by Josh Levine
Jeff doesn’t want to take the test either, but he comes along and it turns out that both are matches. How to decide which one of them should make the sacrifice? Marty Funkhouser is called on to toss a coin. (Bob Einstein has to do very little to be funny and any appearance is welcome.) The coin toss doesn’t work out and they start on eenie-meany-miney-moe. But Susie makes the decision by screaming at Jeff that he can’t give a kidney. What if one day their daughter needs one? Besides, he’s too fat and unhealthy. It’s a loving sort of abuse and the result is that Larry’s the one.
Most of the funny moments in this episode are quite incidental, such as a little verbal sparring match between Jeff and a nurse over the expression “Good night nurse.” Another plot has Larry meeting a man who turns out to be a known felon after Larry locks himself out of a car. The two of them eat at a Jack in the Box, the scene reading like an ironic product endorsement. Then later, while robbing another fast-food restaurant, the felon shoots Richard’s cousin Louis Lewis, putting him into a coma from which he is not expected to recover. Larry jumps for joy; if the cousin dies, his kidney can go to Richard.
EPISODE SIX
The Smoking Jacket / Original Airdate: November 6, 2005 / Directed by David Steinberg
The funniest actors on Curb are not always the regular stars — Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, Wanda Sykes — but are sometimes the less prominent recurring roles. One of those is Cousin Andy (played by Richard Kind) whose delivery of even straight lines can make a viewer smile at his excessive emotion, his enormous mouth and exaggerated pronunciation, his new-world version of Yiddish sentimentality. Here on a visit from New York he commiserates with Larry over his father’s increasing deafness and confusion . . . and you just want to laugh. But Andy is quite feisty and opinionated in his own way, often getting into arguments with Larry. Here a package arrives at the David household for their cousin and it turns out to be Nat’s favorite smoking jacket. Larry is sure that his father meant to send it to him, but Andy says that Larry just can’t accept that Nat “happens to love me.” The only way that Larry can get it from Andy is by inviting him to the Playboy Mansion, where Jeff has been invited. At first Larry declines the invitation himself, saying that Cheryl is already mad at him. But Jeff explains to him the “double transgression theory”: if you’re already in the doghouse you aren’t going to be punished more for doing something else bad.
Andy isn’t the only hanger-on to the land of the bunnies. There is also a kid named Wilson whom Larry meets in the hospital. The Make-A-Wish Foundation has turned down Wilson’s wish to see a naked woman so the boy convinces Larry to take him to the mansion. The visit (filmed at the real mansion) takes them to the famous grotto where topless women, frolicking in the water, take one look at Larry and run screaming. In the house he meets Hef himself who examines the smoking jacket and declares it a great knockoff of his Italian original and then mistakenly takes it as his own. There is one of those funny scenes of Larry making small talk, here to a couple of Playboy bunnies about dental hygiene, the danger of monkeys, foot odor, and ventriloquism.
Larry and Wilson met when Larry went to see the comatose Louis Lewis in the hospital, hoping to hear that he won’t last long. Amusingly, the doctor is played by James Pickens Jr., chief of surgery on Grey’s Anatomy. Wilson feels that Larry has ruined his trip to the Playboy Mansion, but his wish will be fulfilled when, returning to the house with Larry, they find Cousin Andy — awkward, funny-looking, pants-too-high Andy — in bed with a gorgeous, and quite naked, bunny. The grin on young Wilson’s face says it all.
It should be noted that the episode also contains a cameo by golfer Gary Player. Larry David does like to bring in the sports figures he admires whenever he gets a chance. And on another important note, Oscar the dog is played by another dog actor! A new dog, Rhett, has taken over the role.
Perhaps the original Oscar asked for too much money.
EPISODE SEVEN
The Seder / Original Airdate: November 13, 2005 / Directed by Robert B. Weide
Maybe this season doesn’t have a story arc like the previous ones. Maybe instead it has variations on a theme that might be called “Larry Acts (Sort of) Like a Jew.”
In this episode he does it with the help of his shiksa wife Cheryl who, looking like a real “Jew girl” as Larry graciously puts it, has agreed to hold a Passover seder so that they might invite Nat. (First the high holidays, now Passover. Next a bris?) But there are other guests too: Jeff, Susie, and Sammy, along with Susie’s sister, right-wing brother-in-law, and kids; Ethel and Mac, the grumpy old neighbors from across the road; Mark, a plastic surgeon whom Larry thinks is stealing his morning newspaper; and Rick Leftowitz, a sex offender.
“A sex offender?” screams Cheryl (understandably) when she finds out. But Larry is adhering to the tradition that it is a good deed to invite to the seder Jews who have nowhere else to go. The offender, Rick, has recently moved into the neighborhood and Larry isn’t at first thrilled when the man offers to help him with his groceries. But when Rick recognizes Larry and tells him that “The Puffy Shirt” is his favorite episode of Seinfeld then asks where the idea for the Low-Talker came from, Larry is smitten.
While Curb mostly uses Italian music in the spirit of its theme instrumental, Larry David does like to draw on other musical forms, especially those with a certain comparable ethnicity. Here Jewish klezmer music is used to accompany the seder scenes, as complementary as gefilte fish and horseradish. Nat conducts the service (his Hebrew sounds pretty, pretty, pretty good) and then Larry hides the matzoh for the kids to find, the winner getting a dollar. The right-wing brother-in-law’s son finds it, but Rick tells Larry that he saw the guy tell his son where to look; it seems that when it comes to the small things in life Rick the sex offender is a man with a strong moral conscience, not unlike his friend Larry. As can be expected, the seder ends in shouting, accusations, and hysteria.
About three decades ago the members of the television comedy troupe SCTV did a satire on a family seder that mocked both the traditions and the way that American Jews carried them out. Larry David uses the seder as an occasion but does not treat the ritual dinner itself with any disrespect. He is kinder to the sort of practices that he grew up with than he is to either the ways of orthodox Jews or Christians. Both seem to him like aliens from another planet.
EPISODE EIGHT
The Ski Lift / Original Airdate: November 20, 2005 / Directed by Larry Charles
Larry David as orthodox Jew? We get a taste of this alternative reality when Larry tries to help Richard Lewis get a new kidney without offering up one of his own.
The problem is that Richard is low on the list for kidney donations. But when Larry runs into George Lopez, the Mexican-American comedian who had a kidney transplant in real life, he finds out that it might be possible to influence the keeper of the list. So Larry sets out to woo the orthodox Jewish Ben Heineman (played by Stuart Pankin), the man in charge of the kidney list.
He does it by bashing into Heineman’s car and then arranging to meet at a kosher deli to apologize and make reparations. Larry comes in wearing a yarmulke, speaking in a Yiddish-inflected voice, waving his hands about. He tells how he was listening to a conversation about Israel on “Jewish radio” and got so heated up that he lost control of the car. When Heineman says a Yiddish expression, Larry makes vague gutteral noises in response. This is good stuff.
In order to really win Ben Heineman over, Larry invites him and his daughter to a chalet for skiing. The obviously gentile Cheryl won’t do as a wife so he has Susie pretend instead. While she describes how they met at a “Hillel mixer” (Hillel is a Jewish campus social organization), Larry talks about his early days as a Jewish folk musician playing such songs as “Gefilte Fish Blues” and “My Freakin’ Back Is Killing Me and It’s Making It Hard to Kvell.” Ben falls for Larry’s dubious charm, but his sour adult daughter is suspicious. And when she gets stuck with Larry on a stalled ski lift at twilight, rather than be alone with a
man after sunset she jumps into the snow below. Larry’s plan comes to naught. The real orthodox community can only sigh in relief that Larry David is not one of theirs.
Previously I touched on what seems like a series of humiliations to the female body in the show, mostly in reference to Cheryl. There was the pubic hair, the colon cure, the numb vagina. In this episode add one more — the “big vagina.” In fact, the big vagina is, according to Jeff and Larry, the hidden truth behind unfair accusations of small penises. The issue comes up when a former date of Jeff’s accuses him of not being adequately endowed. But Jeff claims that the problem, as it is so often, is the woman. He and Larry even start to use a gesture — hands together in a wide “V” — to indicate the big vagina problem. The accusing woman, a nurse in the hospital where Louis Lewis is lying in a coma, denies that she is anything more than average, but later — in a moment that some viewers may find funny and others a tad misogynistic — it’s shown that the nurse has been stealing objects by hiding them, yes, in her big vagina. We hear Larry’s cell phone ring in there. You be the judge.
EPISODE NINE
The Korean Bookie / Original Airdate: November 27, 2005 / Directed by Bryan Gordon
You have to wonder how it is that Larry gets invited to so many events given his negative attitude. This time it’s a campfire beach party held by Mark and Marla, and Larry is very vocal about his opinion that roasting marshmallows is “idiotic.” The couple announces that they are going to get married, but all Larry can think about is the audacity of Marla going into his car and taking his jacket to wear because she was cold. Not only that, she stains it with dripping s’mores. Knowing how offended he is, Marla sends Larry a check for $150.
First it was the Japanese and now it’s the Koreans. Sang is a flower seller who also works as a bookie on the side, taking bets from Larry. Of course he also provides the flowers for Mark and Marla’s wedding, for in the world of Curb everyone knows everyone else and service people serve everyone. When Oscar goes missing, Larry is certain that Sang has kidnapped the dog for its meat, which he believes is a Korean delicacy.
Larry’s obsession with minutiae takes on truly Talmudic proportions in this episode when he discovers that Ben Heineman has not used the $1,500 that Larry gave him to fix his car for the designated purpose. Instead, he’s used it to help pay for breast-enhancement surgery for his daughter (performed by Mark). Larry argues that it is unethical for Ben to use the money for anything other than its designated purpose, while Ben insists the money is his to use as he wishes. But Larry is shown to be rather inconsistent when it’s discovered that he himself hasn’t bought a new jacket with Marla’s money but instead has bet it on sports. Larry is extraordinarily mean to Ben’s daughter, Rachel, when he sees the size of her breasts. He says she looks like a “freak show.” This is at least the second time that the show has criticized breast implants.
Just as he spoiled the beach campfire, so Larry wrecks the wedding ceremony on the same beach when he believes that the dish Sang has brought is made from ground-up Oscar. He shouts it out to everyone and the guests begin to spit and vomit. Soon after Oscar turns up, very much alive.
In this rather eclectic season, this episode is a stand-alone, with virtually no links to either of the story arcs or the recurring theme of Jewishness. Perhaps after the previous seasons, Larry David wanted to have the freedom to take more episodes in whatever narrative direction struck his fancy. But the arcs do need to reach their climaxes, and they certainly do in the big closer that follows.
EPISODE TEN
The End / Original Airdate: December 4, 2005 / Directed by Larry Charles
Larry David has written some ambitious, surprising, and re-markably satisfying final episodes for Curb seasons. This one is certainly ambitious and no wonder, for it has to catch up on both lagging story arcs.
Larry’s last hope for some other kidney for Richard fades when Louis Lewis chooses to live. He has woken from his coma and proves himself to be far more annoying awake than he was unconscious. In the hospital corridor Larry sees Richard slouch by, dragging one foot, pasty-faced, a deathly look on his face as he stares at Larry without speaking. “I’m haunted by that look,” Larry tells Cheryl later. Yet still he tries to justify his hesitation, claiming that although he has known Richard for forty-four years they are really just acquaintances.
But everything changes when Omar Jones, the PI, tells Larry that his birth parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cohn, live in Bisbee, Arizona. Stunned, Larry goes to find Cheryl, hugging her. Then he is in an airplane, about to take off for Arizona. There is an extremely funny conversation with a stewardess about sitting by the emergency exit. Larry insists on moving, saying that he can be no help during any “non-traditional landing or traditional landing.”
The Cohns turn out to be the Cones, a Christian couple living in a pretty, modest home. “Oh my God,” Larry says. “I’m gentile.” What follows is a sequence that can hardly be topped for hilarity as Larry turns himself into a non-Jew. We see him in a TGIF T-shirt, shorts, white socks, and fanny pack, meeting small-town folks, fishing, hunting, and even riding. One moment he’s under the chassis of a car, the next fixing the roof — a play on the stereotype of Jewish men being totally unhandy. Then he’s in a pub chugging beer with the encouragement of a chanting crowd. On Sunday he’s in church belting out, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” When the priest preaches about the “bond of friendship,” Larry knows what he must do.
Back in California, Larry is ready to give his kidney to Richard. He disturbs Cheryl by telling her, “I love you so much” and saying that he wants to have children. He and Richard are both on hospital beds being wheeled to the operating room when Omar Jones runs in. There has been a mistake. Larry isn’t adopted after all. A rather creaky plot device, but it works. Larry panics. “Get me the fuck out of here!” But it’s too late. The transplant will go forward.
The scene jumps to “two months later” where we see Richard on a beach frolicking with a beautiful woman, having recovered his health. Meanwhile Larry is still in hospital, hooked up to machines, breathing laboriously. Clearly he is on his deathbed and those closest to him — Cheryl, Jeff, Susie, and his father — are by his side. Also in the room are a rabbi and Larry’s business manager to deal with last-minute spiritual and financial responsibilities respectively. His last words are true Larry; he accuses Jeff of lowballing him on a car that he bought from Larry, tells the rabbi that he thought God only took good people to die young, and asks Cheryl if he can fool around in the afterlife until she gets there. His visitors, none of whom look terribly stricken, begin to argue among themselves. Then Larry flatlines.
Hollywood has long enjoyed depicting heaven. There is a tradition of characters being sent up before their time and coming down again (such as the aptly named 1943 Ernst Lubitsch comedy Heaven Can Wait). Larry finds himself in the clouds with two angel guides to lead him, played by Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen. He encounters his mother whom we never saw alive, played by a gaunt but still fierce Bea Arthur (Maude, 1972–1978). There’s some funny business with Dustin, who has always been a fine, fussy-mannered comic actor, which ends with Dustin and Larry saying “Fuck you!” to each other before Larry is sent back to earth to finish out his life. Larry David had asked Hoffman to appear in the first season, but the actor had felt uncomfortable playing himself and declined. Only the urging of his family had changed his mind.
Leaving the hospital, Larry says that he is a “changed man,” a “completely different person.” But when he gleefully tells off someone for using the handicapped washroom, we know that he hasn’t changed at all. And let’s face it, people rarely do change in the long term.
Larry, it’s good to have you back.
Season Six
EPISODE ONE
Meet the Blacks / Original Airdate: September 9, 2007 / Directed by Larry Charles
Larry David has said that one of his major writing challenges is pushing forward the season’s story arc while w
riting a self-contained episode at the same time. Here he begins the first one with the arrival of the Blacks — a family displaced by a hurricane — weaving it into a complicated series of events exploring that interesting social phenomenon of the party.
Neither Larry nor Jeff bothered to go to Marty Funkhouser’s party, but neither of them told Marty that they weren’t going to show up, an obvious social infraction. (Marty is one of the few continuing characters who was not established very early in the series. No doubt Larry David has found Bob Einstein’s presence to be as funny as the audience does.) Jeff comes up with a solid excuse (that Sammy was sick), but childless Larry is unable to do the same. He comes up with the idea of knocking on Marty’s door that night as if he got the wrong date. Then he and Cheryl can go on to Ted Danson’s party. Not surprisingly, the plan backfires when Marty insists that they come in anyway. Larry and Marty actually tussle when Larry tries to leave. Jeff and Susie show up at the door, Jeff having decided to steal Larry’s idea, and all of them are forced to play the Newlywed Game during which Larry gets into hot water for saying that he’d like to sleep with Richard’s new girlfriend Cha Cha. And they miss Ted Danson’s party.
Cheryl will forgive Larry only if he agrees to take in a family left homeless after the devastation of Hurricane Edna. (The real Edna struck the East Coast of the United States in 1954, but Larry David uses it as a stand-in for Katrina.) Cheryl is as excited as a kid getting a new puppy about the idea, but on the way to the airport Larry insists on stopping at Ted’s and pulling the same stunt. Once more they are dragged into the house, where Ted talks about a cyst in his mouth, but at last they get away. Late, they head for the airport and find the Blacks at an empty luggage carousel: the pretty single mother Loretta, the wide Auntie Rae, and the kids, Keysha and Daryl. Remarking on the fact that they are black, Larry says that it’s as if his name was “Larry Jew.”