After a jam-packed premiere, Curb settles into Atlanta’s slower, more “Southern†pace. The episode plants several threads that Larry will likely continue through the season: Larry’s status as a newfound liberal hero, the reprisal of Mocha Joe in the form of his lawyer doppelgänger, and, ultimately, a trial that will see Larry fight for the right to hydrate. While these storylines are all promising — and we should never underestimate Larry’s ability to weave together even the most disparate subplots — the episode feels more concerned with getting things going than sticking the landing. After watching “The Lawn Jockey,†I couldn’t help but feel nostalgia for early-series Curb, when episodes were self-contained, offering all the pleasures of Larry’s signature episodic storytelling in under a half-hour. There’s a narrative brilliance to the later seasons of Curb, which follow storylines throughout the entire season, but sometimes it feels more like an exercise in cleverness than comedy. When we have to zoom out to see how the dots connect, there’s a risk of losing the picture altogether. (Cue Alan Ruck gazing into the abyss of a pointillist painting in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.) But in Larry we must trust.
In the final season of any show, every episode has to pull its weight. So — aside from the coincidence of Usher’s halftime show at the Super Bowl last night — I’m curious about the choice to set the entire episode in Atlanta. While it’s fun to see Larry going all fish out of water, I did miss Larry in his natural L.A. habitat: dawdling at lunch, dawdling on the golf course, making big deals out of nothing, just Larry being Larry. Larry is still Larry in Atlanta, but there’s a different complexion to this episode. With a presidential election around the corner, the stakes are getting higher in Larry’s world (and ours), and he’s hell-bent on reminding us just how close we are to a 2016 reboot.
We start the episode with Larry in jail after committing the Georgia-specific crime of offering free water to Auntie Rae on the voting line. In the company of far less affluent (and presumably more conservative) people, Larry meets a man whose diet consists mainly of cheese and diagnoses him with lactose intolerance, suggesting earnestly — in one of Larry’s charmingly honest interactions with strangers — that he give up dairy completely. The best exchange in this episode comes when Larry starts musing about “a delicious camembert on a cracker,†to which the man replies, “Camden-bear? What the fuck is that?†He then compares it to his own struggle to give up Marcona almonds because, of course, he does. (“That with some truffle oil and sea salt. Tremendous.â€) Lines like these always affirm my trust in Larry. The man has taste.
Larry gets out of jail with the help of a lawyer sent by Jeff. The lawyer is the spitting image of Mocha Joe, Larry’s arch-nemesis from seasons seven and ten. Of course, the role is played by Mocha Joe himself, actor Saverio Guerra, just with a Eugene Levy-esque mustache. The Mocha Joe lore runs deep in the Curb-iverse; introduced in the season-seven finale working on the NBC lot, the character was a nod to Larry’s friend Jeremy Gursey, the “celebrity barista†who served coffee to him on the Seinfeld set.
After Mocha Joe, Esq. releases Larry from jail on his own recognizance, telling him to plead guilty to violating the Georgia voting law, he’s immediately greeted by a crowd of people holding signs like “Water is a human right.†With his unintentional act of resistance, he’s become a liberal darling overnight. He’s being hailed on Morning Joe, spoken in the same sentence as Rosa Parks, and personally shouted out by former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams, who has led the effort to tackle voter suppression in the state. (“What did Jesus say? ‘I was thirsty, and you gave me water.’’) Even Bruce Springsteen calls him Larry “Involvement†David.
But Larry’s Atlanta Airbnb, which has a racist Black lawn jockey statue outside it, threatens his liberal image, and in his attempts to remove it, he ends up breaking it. Thus begins an odyssey to replace it because Susie is not “eating that security deposit.†(And you do not mess with Susie, especially when she’s accompanied by her Spaghetti Western musical cue.) The local store no longer sells Black jockeys, so Larry is forced to look like a complete bigot in front of the Black sales associate. Once again, Larry’s full awareness of the absurdity of the situation contrasts with his compulsive stubbornness, and in the process, he manages to offend yet another person.
So Larry decides to paint a white jockey with Jeff’s hair dye. Sure enough, it starts melting off his face in the heat like Rudy Giuliani. The 2020 reference might feel somewhat dated if not for Trump’s imminent revival. The specter of Trump haunts us all, including Larry. (Though it doesn’t haunt the slate of MAGA-heads he visits in Georgia in the hopes of buying off their racist lawn jockeys.)
Meanwhile, Larry helps Jeff shop for Susie’s birthday gift with his foolproof two-gift method and once again makes another enemy. The uptight sales associate, played by Instagram comedian Benny Drama, requires customers to buy something before using the restroom, so Larry is forced to buy a $650 jacket. In the bathroom, Larry frantically flicks his hands after washing his hands to cover up the smell behind him. (Why he’s so digestively distressed is a mystery, at least as of right now, but I like to think it’s because Larry indulged in too many Camembert-on-a-crackers.)
Larry ends up sourcing a lawn jockey from the lactose-sensitive guy in jail, who stole it from a church, which makes Larry a bunch more enemies at Auntie Rae’s church barbecue. To appease her, Larry pleads not guilty and lives another day as “kind of a hero or something,†in Susie’s words. Meanwhile, the guy from jail is getting escorted by the cops because of Larry’s gift from the store — an overpriced Madras blazer — to ensure he can go to the bathroom. Larry didn’t realize the man was a thief and that he had left the tags on when he gave it to him.
The best parts of Curb are arguably the quippy observations between plot points. This episode was sadly a bit light on these, but it also gave us Larry’s fixation on a Scientific American article he read in jail that suggests humans are evolving with flatter index fingers because we’ve made a habit of using them as shoe horns. It’s the kind of random observational humor Larry David does best.
Over coffee at Aunt Rae’s, Larry decides the lawyer who looks like Mocha Joe is acting too much like Mocha Joe. (“The beans!â€) And so, in a very Trumpian move, he fires him. But will karma do its thing and prove the Mocha Joe-attorney relationship to be more than a coincidence? The lawyer does reference his “old man†in his rant on the beans, suggesting there could be some familial connection. Could Mocha Joe return for vengeance on “Latte Larryâ€? I can only speculate that Guerra’s reprisal means scones may be on the horizon.
The episode’s climax comes at Aunt Rae’s church barbecue, where Larry is once again being congratulated for his defiant resistance to Georgia’s antiquated voter laws. That’s until the Black jockey is discovered in his car. Unable to face the disappointed wrath of Aunt Rae, Larry ingratiates her by pleading not guilty and promising to fight the good fight on trial.
Whatever Trump-y tendencies Larry might have are in perfect contrast to the Larry beloved by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Aunt Rae. It speaks to the duality of public versus private persona, Larry as Creator and Larry as subject. As Larry philosophized in the last episode, the difference between how you see yourself in the mirror and selfies. Will the “real†Larry please stand up? While it’s a far cry from the almost nihilistic lightness of early Curb, which honored Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning†ethos, this season shows Larry taking some ambitious political waters Curb is wading are only possible due to the wider swings.
In his final act, Larry is teetering between the two poles of an ever-divided nation. And, like any American story, this one can only be settled in court.
Leonisms
• “Look, this whole Black lawn jockey shit is bullshit anyway. You know, it should be something more respectable. Like a fucking Black lawn doctor with a stethoscope around his fucking neck.â€
• To an LD-fanboy passerby: “And you’re the guy wearing a sweater tied around his motherfuckin’ neck.â€
• While shopping for Susie: “What do you buy a person who already has bullshit like this bullshit?â€
• Not an -ism, just a fit: Cow-print jacket with olive-green sleeves.
• And a Susie-ism, because it’s her birthday: “You know, if I wasn’t born, I think the whole world would be shit.â€