“Curb Your Enthusiasm” Was Larry David’s Book of Manners

Etiquette is a pact. In a functional society, it’s also an offering of goodness, decency, forbearance and respect, a flavor of the social contract, in which we all pay a small personal freedom tax so that everyone feels accommodated. The offering risks rejection, risks offense: Some people just won’t care about their civic duty. They won’t care that you’re performing yours. Some of them won’t care with zeal. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” takes up that risk. It’s Emily Post with boxing gloves.

Larry is hardly the show’s only offender. It knows too well that we all have our moments, our … things. Clanging differences are what drive the show. And through it, I spy Post’s ideal out on some faraway horizon, an ideal we call “America.” It taps into a puritanical force so strong that etiquette becomes an almost religious expression of gentry; we’re not even sure how we’ve come to abide by it. Susie (Susie Essman) has been the show’s true superego, there to zap Larry and curse his transgressions. Her denouncements are bangers. But they always come down to what she once tells him after he more or less asks whose rule he broke: “I don’t know the derivation,” she snips. “It’s just not done.”

On this show, no stable etiquette emerges. Susie’s version is aspirational and oriented toward propriety. She’s a proud Jewish woman whose etiquette tax seems to entail the public tamping of her full ethnic self. A stern Japanese man, Mr. Takahashi (Dana Lee), owns the country club Larry belongs to and insists upon a strict etiquette of his own that, come Season 12, the membership has revolted against. For the last seven seasons, Larry has had a housemate named Leon (J.B. Smoove), a do-ragged sex machine who has surmounted an entertainment stereotype to provide a haven for Larry’s insecurities and a resource on etiquette (no, Larry, you can’t break up with a woman in a wheelchair — or anybody! — over the phone) and its Black alternative, which often entails slipping into and out of respectability. In other words, within that pact resides variety. The ideal that etiquette might aim to provide is harmony. But America has always made its attainment laughable. We are a nation of etiquettes — well, for the show’s purposes, we’re a Los Angeles of etiquettes, a New York of them.

It identifies etiquette as an M.R.I. of our character, as glue for our communities. To build a data set, its makers have sicced Larry on us. He’s simultaneously our great crusader against shoddy parking, wobbly cafe tables and getting together for no reason and a white man run amok, telling you he knows better than you how your gender is best expressed, what your true sexual or personality orientation is, how to rear your child. Here is a white man who has managed to upset and insult us all — and at this point, I do mean all of us: every service professional, every race, every executive, every religion, every body. And yet, crucially, nearly every single time, he is told off, cast out, ignored, tsked, dumped, pitchforked, closed in on.

But the one thing Larry has never been (until April 7 at least) is canceled. I’ve thought about that over these three decades, what it has required to tolerate this man. I’ve worried whether my attraction to this show, my fascination with him, is akin to devotion to the brashness of a certain former president of the United States. But I remember that Larry has never cried “witch hunt” or “fake news.” He has no lackeys, no suck-ups, no enablers. What Larry has is friends, and a friend lets you know when enough is enough. Larry isn’t irredeemable. He can admit defeat, can confess that “when you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” that “I’m hoisted on my own petard.” When his mouth doesn’t say “mea culpa,” his body does. That, I think, is what we’ve been watching this show to experience: Larry’s duality. A whole other side of his character and David’s performance radiates warmth, generosity, concern, devotion — joy in people, belief in them, patience for even those of us in error. Empathy stirs within him. He can attach strings but can snip them too. The man whose defense he came to at that brunch place? Larry served him potatoes!