Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9 episode 2 'The Pickle Gambit' review: One of the funniest episodes to date
Hilarious episode extols the virtue of thick pyjama bottoms that 'obfuscate the penis'
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Your support makes all the difference.Despite being off-air for more than six years, Curb Your Enthusiasm has taken no time to get back into its stride, kicking off with an eventful episode last week and continuing with an ingenious one tonight.
Larry may be gripped with fear over his fatwa, but not to the point where it's overriding his pedantic impulses, still finding time to wax neurotic over a hotel's cookie jar policy, study the crisis of masculinity that only a pickle jar with a stiff lid can produce and praise a thick pyjama bottom's ability to protect one's modesty by "obfuscating the penis".
Ted Danson asking Larry if it's okay to date his ex-wife Cheryl, and Larry's attempted fatwa-mitigating dealings with the Iranian consul were the main plot points this week, but it was the smaller moments that provided the most hilarity and the supporting cast were on sensational improvisational form.
JB Smoove (Leon Black) had some killer lines: "Hey no fatwa up in here!", "Remind me to bring up the fact you fuckin' in your goddamn glasses" and the superfluity of his "My name is Mr. Chappie Johnson" declaration, and his chemistry with Larry is better than it's ever been. Leon can't be in the show enough right now.
Larry's "hooker mitzvah" was also a high point in 'The Pickle Gambit', along with his agreement with the always good value Marty Funkhauser that going behind your friend's back so as to spare their feelings is the only way to go.
What continues to amaze me about Curb is not all the various foibles of modern life that Larry skewers, but how he manages to gather them all together and make them work as a half-hour narrative, the genuinely mortifying co-existing with the absurdly trivial.
Curb Your Enthusiasm airs on HBO Sunday nights in the US and on Sky Atlantic and through NOWTV Monday nights in the UK.
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