Some quick thoughts about the next-to-last Curb Your Enthusiasm of the year:
- I felt like this one really flourished when it was on the Seinfeld reunion set. So much to like here: Funkhouser's repulsive joke, Larry and Jason Alexander's continued, smiling-through-gritted teeth hatred of each other, and of course, seeing the Seinfeld cast do their stuff.
- None of that, however, was topped by the brilliant scene where an uncoached Leon tries to convince Michael Richards that he's a survivor of the fictional "Groat's Disease." I'm not sure what I found funnier: Leon's ignorance of how a bar mitzvah works or his made-up Groat's disease symptoms ("Everything I ate tasted like peaches...I forgot how to multiply.")
- Almost as funny: Funkhouser inadvertently blowing the whistle on Leon and Jerry's scam by introducing the widow of the real Groat's sufferer and confirming that the man Leon had been impersonating had in fact died "a long painful death."
- But like I said, once the episode got away from the set, it fell kind of flat. I'm not sure what kind of bad restaurant experiences Larry David has had between seasons 6 and 7, but something has caused him to make waiters/maitre d's into his foils this year. And it was obvious early on that Larry's continual and wayyyy-too-casual reference to the little girl's rash would come back to haunt him.
- Next week brings us the finale. The show has yet to put together a bad one.
Tom Coombe
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