Curb your language and call your wife
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- October
- 30
I’m not sure which was more egregious about Sunday’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The N Word.”
The quasi-fictional Larry David doesn’t know better than to retell a story that highlights perhaps the most offensive and surely the most inflammatory word in our modern culture without a little self-editing.
At the same time, the real Larry David tests the boundary between funny and rude by creating a storyline in which the parallel trials of African Americans and bald Americans are roughly equated.
I guess, given that the latter is not new to Curb Your Enthusiasm, and since the joke works especially well when he trades thumbs-up with a fellow baldy in a hallway, I’ll have to go with the former.
But not even the scene in which the numbskull on the cellphone is screaming the episode’s eponymous racial epithet in a public restroom stands out most in my mind right now. No, what stands out is the irony-free and unexpected montage of fictional Larry’s estranged wife Cheryl. This show doesn’t ever go there with the sentimentality. Even with Richard Lewis laying on his deathbed waiting for a kidney, the tone was never morose.
But I can understand it. Up until that point, I was missing Cheryl too. She grounds the show. More than an Abbot to Larry’s Costello, she brings an understated comic sense to her part that provides all the redemption Larry has ever warranted. Without her, he is the guy who can’t control his hormones around Mrs. Black and who uses racially charged language willfully, or at least unthinkingly.
I have to say, it was a waste of a cameo to bring Ben Stiller on for such a short appearance, but that’s what a cameo is. His fixation on Jeff’s newly chromed dome was hilarious but no less so than the pharmacist’s reaction to the out-of-context references in the doctor’s love note to Larry.
For all the hot water he finds himself in, Larry’s biggest problems at the end of the day are that he goes to bed alone. Oh, and he’s accidentally been taking estrogen pills.
Being follicularly challenged is the least of his problems these days.
Jeff Garlin and Larry David at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Beverly Hills last July, obviously not long after “The N Word” was filmed, judging by Garlin’s crew cut. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 3:13 pm by Brian Howard.
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I like the show so much, but would you please stop showing Leon using profanity in front of the children. There are people in all races that do that, but those that do are living to their lower nature. Please show Leon a step above.
Thanx,
Sharon
Cheryl Hines plays “Cheryl David,” Larry David’s wife, on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In this audio interview (and transcription), she talks about the effect of his divorce on the show and her role, as well as her favorite improv moments and what it was like to play opposite Robin Williams in “RV.”