Curb Your Enthusiasm recap: The fish is a metaphor, you see

Well, this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm begins just as it should, considering the circumstances: with a dedication to Richard Lewis, longtime actor on the show and real life friend to Larry David, who passed away earlier this week. It’s a sad thing, and oddly, a couple of weeks ago on Curb, the TV versions of David and Lewis were bickering about who was going to die first and leave the other behind to collect whatever sum was left to them in their departed friend’s will—Lewis was the one to introduce the subject. (They bring the will thing back in this latest episode, too.) Now that Lewis is really gone, it makes that bit hit differently and casts a sort of pall over things, one that will likely linger throughout the rest of season 12. Still, there were funnies to be had here; let’s give them their due as well.

So Freddy Funkhauser is out there in the dating world, and he has great big, fluffy feelings for a fun girl with great taste in music—as well as (he thinks) a prestigious job at Disney. He’s so confident that she’s some higher-up that Larry, upon meeting her, asks if she’ll read Irma’s sponsor’s daughter’s script (turns out she’s an aspiring writer). Meanwhile, this girl doesn’t work for Disney, purveyor of cute cartoons and Marvel/Star Wars stuff: she works for The Disney Store—as a costumed greeter, of all things. Funkhauser’s ego can’t take it, and with Larry’s encouragement, he decides he has to cut her loose. Turns out Larry knows a gal he’d just as soon be done with, too: Irma.

There’s a problem there, though, as we all know by now. Her sponsor wants him to hang in there for 8 more weeks with Irma, unless L.D. can convince her to leave him of her own accord. Larry has to hatch a scheme, and Lewis gives him his first clue. An alcoholic himself, he has been attending Irma’s AA meetings (and workshopping standup bits while there). It was in this context that Irma revealed her whole sordid backstory about leaving her first husband when his medical needs—mostly the diapering—became too much for her to handle. The second clue is a fish.

Now, the name of the episode is “Fish Stuck,” a reference to an orange fish who appears to have its little lips stuck in the filter of a big fish tank at Sun Wah Palace, a Chinese restaurant. When Larry draws the server’s attention to the fishy’s predicament, the server insists that the fish is not stuck, but sick, and simply trying to heal itself with this close proximity to the filter. Larry and the guys don’t buy it, and later, when the fish appears to be gone from the tank, Larry presumes it’s dead, but the server explains that it has merely gone to a different tank. Larry meets with Funkhauser to reveal his fish-inspired idea to get them out of their relationships: they can feign an illness (Groat’s again, remember that?) and be rid of these women who don’t wish to be caregivers. “We just want to swim and enjoy our day,” Funkhauser says (you see, these two guys are that stuck fish). It works, and the women split, not knowing they’ve been duped. Larry basks in his victory, belting a celebratory rendition of that “JG Wentworth” song Irma kept singing (the best part of the episode). However, Irma heads to Jenna’s place of work to replace some Mickey Mouse oven gloves she left at Larry’s and they put the pieces together.

Another little plot thread not mentioned yet involves some illustrious guest stars: Shawn Hayes and Dan Levy, who play husbands having a baby by surrogate. Hayes’s character, a lawyer named Christopher Mantle (like Mickey Mantle, you know?) is newly working for Larry, and he is so close to filing a motion to ensure that the water bottle case won’t go to trial—until Larry ruins it all. He can’t let go of the fact that this baby these guys are going to be having won’t carry the Mantle name, but will instead have the last name Zeckelman. Larry pries too much, offers too many ridiculous names that piss off the couple (Ziggy, Scooter, and Foots among them), and essentially destroys their marriage, causing his poor lawyer to miss the filing deadline to dismiss the case, meaning L.D. will have to go to trial. Meanwhile he’s racking up haters, most of whom seem to be donating bricks to the temple he attends with some sort of disparaging remark about Larry engraved in each one. Anyone else getting the feeling he’ll have a lot more of those by the time this season wraps?

Stray observations

• Larry is such a child. When Mantle takes a call from the surrogate he and his husband have hired to carry their baby, Larry grabs a glass ball paperweight from his desk and shakes it around, forcing Mantle to divide his attention between the person carrying his unborn child, and this giant man-baby is his office waving around a shiny, fragile object. It even takes him a little while to listen to Mantle and stop.
• When Freddy Funkhauser is telling his buddies about the girl he is dating, who he thinks works for Disney, Leon starts going on and on about Tinkerbell and her “little booty.” “Tinkerbell fine as fuck,” he says, “I’ll put her in my motherfucking pocket… And she flies her little ass out there, give me a little kiss on the cheek and shit, and flies the fuck off.”
• “I hate asking for favors almost as much as I hate doing favors,” is a pretty Larry-ish thing to say.
• “We’re coming out with a new line of Little Mermaid sleepwear, so if you text me your sizes, I can hook you up.” Jenna says this to Irma’s sponsor’s daughter while giving her screenplay notes, and it really just proves that Jenna is a gem and Funkhauser was wrong to ditch her.
• As Larry’s on the phone with Irma’s sponsor, she calling out things like, “Larry, where are my sleep brassieres? Nevermind. They’re in the hamper. They’re not that dirty,” and “Larry, where are my bunion splints?” Irma’s the greatest. I hope she sticks around somehow.
• When Larry tells the rabbi at the temple that Hobie Turner’s message about him, engraved on a brick, is “hate speech,” Rabbi Adelman’s dismissive response is “I think it’s ‘strong dislike’ speech,” which I love.
• So if Larry and this fish are one and the same as Funkhauser suggests, where do you think old Larr will end up at season’s end: dead or “moved to another tank” (i.e. jail)? Discuss!

Curb Your Enthusiasm is available to stream now on Max.