The Non-lessons of <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>

On a recent flight from Auckland to Sydney, an unruly man reportedly urinated into a cup while sitting at his seat, much to the horror of his fellow passengers. The man later stood up, apparently so he could toss his waste into the toilet, then tripped and spilled the cup’s contents onto a flight attendant. When the plane landed in Australia, the man was escorted off by police and fined.

This appalling incident is devoid of any decorum, which is to say that it seems ripped from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Created by and starring the Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, the HBO show spent 24 years both probing humanity’s depravity (not unlike said plane-urination incident) and questioning the veneer of interpersonal niceties (such as politely praising the mediocre food at a dinner party). No grievance was small enough and no taboo was off the table for David’s character, who seized on the befuddling things that people say and do in social situations—and was just as often guilty of committing his own blunders.

After 12 seasons, Curb Your Enthusiasm took its final bow on Sunday, after its creator expressed wanting to finally “shed this ‘Larry David’ persona.” Calling back to the divisive Seinfeld finale, which David has long defended, Curb ended by putting his character on trial, after he violated Georgia state law by accidentally handing someone water while they were in line to vote. To make its case, the prosecution ushered in a long line of people David had wronged over the years, including the owner of a golf club in his comfortable west–Los Angeles enclave and Bruce Springsteen, who claimed that David once gave him COVID-19 by insisting that he take his glass at a dinner.

Even after the jury found David guilty and the judge gave him the maximum sentence, the series offered no tidy takeaways. Instead, it signed off in the Curb-iest way possible: not with a bang, but with a shrug. Due to a technicality, David’s character didn’t actually end up going to prison like the Seinfeld ensemble did in that controversial finale. In doing so, the finale left viewers with a question, the same one that’s animated the series since its inception: How does one be a decent person in the world when the goalposts for decency are always shifting?

[Read: We’re all Larry Davids now]

If the previous season of Curb addressed the pandemic’s erosion of social norms, this one suggested that people hardly emerged from lockdown kinder or more understanding. If anything, the opposite seems to be true. These days chaos reigns, from people throwing iPhones at pop stars onstage to guests treating restaurants and bars like their own personal kitchens. According to data from the Federal Aviation Administration, 2024 has already seen 490 reports of unruly passengers on airplanes—almost as many as there were in all of 2017. And so it’s fitting that Curb’s series finale includes two separate debates on a plane: one in which David and his friends bicker about whether it’s okay to “squeal” on someone whose phone isn’t in airplane mode, and another where they consider whether opening the window shade requires individual or communal consent.

At a time when many old norms governing public behavior are being rewritten, there’s something appealing about a brutally honest person who’s willing to call out poor conduct among strangers and friends. But, of course, David’s character on Curb is frequently, cringingly wrong in the way he goes about this. He’s incapable of letting small things go and doubles down in a way that makes you want to watch the show through your fingers. He himself is guilty of some egregiously entitled behavior, too—in one scene this season, David brings his own organic eggs to the golf clubhouse, and hands them to a server so the kitchen can make him a special omelet.

Curb proved over and over again that David never truly solved grievances when he went out on a limb to call attention to them, especially with strangers. If anything, by interjecting with his dreaded “let me ask you something,” he typically incited another, worse problem, or caused long-simmering resentments to erupt. Therein lies much of Curb’s humor: Yes, we all probably need to be better about dealing with the gradual buildup of small annoyances in our lives before they ossify. But also, who does this guy think he is, bringing all of this to the surface?

In Seinfeld, David often preached the maxim of “no hugging, no learning” regarding his characters. In a similar vein, Curb refused to be read as a fable or a parable, finding no elegant resolutions for life’s messy moral questions. In a scene from the finale, David crouches down to a small child’s eye level and says, “I am 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life!” By ending on this note, Curb seems to concede that there’s no one right way to be a decent human. So go ahead and call out indignities if you want, as David often did. Or don’t. As long as you’re dealing with other people, you’re going to be slightly miserable either way.