The Aggravator and the Aggrieved: How Larry David Made Magic in ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’

In the end, the bickering actually felt soothing, like falling asleep to a white-noise machine or the ambient sounds of a nature show. There they sat in the final-final scene of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Sunday night, snakes on a plane: the freshly uncaged Larry David, and all the friends he somehow didn’t lose along the way. There were Susie and Jeff; Cheryl and Ted; Richard and Leon—some of them basking in the sunlight through a wide-open window shade, others recoiling from the intrusive glare, everyone hissing and slinging venom at Larry and at one another, same as it ever was.

It was as gentle of a series landing as the ür-rude Curb Your Enthusiasm could have had while still featuring the shouted phrase “Go back to fucking jail, Larry!” in its closing moments. The farewell tableau highlighted some of the many, many supporting Curb characters who fought against and/or conspired with Larry over the course of a dozen seasons of the show, taking stands on topics ranging from ice cream sampling etiquette to testicle composition and making excuses for behaviors that boomeranged from the understandable to the abhorrent.

It was a finish that honored and transcended Seinfeld, the place where this whole beautiful mess first began. And it was also a reminder that sure, you can jailbreak Larry David the character—as Jerry Seinfeld did on Sunday, simultaneously releasing the culture at large from the grip of that carceral, controversial Seinfeld finale. And yet no matter how hard you try, you will never free Larry David the creator from the trappings of his own crafty, cranky, cursed mind. In the world of Curb, society was its own confinement. Standard niceties might as well have been little life sentences. And there was no one who could reliably adjudicate all of Larry’s appeals to humanity about the senselessness of it all.

Over time, we saw the way the characters in the Curb universe could become prisoners to their own overthinking. Larry, in particular, tangled himself up in questions like: When should someone stop milking that sweet, sweet dead-relative sympathy? Or: Why do people say no gifts, please! if they don’t really mean it? After an acquaintance of Larry’s told him not to let her eat dessert no matter what in an early season, he struggled to understand why she later got sooo mad when he stalwartly tried to uphold his solemn oath. (I personally think back to this interaction every time I announce that the diet starts tomorrow.)

This season delivered more of the same: Larry taking issue with the vague parameters of the term “cordial,” Larry not understanding why a golf pro might not want him to overhear the tips he gives out in his lessons, Larry asking, in the finale, why he can’t remark that Cheryl doesn’t like Mexican food. (Ted Danson’s delivery of “It’s not your story to tell!” was the perfect mix of exasperated and smug.) What good does it even do, anyway, to pay attention to the letter of any law when people are out there casually swapping restaurant health inspection signs to an A from a C right in front of your lyin’ eyes? In Curb, the answers to these questions have always mattered less than the rancor behind them. The disagreement has long been the juice. And Larry David, now and forever, is the one getting squeezed.

The incomparable character of Larry was once described by a frenemy as a “social assassin,” but that gave a heck of a lot of operational and logistical credit to a man whose day-to-day dealings didn’t always unfold with the utmost precision. His impact on the people around him was maybe more akin to that of the damn J.G. Wentworth jingle, the one that his repulsive political foe turned paramour Irma Kostroski wouldn’t stop singing across Curb’s final season. “It’s a booming, operatic song that really lends itself to Irma belting it out,” series producer and director Jeff Schaffer wrote to me in an email a few weeks ago. “And it has different parts for different singers, so Larry could jump in on a duet. Even though he hates it, he can’t stop singing it either!”

That last part does a good job of getting at the Larry David experience within the show. Larry is the kind of guy that his Seinfeld counterpart George Costanza had in mind when he tried singing his name to a catchy tune in order to get a girl. “I’m like a commercial jingle,” Costanza said. “First it’s a little irritating. Then you hear it a few times. You’re humming it in the shower. By the third date, it’s ‘By Mennen!’”

All these years later, the TV version of Larry has proved himself to be a similarly formidable earworm of a human: annoying, yet memorable as hell. “One of the incredible things Larry has achieved with Curb,” wrote Schaffer, who has worked with David since his Seinfeld days, “is that he can be either the person aggravating someone or the aggrieved. And sometimes he can be both in the same story!”

This has been true since Curb’s very start. During Season 1, for example, which aired when Clinton was still in office nearly a quarter-century ago, Larry begrudgingly decided to do the right thing and hold an elevator door for a woman—who then was able to sign in before him at the doctor’s office, thus delaying his appointment, thus ruining his whole day. In Season 6, he relatably tries to avoid all that Cha Cha chitchat—but then, as usual, he takes things too far. And at the start of Season 12, five presidential administrations after the series premiere, Larry was kind enough to give ol’ Auntie Rae a bottle of water as she stood in line to vote on a hot afternoon—only to find himself being criminally prosecuted under a backward Georgia anti-electioneering statute.

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In Sunday’s finale, as Larry’s lawyer tried to plead his case to a stone-faced jury tasked with deciding whether he would get the same last-episode sentence—a year in the slammer—that was infamously handed down to the Seinfeld foursome back in the ’90s, she had no choice but to paint him as both a perp and a victim. (The same actress also once played Kendall Roy’s lawyer—quite the challenging Rolodex!) Technically, Larry had committed the crime, she allowed. But really, it was the existence of the law itself that was actually morally wrong.

This was effectively the same doomed argument that Larry had tried and failed to use in his own personal defense over the years, across all manner of ethical and sociological skirmishes—your honor, it’s the custom that’s unreasonable, not me! (One minute you’re eating some Pinkberry, and the next minute a witness at your trial is accusing you of “eating a dying dog’s last meal”—happens to the best of us.) But often, the issue Larry ran into was that these customs he questioned were things like: don’t cut a baby doll’s hair, or don’t steal flowers from a funerary display.

In the finale, as witness after witness shared their Larry David horror stories, longtime Curb viewers were privy to the context justifications and Rube Goldberg–style predicaments behind the accused’s various misdeeds. What made Curb funny, and even escapist, was the fact that Larry’s motivations were, more often than not, really pure: 100 percent self-preservation, eyes on the prize. After 119 episodes filled with instances of Larry acting for his own benefit, it wasn’t a surprise when, in the 120th, that jury of his peers had no interest in giving him any benefit of the doubt.

The premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm at the turn of the millennium played a pretty big part in establishing and advancing the genre of “cringe” comedy that would come to define so much of our modern programming, from The Office to The Curse. And one of the real beauties of Curb, once viewers acclimated to the inherent discomfort of its inventive, influential form, was that we were moved to cringe not only by Larry, but for him.

In Curb, Larry was in the wrong all the time—except for when he was totally, excruciatingly right. Larry’s lasting appeal lay in the fact that while he was a certified grump, he was never a complete misanthrope. Viewers routinely got to see him with a real spring in his step, with a genuine glimmer in his eye, with a hot chick on his arm, with a generous love for the world bursting from his heart—OK OK, maybe more like a contingent love for the game of golf hidden somewhere in his soul. But still!

True, Larry could sometimes be found feuding with a maid over a misunderstanding involving a cash tip and a toilet, but sometimes he was just a dude singing in the shower. Sometimes he was the very definition of that fuckin’ guy, and sometimes he was the lone brave soldier willing to push back against all of life’s petty adversaries, like friends who want to give you a tour of their home. “Sometimes,” wrote Schaffer in his email, “the audience is thinking, ‘Larry’s just like that guy who did that to me!’ And sometimes they think ‘That happened to me! I wish I had told that guy off like Larry!’” But as Larry himself would say: never the twain shall meet.

“I’m 76 years old, and I’ve never learned a lesson in my entire life,” Larry said on Sunday night, addressing a young child who had a helicopter mother. It echoed something the character said back in the beginning of the season in an attempt to explain why he is the way he is: “I have bad energy,” he said then. “I’ve been expecting more from myself my whole life, and it’s just not there.” All of this also had roots in an old Seinfeld chestnut—the mantra, designed to distinguish its tone from the majority of the other sitcoms of its day, of: “no hugging, no learning.” The title of Sunday’s Curb series finale? “No Lessons Learned.”

Curb’s concluding plot ultimately belied that title; David’s creative choices showed that he’d studied at least a little for this test. Like many had predicted, he went ahead and doubled down on his Seinfeld closing statement by doing a speed-run of its rhythms and tropes: a trial; a parade of nostalgic, vengeful anti-character witnesses; a guilty verdict; a circle back to an old Episode 1 joke—in this case, “pants tent”—while commencing a trip around the sun from inside the clink.

But this time, David and the Curb writers added more, building the sort of meta buttressing that long distinguished Curb Your Enthusiasm as David’s magnum perturbus opus.

There was Jerry’s gumshoe cameo, which brought with it an incredible would-you conversation with Larry about a freshly shorn bearded lady; a key mistrial plot twist that nodded toward a shocking real-life story in which old Curb footage exonerated a man who had been wrongly on death row; and the funny suggestion that while George Co-STAN-za might have been the ghost of Larry David’s past, it’s Jerry who seems to be rapidly morphing into his old creative partner at present. (The two of them simultaneously remarking on the judge glancing at the verdict suggested a truly indelible bond.)

And then there’s that final-final scene on the plane. Far from ending Curb on the sort of discordant or awkward note that the series successfully struck over its dozen seasons, this felt to me more like some of the most straightforwardly comforting content the Curb team had ever put forth. (Larry’s victorious post-Irma rendition of 877-CASH-NOW on his front steps from earlier this season being up there, too.)

Since the dawn of the 21st century, the character of Larry strenuously and repeatedly offended and alienated and undermined (and, to be fair, charmed!) just about everyone he came across: nemeses, employees, lovers, colleagues, roommates, even old pals. And yet in the end, one of each sat on that plane against their better judgment (and/or their will), still amid the dick graffiti and the breast reductions, the Palestinian Chicken and the vanilla bullshit things, the foisting and the lampin’ and the fatwa.

They may have acted like they didn’t want to be there, and you could argue that their mere presence was proof enough that in the world of Curb, there was indeed no learning after all. But listening to the familiar cadence of their closing argument, and watching the easy choreography of their dumbass discord? That, sport fans, felt a lot like a hug to me.