by Josh Levine
Humiliations of the body are, of course, often sexual. It seems unlikely that any situation comedy in the history of television has ever focussed its attention quite so often on the penis of its star. In season one, episode one, it was the pants tent. In season two’s “The Doll” it was a rash. This time Larry pets a happy Oscar the dog, only to appear to Susie as if he’s using pressure from the pooch to get himself aroused. Alas, poor Larry. He is accused of being erect when he’s not. And things don’t usually go well when he is.
EPISODE FIVE
The 5 Wood / Original Airdate: February 1, 2004 / Directed by Bryan Gordon
What is it really like to be Larry? To find yourself preoccupied by such trivia as the elasticity of shirt sleeves or, as in this episode, the number of cashews in a snack bag? The snack bag in question is made by “Health-Glo,” a company owned by David Schwimmer’s father, and the bag that Larry buys has lots of raisins in it and only four cashews. Of course he brings this up with David, who tells Larry that there is a cashew shortage and that his criticisms aren’t needed: “stay in your element.”
The episode opens with Larry and David with top hats and canes, singing and dancing a number from the show. It looks pretty amateurish but Steve the choreographer praises Larry to the skies. Suddenly the two are buddies — so much so that Jeff tells Larry that he has taken on Steve’s gay mannerisms. “You’re Steve the gay choreographer!” he exclaims. Like Seinfeld, Curb is not a gay-negative show. But that doesn’t mean its straight male characters are absolutely comfortable around gay people, and they do seem a touch afraid that gayness might rub off on them.
Leo Funkhouser has died from the “good” Hodgkin’s disease and Larry and Cheryl, along with many of their friends and acquaintances, attend the funeral where Larry encounters a writer from the television show Party of Five, which happens to be his source of information about Hodgkin’s disease. (Larry David used to watch the show with his nieces and claimed to have found it quite involving.) That Larry is as willing to play fast and loose with Judaism as he is with other religions is highlighted by the open casket. Jewish funerals never have open caskets, but Larry David needs one for his plot, which has Larry noticing that the diseased is holding Larry’s own 5 wood golf club, which is irreplaceable. Larry then schemes to get it out of the dead man’s clutches, replacing it with one of Jeff’s. All seems to go well, and Saul the dentist gives a very funny eulogy about the deceased, a man who “loved ginger ale.” But when Saul notices the switched club, Larry, Jeff, and their spouses are kicked out of the country club.
“You’re fucking narcissists,” Susie tells them at home. “It’s all a game, a big fucking game.” She and Cheryl — whose presence rather pales next to Susie’s — are genuinely angry at losing the center of their social lives. Now they will have to apply to the Beverly Park Country Club, a place that has “three Jews” in it by Susie’s count. The funniest scene in the episode has Larry and Cheryl undergoing their interview in the club’s stuffy office. Larry presents himself as a Hummer driver, a Yale man, and a Ronald Reagan fundraiser, not to mention a Moose and an Elk.
This episode is as good a place as any to notice an interesting trend in the show: the emphasis on Larry’s Jewishness. Like being a former Brooklynite in California, being Jewish marks him as different. It makes him comfortable around his best friends (Richard and Jeff are both Jewish), irritable around his gentile in-laws, and at odds with much of the rest of the world. It sometimes draws him closer to other minorities, at least in his own peculiar way, be they black like Krazee-Eyez Killa or gay like Steve the choreographer.
We can’t leave this episode without mentioning yet another sexual humiliation, and a rather painful one: Oscar the dog bites Larry’s penis. It seems like a bit of juvenile humor, although in keeping with the show’s phallo-centricity. And it prevents Larry from having a rendezvous with a sexually hungry dental hygienist, causing him to lose another chance at claiming his tenth anniversary gift from Cheryl.
EPISODE SIX
The Carpool Lane / Original Airdate: February 8, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide
It’s been a while since Larry David has outlined an episode that doesn’t fire off in all directions but this one is built on a single, if convoluted, narrative that has Larry trying to get to a Dodgers game.
The urge to see the Dodgers comes from Larry not having anything to do, having been kicked out of the golf club and not yet accepted at the new one. Failing to pry a pair of tickets from the mourning Marty Funkhouser, he gives up only to be presented with a pair by Cheryl. Larry gets out of jury duty by making himself look like a racist, picks up some marijuana from a dealer to ease his father’s glaucoma, and heads for the stadium. But when he hits traffic and realizes that only by using the carpool lane will he get to the game on time, Larry picks up a large but lively black prostitute named Monema (played by Kym E. Whitley). He offers her $750 and a ticket to come in the car with him.
The real pleasure of the episode is seeing Larry and his unlikely companion making jokes together, sharing popcorn, and arguing like Laurel and Hardy. He sees the officials from the new club and hardly seems to care that he’ll never get in now. Marty, also at the game, is having car trouble. Larry gives him a lift to the airport to pick someone up and Marty, holding Larry’s Seinfeld jacket, gets nabbed for marijuana possession. Meanwhile Larry and Monema head for Larry’s father’s apartment where the three of them get high. Little old Nat David, who has never smoked marijuana before, delights in its pleasures, telling Monema (who has supplied it) that it’s “good shit” and teaching her to swear in Yiddish. Shelley Berman is, as usual, a delight, proving that cute little old men can get away with almost anything. Larry, though, is having one bad experience, his face sweaty, his eyes bulging, as he tells himself off in the mirror. In the next scene he’s in court, having gotten Marty off the hook by confessing to owning the marijuana in the jacket. He sees that the judge is the same one before which he appeared as a prospective juror and made himself look like a racist. But Larry has a solution for this pickle as well: he faces the judge with his arm around big Monema.
Monema is a fun character and Larry’s ease with her is certainly the engine that runs the episode. Despite his self-professed discomfort around black people, once more he gets along well with a black person who falls into one of the cultural “types” that he can recognize — the rapper, the prostitute. In fact, it’s the uptown, well-educated blacks that he seems to have trouble with, as if he can’t comprehend a black person in the same socioeconomic category as himself. On another note, it’s almost shocking how mean he is to Marty, mocking him for being in mourning for his father. Feeling another’s pain is not Larry’s strong point.
EPISODE SEVEN
The Surrogate / Original Airdate: February 22, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles
The episode opens with a scenario that is not likely from real life. In bed, Larry and Cheryl are watching Seinfeld (“The Puffy Shirt,” one of Larry David’s scripts) and laughing. The implication is that this is a bedtime ritual. Jeez, Mr. David, I know we all like the reruns, but do you really make wife Laurie watch it with you every night?
Here’s another question: is it possible that Larry is more a ladies’ man than he lets on? One of the story lines in this episode involves yet another new girlfriend for Richard Lewis. Forever the optimist, Richard replays his hope for true love over and over. Here it’s an attractive black woman who happens to be a nurse in Larry’s doctor’s office. Richard is worried because of that old rumor that black men have much bigger penises. How can he compete? Richard asks Larry if he’s ever slept with a black woman and Larry casually mentions that he has slept with a couple. A couple? Larry who is terrible at two things, picking up women and drawing?
Renée, the nurse, proves to be a bit of an unexpected problem for Larry. At the doctor’s office where he is taking a physical in order to be insured for the Broadway show, he walks the treadmill while hooked up to a heart monitor
. But when Renée leans over, showing her cleavage, Larry’s heart rate spikes. The doctor can’t give him a clean bill of health and Larry has to wear a “heart halter” for twenty-four hours to monitor his rate. The halter turns out to be a very useful, if unlikely, protection, when a driver with a crowbar later goes after him.
But the main story has Larry in one of his awkward social positions. He and Cheryl are invited to a baby shower for a wealthy couple who are using a surrogate. Larry buys the gift, a “biracial” doll, which he makes the mistake of calling a “mulatto.” He is also the only one who brings a gift for the surrogate, a large stuffed panda. A misunderstood conversation between the surrogate and Larry (when he talks about giving up a “baby” he’s referring to a script) causes her to decide to keep the child herself.
The incident is almost as uncomfortable as it is funny. Larry is the only one (including Cheryl) who even recognizes the woman who is carrying the child, and the difference between her inferior position and that of the receiving couple, surrounded by piles of gifts in their splendid home, is startling. Larry is no social crusader, but in his own brusque and fumbling way he does manage to illuminate some dark places.
Our concern for Larry the Broadway star deepens as he continues to stay “on book” — theater talk for needing a script because one hasn’t memorized the lines yet. Is the show heading for disaster?
EPISODE EIGHT
Wandering Bear / Original Airdate: February 29, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide
Many an episode of Curb has touched on the subject of sex — wanting it, not wanting it, fantasizing about it, worrying over it. But this is the first episode that is largely about sex, not in one way but in several different ways.
Up first: pornography. Larry and Jeff both see a cable TV commercial for a porno film called College Girls Gone Wild and decide they want to see it. (The choice seems deliberate; the idea of older men getting excited by women who are hardly out of childhood will be distasteful to many.) Larry orders it to be sent to his office, where the package is opened by his generally idle secretary Antoinette.
Up second: premature ejaculation. Antoinette is in distress, for her boyfriend Marv has dumped her, leaving her an emotional wreck. The reason, Larry discovers, is that he has no lasting power in bed and the shame has driven him away.
Up third: unfulfilled desire. Cheryl complains that she and Larry haven’t had sex since the dog bit his penis.
Up fourth: the proper use of “protection.” Cheryl is no longer on the pill so Larry has to use a condom, the very thought of which flusters him.
Up fifth: unexpected hazards. Jeff gives him some “Everlast” condoms that have a numbing agent on them, but in his haste Larry puts it on inside out, resulting in Cheryl suffering a “numb vagina.”
The real problem of Antoinette’s distress is that it makes her an incompetent secretary, provoking some criticism from Larry that causes her to quit, threatening to tell people all of Larry’s dirty secrets. Unlike the rest of the episode, these secrets aren’t, however, sexual. They’re mostly about Larry lying to people to make his own life easier.
Another story line centers on a Native American named Wandering Bear who, being immune to poison oak, is hired by Larry to cut down a patch in the backyard. Treating him as a shaman or “medicine man,” Larry consults Wandering Bear for a solution to Cheryl’s numb vagina. Not only does Wandering Bear have a cure for that, but he also heals Oscar, who has suffered a bruised larynx after being hit by Larry’s car. As soon as he’s cured, Oscar goes once more for Larry’s privates.
While the show is no doubt about physical as well as social humiliation, it seems that Cheryl has been coming in for special treatment. Last season there was the matter of her pubic hair being caught in Larry’s throat. Then came her “colon cure” that caused her to rush through a carwash to get to a bathroom. And now there’s the “numb vagina” — a subject that Larry has no reservations about sharing with a number of people.
EPISODE NINE
The Survivor / Original Airdate: March 7, 2004 / Directed by Larry Charles
This season has two big days — opening night on Broadway and this one, the renewal of Larry and Cheryl’s wedding vows. We don’t expect things to go smoothly and we aren’t disappointed. There is a running gag in which Larry keeps getting stains on the suit he has bought for the ceremony. And there is still the matter of Larry cashing in on his anniversary gift, with time quickly running out.
Feeling some guilt about the thought of sleeping with another woman (yes, Larry does have some normal human responses), he consults the rabbi who is going to renew their vows. The rabbi (played by Barry Gordon, whose voice you may recognize as that of Donatello from the kids’ TV series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) points to the story of Abraham and Sarah from Genesis, where Sarah gives her husband permission to sleep with another woman so that he might have a child. “I think you can look at that as a very real precedent,” the rabbi says. Amazed, Larry answers, “I’ve got to start coming to temple more often.” But does Larry truly feel free to enjoy a strictly hedonistic pleasure?
Days before the ceremony, the Davids hold a dinner. The rabbi is invited, of course, and asks if he might bring a friend who is a “survivor.” Larry suggests to his father that he bring his own friend, Solly, who is also a survivor of the Holocaust. But the rabbi’s friend turns out to be Colby Donaldson, a real-life participant on the Survivor television series. Solly, mean- while, is played by Allan Rich, a veteran actor black-balled during the McCarthy era who found his way back into decades worth of TV and film character roles. During dinner Colby talks about the dangers of filming in Australia where there were many venomous snakes. “That’s a very interesting story,” says Solly in a heavy Yiddish accent. “But let me tell you, I was in a concentration camp. You never even suffered one minute in your life compared to what I went through.”
What follows is a ridiculous, distasteful, and extremely funny argument between the two in which Colby talks about having “no snacks” and not being able to work out in a gym. Larry David neatly manages not to disparage the memory of Holocaust victims even as he shows how people can use suffering as a kind of badge of honor.
Larry and Cheryl have some trouble over their personal vows, in which Larry doesn’t want to say that he and Cheryl will be together for eternity. “I guess I had a different plan for eternity,” Larry says with hesitant seriousness. “I thought I’d be single.” This is a man with serious reservations about the married state. But the ceremony goes ahead and Larry, forgetting his notes, tells Cheryl before witnesses that their marriage is “pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.” The vows, however, don’t prevent him from trying to cash in on his pass go/have sex card. While getting his suit cleaned, he makes arrangements for a hotel tryst with a sexy orthodox Jewish dry cleaner named Anna (played by Gina Gershon). Jeff tells Larry that orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in a sheet (Jeff is steering his friend wrong here; it’s a myth) and so Larry brings one with him. “What kind of fucking idiot are you?” Anna asks, sounding less than traditionally orthodox. In any case, their time is interrupted by an earthquake that forces a sheet-wrapped Larry out into the street.
This is one of the funniest episodes in the season, from the rabbi taking emotional advantage of the fact that his brother-in-law died on September 11 (hit by a bike courier) to Cheryl’s father asking if he can shout “yippee” instead of “mazel tov.” And Larry does, in the end, commit himself for “eternity,” if reluctantly. Cheryl looks happy and satisfied to hear her husband do the right thing. If only it would last.
EPISODE TEN
Opening Night / Original Airdate: March 14, 2004 / Directed by Robert B. Weide
It’s hard to believe that Larry David can pull off a season closer as good as last year’s transcendent restaurant opening, especially since overall the fourth season isn’t quite as strong as the third. But he does. And we get to witness Larry’s opening night on Broadway.
Th
e episode begins with Larry nervously packing for New York and unable to remember his lines. The three days leading up to opening night (which, coincidentally, is Larry and Cheryl’s anniversary and the deadline for his anniversary gift) are full of funny business. There’s a running gag about Larry not having proper change for tips in the hotel. There’s the continuing bad blood between him and David Schwimmer, here centering on David’s lost watch, which Larry finds and promptly loses again, with David asking that he replace or pay for it. There’s cousin Andy needing a ticket for the show. There’s the woman in the hotel bar who works as a fellatio teacher and who claims that spicy food makes a man’s “cum” taste delicious. (In his excitement Larry puts so much hot sauce on his food that he chokes and sweats while eating, revolting her.) And there’s Larry, making one last-ditch effort for his gift, trying to bed voluptuous Cady Huffman.
Jeff, bless his soul, has given Larry a leg up. Cady has OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) so Jeff tells her that Larry suffers from it too. Cady immediately warms to him and Larry encourages the connection by doing such things as arranging and rearranging objects on the table at a cast meeting. Things are looking good for Larry — except for one thing. He’s freaking out about having to actually perform on a Broadway stage. His name is on the marquee and his picture in the full-page New York Times ads. There’s a priceless scene on the day of the opening in which Larry has a hysterical fit, screaming and crying that he can’t do it. And who is there to talk him down but Nathan Lane, the show’s original star. “You can do it!” Lane says in his best Broadway voice.