Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete 6th Season

Review By: Shawn Hazelett
ShawnHazelett@TheCinemaSource.com

RICHARD LEWIS: You ruined my fucking pilot because of your recommendation! I can see if it came from a skinhead or one of Bin Laden’s people –
LARRY DAVID: – you call him "Ben" Laden or "Bin" Laden?
RICHARD LEWIS: …I don’t know.
LARRY DAVID: You called him "Ben." That's almost like a Jewish name.
RICHARD LEWIS: That's true. (he laughs) Ben Laden does sound like a shirt-maker in Manhattan. "Go to Ben Laden’s, they've got great collars."

What is it that makes Curb Your Enthusiasm quite possibly the funniest show on television? Some fans might claim it’s the natural banter. Others might offer passages like the one above, where Larry David’s witty observations – as both writer and character – universalize the show. Maybe it’s Larry’s boldness in both exposing and perpetuating every stereotype imaginable. Then again, it could be the cheap laughs from one-liners, physical humor, and Larry’s eccentricities.

I believe Curb Your Enthusiasm excels because of its plot developments. For example, who can forget the time Larry buys a prostitute in order to take the carpool lane to Dodger’s stadium? Or when he invites a known sex-offender to Cedar? Or how he invites a Holocaust survivor to accompany another survivor to dinner, and the other turns out to be a cast member of the reality show Survivor? The jokes and banter make us laugh through the plot; the plot gives the show staying power. This is because the stories are designed with such brilliance that they seem plausible when contextualized and absurd (in a good way) when reduced to their mechanics. Season six is no exception.

It would be an injustice to summarize the episodes, but the premise for the encompassing storyline is enough to make us laugh: Larry and Cheryl house a New Orleans family – the Blacks - displaced by a hurricane. Yes, their last name is also their ethnicity. “That’d be like if my name was ‘Larry Jew’.” The Blacks include Loretta (Vivica Fox), her aunt, and her two children, but a fifth soon joins: Leon (J.B. Smoove), Lorretta’s freeloading cousin who was already living in Los Angeles. Larry’s various contrasts with African-American culture have been a long-running joke in Curb, but never so much as with his relationship with Leon. The season’s most hilarious exchanges come from their dynamic, which includes quilted toilet paper and job interview strategies; the beauty of the show is that such simple concepts become selling points.

But there exists a layer for which the show gets little recognition: its thematic elements. In the season’s first episode, while watching the hurricane on the news, Larry questions what it would be like to lose everything. Therefore,