Terrorists, Tours, And Tourette’s: Season Three Of Curb Your Enthusiasm

By AJ Wood

Season Eight of Curb Your Enthusiasm will be starting soon, and I will of course be watching. No matter what it brings, it will be difficult for it to reach the brilliance of the third season, which aired in 2002.

Not that episodes from seasons before and after the third one have not been great in their own regard: Porno Gil’s dinner party, opening night of The Producers, and of course, a wrestler named Thor. But as a whole, the third season brings the best mix of those three things that make CYE such a comedic goldmine: impossibly bizarre situations, a wonderful supporting cast, and some great insights into the mind of Larry David.

Throughout the third season, the recurring storyline involves Larry’s investment in a new restaurant. As an investor, he has some interesting insights to the menu: applesauce is an under-appreciated side dish, and they should offer it; kebabs are completely off the menu (what do you do with the skewer, anyway?); and every table should have a bell to summon the wait-staff.

Perhaps funniest is his suggestion to put dividers between the urinals in the restroom; after all, everyone ends up standing there at odd angles without them. When an unexpected event stalls the opening of the restaurant, giving extra time to put in dividers, Larry looks on the bright side: now they have time to put in dividers. “It’s a blessing in disguise!”

Some of the most socially awkward parts of Larry’s mind come to fore in his opinions over potential chefs. One’s food is deemed “too saucy,” not to mention the need of extra salt for Larry’s palate. When a new applicant is found, Larry excited is to hire him, but only because this applicant is bald. The job interview is little more than Larry and the chef discussing the hardships of being bald.

When Larry happens to meet the same man later and sees his new chef wearing a toupee, he fires him on the spot for lying to him. “He’s—quite literally—a bald-faced liar!” Larry tells the rest of the investors, defending his actions.

The next chef seems OK enough to everyone. Larry spots a suspicious-looking string of numbers on this man’s arm during the interview, however; when it comes to light that this man is a textbook case of raging Tourette’s, who screams obscenities at random times, he defends the chef. “We can’t fire him; he’s a survivor,” he says, referring to the numbers on the chef’s arm. These actually turn out to be the chef’s reminder to himself of what lottery numbers he played. “I was one number off,” he laments, licking his finger and rubbing off the numbers.

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