKean, Nadia Dajani, Mindy
Sterling, and John Legend all squeeze in some screen time too.
However, the biggest thrill of all is Larry cozying up with his new
clan and flashing some of that David holiday cheer.



3. “The Ski Lift” (Season 5, Episode 8)

Five words: “What are you, fucking nuts?” That’s when the jig is up.
Larry feigned Orthodox Judaism as long as he could to help Richard
Lewis skip the line for a donated kidney, but once Iris Bahr’s devout
Rachel insisted they leap off a stranded ski lift so they’re not
seated together after dark, he mouths that telltale, somewhat
rhetorical question while gnashing on a pair of edible underwear.
(Yeah, it’s a long story.) “The Ski Lift” is true bang for your buck,
delivering scene after scene of Larry bumping up against the limits of
his Jewishness — no one does a better bastardized gibberish Yiddish —
in addition to Larry, Richard, and Jeff forming conspiracy theories
about Mo Collins’s huge vagina. What, did you think it was as simple
as Jeff having a small penis?



2. “The Survivor” (Season 4, Episode 9)

It’s one thing to wonder aloud what would happen if you pitted a
Survivor contestant against an actual Holocaust survivor to find out
who’s suffered worse. Creating a 30-minute episode that supports that
premise and keeps it from collapsing is a feat all its own. “The
Survivor” sees Curb circling back to 9/11 for the first time since its
immediate aftermath around the time of season two, and goes all in by
satirizing our perverse attraction to tragedies and hardship. The
subsequent, chaotic dinner party is still, naturally, Larry’s fault.
(How do you trust that rabbi’s definition of survivor-dom when you
already know he lumps in his late brother-in-law, run down by a bike
messenger on September 11, 2001, with those who actually perished
downtown?) Survivor’s Colby Donaldson gets a thumbs-up for the leap of
faith, and his sparring with septuagenarian Solly (Alan Rich) is for
the ages. Neither Larry’s vow renewals with Cheryl nor his attempt at
a reverential fling with Hassidic dry cleaner Anna (Gina Gershon) go
swimmingly, but as Colby — who’s coincidentally stuck outside the same
hotel during a fire-alarm evacuation extols: “We survived!”



1. “Palestinian Chicken” (Season 8, Episode 3)

Alongside everything else, “Palestinian Chicken” gives Jeff a chance
to flex his “solid, single ball” and finally snap back at Susie. “I’m
just sayin’,” she adds after advising he watch what he eats. “You’re
just annoying” is his rejoinder, and the most assertive one Susie has
heard since Loretta told her off in season six. But the real meat of
this all-time episode, which dissuaded any naysayers who worried Curb
lost its edge, is Larry inadvertently becoming a hero to staff and
onlookers at Al-Abbas after he swipes Marty’s yarmulke off his head.
“What’s not to like?” Larry asks a beautiful Palestinian woman named
Shara (Anne Bedian) as she skeptically eyes him up and down. “Eh,
you’re a Jew,” is her matter-of-fact retort. Not that this stops Larry
from sleeping with her, or Shara from hate-speechifying while riding
him. (“Fuck me you fucking Jew!” “Zionist pig!” “Occupying fuck!” “I’m
going to fuck the Jew out of you!” “Fuck me like Israel fucked my
people!” “You circumcised fuck!”) Larry’s deed, and his unwillingness
to take sides in the great Al-Abbas vs. Goldblatt’s turf war, doesn’t
win him any points with Marty, but it’s the apex of Curb’s years-long
quest to make a fine mess of political correctness. It’s prettay,
prettay, prettay perfect.


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Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.