‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ is dead — and so are funny sitcoms
05.04.2024 - 19:59
/ nypost.com
finale of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” by “Seinfeld” creator Larry David, won’t do numbers like those. Not even pretty… pretty… pretty close.But, after 24 years on the air, the finish line for “Curb” feels momentous all the same. That’s because it’s one of the last comedy series — if not the last — to let us laugh without cumbersome strings attached.
The brilliant show, which ran 12 seasons, had no morals, no grand causes and no hug-it-out, heartwarming conclusions. Unless, or course, you count Bill Buckner successfully catching a baby thrown from a fiery Manhattan apartment. building as heartwarming.With its largely improvised dialogue and personalties so huge they should be Wonders of the World, “Curb” was all about the bit.
Unsparingly so.David, who, like Jerry Seinfeld, played a fictionalized version of himself, was my kind of television hero: a perpetually annoyed Jewish man in Los Angeles who just wanted to play golf and be left the hell alone.And yet, everybody else was hellbent on bothering him.Yes, Larry got into some adventures. In Season 4, he played Max Bialystock in the LA production of “The Producers” with David Schwimmer. In Season 6, Larry and wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) amusingly housed a displaced Hurricane Katrina family called the Blacks.
In Season 7, the miser worked on a “Seinfeld” reunion. And in Season 8, he moved back to New York solely to avoid attending a charity event.But, like the title suggests, Larry was never particularly excited about any of these developments. They’d simply happen to him, much to his chagrin.
Oh, how I’ll miss his shouting matches over nothing with Susie “You bald motherf—er!” Essman. Or when J.B. Smoove as Leon uttered the craziest, filthiest similes imaginable.