Larry David followed up his revolutionary sitcom Seinfeld with an equally idiosyncratic series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, a sharp, self-aware satire in which David plays a fictionalized version of himself bumbling through the Hollywood elite. Curb has made single-camera comedy the norm for television and blurred the line between reality and fiction with actors playing themselves and improvising all their dialogue in everyday situations.
Over the years, David has cultivated a style that is entirely unique to Curb. It’s not interchangeable with any other sitcom on the air and there are a couple of storylines in Curb’s history that wouldn’t have worked on any other show.
Denise Handicap
No other show could fetishize the disabled quite as horribly as Curb. In season 7’s “Denise Handicap,” Larry hits it off with a woman in a wheelchair and they agree to go on a date. When Larry’s friends spot him on a date with the woman, his public image starts to change, as people admire him for it and he proudly declares, “I date the disabled.”
After Susie throws Larry’s BlackBerry in the ocean and he loses Denise’s number, he asks out a different woman with disabilities and the two women catch him in a web of lies, so he runs up a staircase to escape them – but Rosie O’Donnell is close behind.
Fatwa!
Only Larry David could get away with doing a sitcom storyline about being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah. At the beginning of season 9, Larry begins work on a musical about Salman Rushdie’s fatwa and is promptly issued his own.
The musical ends up getting called off when Larry accidentally shoots his star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, in the mouth with a paintball (earning him comparisons to Aaron Burr).
The Seder
Larry David is the only sitcom lead on TV who would invite a sex offender over for dinner. After the sex offender compliments Seinfeld and gives Larry a good golf tip, Larry decides he’s all right and invites him over for Passover.
Rob Corddry gives a hysterically awkward guest performance as the sex offender, trying to fit in with the other guests, knowing Larry is his only friend in the room.
Beloved Aunt
When Cheryl’s aunt commits suicide without leaving a note (which Larry and Jeff think is rude) in the first-season episode “Beloved Aunt,” Larry takes on the task of getting an obituary printed in the newspaper.
However, he’s quickly ostracized from Cheryl’s family when there’s a typo in the obituary and her aunt is described as a “devoted sister, beloved c*nt.”
The Survivor
Only Curb could draw parallels between the survivors of the Holocaust and the contestants of the game show, Survivor. When Larry organizes a dinner party, his rabbi asks if he can bring his friend, a “survivor.” Assuming he means he’s a Holocaust survivor, Larry invites his dad’s Holocaust survivor friend to join them.
However, he turns out to be from the show Survivor, and what’s even worse is that he believes he went through more hardships on the TV show than the real survivor did in the concentration camps.
Artificial Fruit
Very few sitcoms would take on a plot in which the lead character is embroiled in a swarm of #MeToo allegations, but it actually lined up pretty well with Curb’s comic sensibility.
A lot of the show’s humor is predicated on unfortunate circumstances that make Larry look bad. Getting caught in a compromising position by his assistant set up a delightfully cringeworthy, surprisingly timely story arc.
Larry Vs Michael J. Fox
It can be dangerous for a sitcom to make light of a medical condition, especially when its celebrity guest star has that condition, but Michael J. Fox’s lampooning of his Parkinson’s on Curb in the season 8 finale was all-time classic television.
Fox has a great sense of humor about his affliction, shown in scenes like when he shakes up Larry’s soda, and the episode as a whole uses satire to raise awareness of Parkinson’s-related issues.
The Spite Store
The premise of Curb’s latest season-long story arc was pure Larry David. In a major move of pettiness, he opens a competing coffee shop next to a coffee shop where he was served cold coffee on a wobbly table, with the hopes of putting them out of business.
In the season finale, Latte Larry’s burns to the ground when a recently transitioned Joey Funkhouser knocks an electric mug onto a pile of business records with his large member. Firefighters can’t get to the fire in time, because Larry blocks the fire truck in retaliation against the “siren abusers” he’s been observing throughout the episode.
The Reunion
The Seinfeld reunion mounted by Curb’s Larry in a bid to win Cheryl back feels like the storyline this show’s meta angle was created for. It allowed the real Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David write new Seinfeld material and rebuild the sets and shoot some new scenes with the cast without doing a real reunion, which would likely disappoint.
It also allowed another layer of comedy on top of the reunion element, as Seinfeld’s ensemble plays exaggerated versions of themselves in the Curb world.
Palestinian Chicken
Larry David presented an interesting metaphor for the conflict between Israel and Palestine in the classic season 8 episode “Palestinian Chicken,” in which he and Jeff fall in love with a new Palestinian chicken restaurant.
After forcibly removing Funkhouser’s yarmulke in the parking lot, Larry becomes a local hero in the restaurant. In the end, he’s forced to choose between his protesting Jewish friends and his new Palestinian lover.