Farewell to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, the show about everything
Curb Your Enthusiasm first aired. In that opening episode — ‘The Pants Tent’, October 2000, streaming in India on JioCinema — Larry David has a fight with his friend Richard Lewis. After much yelling, Lewis asks David to call him “by sundown." David is stunned by the word, not the demand.
“By sundown? What are you, Gary Cooper?" Lewis cracks up. He makes it clear that he’s still angry, but points out that, comedian to comedian, David has scored. “I’m trying not to laugh, but that’s funny." That instantly set Curb Your Enthusiasm apart from any show we had seen.
The show was built around the unique vantage point of Larry David, an entertainer so successful he had nothing left to prove. He had co-created Seinfeld, a landmark in television comedy whose influence on our lives and our language continues to grow, and on the show, David put his feet up. He’d ticked the box already.
Early episodes and seasons see David unmotivated to find new projects, shelving plans for the fussiest of reasons, eager to goof off instead. Imagine Henry Ford right after having made the Model T. (No wonder there was never a Model U.) To me that is the biggest difference between the on-screen David — legendary curmudgeon and real-world version of Seinfeld character George Costanza — and the actual Larry David, who set out to bottle lightning all over again with a series that constantly, defiantly took on social niceties and hypocrisy.
“Hell is other people," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. Over 24 years of Curb, David embraced and exemplified that, complaining and arguing about societal convention and acceptable behaviour. Yet — and here is the show’s unpretentious brilliance — David is no messiah of the misfit, but a selfish miser, one who refuses to go
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