Curb Your Enthusiasm recap: Of course Larry sees himself as Lincoln-esque

Have you noticed that a lot of scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm involve meals of some kind? Well, that trend holds firm in this episode, too. (It’s not a problem, not a bad thing, but it is most definitely a thing.) To kick it off, Larry and Leon are at a buffet place called Shimon’s, and Leon is going nuts in there, his justification being “It says all you can eat, right? So you fucking eat.” Seated at their booth, Larry asks his friend if he has ever thought about the time people waste while peeing and whether we could hack that time to improve ourselves. (This comes back later.)

Meanwhile, Ike Barinholtz, doing an accent, guests as Shimon himself, the owner of the buffet place (“the ‘Wendy’ of this motherfucker,” Leon observes), and he hates that this Leon guy is loading up on so much food at his establishment. Just like the “Soup Nazi” once banned the Seinfeld guys from his business, this restaurateur Shimon bans Leon for life for this faux pas. Gary Busey is the only other guy to have suffered this fate at Shimon’s, he says, but now Leon’s on that list. (Eventually, Larry gets banned, too, of course. Larry likes to push things too far, but it’s nice that this time it’s because he’s trying to defend his friend.)

As the guys exit the buffet place, they conveniently run into Ted Danson, who sets up the next subplot of the episode, telling Larry he’s starring as Abraham Lincoln in a play with the Lori Loughlin playing Mary Todd. And he asks Larry a favor: Apparently, his co-star loves playing golf, but she can’t get into any golf clubs, due to the whole college admissions scandal thing. Larry, eager to be, “a champion of the underdog,” agrees. And it’s this encounter that gives Larry the inspiration he needs for a good pee-time activity: He decides to learn, and practice Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address while he goes. There’s a whole montage of him reciting it in various bathrooms, public and private, even on the grass by the side of the road.

Larry spots something else on the side of the road this episode: Susie’s billboard for her new caftan business (Catch as Caftan) with a big penis graffitied onto it pointed right at her mouth, made to look like she’s cradling its balls. She’s chagrined by it, but she gets a “post-penis” sales bump as a result. After Larry and Jeff joke that a second would really help sales go wild, another materializes. This escalates throughout the episode, right up until the end—we’ll get there.

Back to the meal thing. Larry goes on a date with Sienna Miller (the event they’ve been building to all season). They go to see a friends and family screening of her latest movie, and he notices a little something about what appears to be her acting process: she is always eating fruit during emotional scenes. She seems immediately self-conscious about this, and tries to deny that this is the case, resulting in her forgoing the fruit almost to the point of getting fired from the movie she’s currently filming because she can’t act without “a cantaloupe” or “some mulberries” to chomp. She’s doomed until Larry shows up at her trailer one day and offers her a pear. She munches it during a big, emotional scene, spits it into her costar’s face while yelling “I hate you” at her, and it saves her job; she’s grateful to Larry. But then of course he screws things up with snide observations about everything from her Jewish factoids seeming false to her hair not looking real. She shouts “I have alopecia, you asshole!” Is this goodbye to Sienna Miller’s arc? Because she was an absolute champ, a great sport at every turn.

You know who else is a pretty great sport this episode? Lori Laughlin. She’s a total parody of herself in this, proceeding to lie and cheat through her entire experience at the golf club. After Larry uses his now-in-depth knowledge of The Gettysburg Address to get the board at the club to give Lori a chance, part of her vetting process to join is to play 2 games with Larry and 2 other board members at the club. She’s a dick the whole time: she has a blue handicapped flag for her cart because “one hematologist” thinks she has Epstein-Barr, she’s mean to Larry about “his short game.” She does, however, get Larry, Jeff, and Susie tickets to her Lincoln play, so that’s good (one wonders if her arc will last beyond this episode—it really might.)

At the episode’s end, the gang turns up at the premiere of Ted’s Lincoln play, “A House Divided.” Larry’s seat is by Cheryl, so we get to see her, but guess who’s in front of him: The waiter at the restaurant where the fish got stuck in the filter of the tank. They argue about that dang fish again (Larry parrots the guy’s accented morphology back to him in a way that I don’t like, mocking his grammar.) Then, during the play, the guy drapes his coat over the back of his seat, in a way that makes it flop onto Larry’s playbill—he’s annoyed. Ted gives The Gettysburg Address during the play (of course), but Larry is now conditioned to pee every time he hears the speech, since he’s been urinating in that context so much. He gets up to go to the bathroom and trips on the coat, reflexively relieving himself as he lies facedown on the floor of the theater.

On Larry’s way home, he sees that someone has now drawn a penis on Sienna Miller’s movie’s billboard, and he gets pulled over for making an illegal u-turn to snap a pic. Larry tries to explain himself, but the cop ends up seeing a bag of spray paint in the back seat of his car, and Larry ends up admitting to having spray-painted the word “Not” in front of “All you can eat” at Shimon’s restaurant: a crime. And this time, he won’t be painted as any kind of hero either. Are his days on top coming to an end? Are people beginning to get that he’s an asshole? We’ll find out (but I think they really are).

Stray observations

• When Larry brings up the whole peeing-as-a-waste-of-time thing, Leon tells him that the person who invents the pee-powered car is going to be a billionaire, then details how it would work, how, ideally, you could just pee right into the gas tank and keep chugging along on road trips. He says this car that runs on urine could be called “The Peeus,” and you know what? He’s right. It sure could.
• Sienna Miller chomping an apple in this movie while distressed and looking for her kid, screaming “Johnny!” with chewed up food in her mouth, is hilarious to me. She needs more comedic roles.
• As Larry shares the news with Lori Laughlin that the board has decided to give Lori Laughlin a chance to join the club, he throws in that he “Could have been a great lawyer. Could have been a great butcher. You take a mallet, you pound the beef. You pound it. You pound it. You slice it. That’s fun.” Maybe that’s what he’ll end up doing by the end of this show?
• Larry tries to call Sienna Miller out on schmeitz not being a real Yiddish word, and he may be right about its origin, but it at least exists on UrbanDictionary.com in an entry from 2018, so it’s a real word of some kind, presumably. Couldn’t find anything on “Rachel and the rug merchants” being an Old Testament story, though, which Larry also claims is a fake one. Prove me (and Larry) wrong?
• The way Larry cackles with glee when he sees poor Susie beset with penis graffiti on her billboard is infectious. It’s impish and fun, even though “it might kill” Susie to have it up there.
• Did you hear it, folks? Ted brought up the Seinfeld finale! Ted thinks Larry must know Lori Loughlin from her time on the show, but he corrects him and says he didn’t work on the last two seasons of it… but he admits that he was back for the finale. What does this mean? Who knows, really. Sound off if you have thoughts!