Yahoo News HBO Commemorates ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Finale With Larry David — and Some Surprise Guests
In 2000, Larry David returned to TV for the first time since Seinfeld, turning the focus on himself with Curb Your Enthusiasm, reaching a new audience with his heightened, fictionalized version of himself. More than two decades later, he’s closing the curtain on the hit HBO series.
On Friday, ahead of the April 7 finale, fans gathered for an evening with Larry David at Warner Bros. Discovery at 30 Hudson Yards, hosted by Tribeca and HBO. Throughout a chat moderated by MSNBC’s Ari Melber, David looked back at the 24 years of Curb, with some surprises in store.
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Melber went back to the very beginning of Curb, showing a clip from David’s 1999 meta HBO mockumentary that holds the same title as his hit series, in which he makes a return to stand-up comedy post-Seinfeld and prepares to make a TV special for the network. When asked about his stand-up career, David, who started performing in 1976, got candid about it not being as successful as he expected.
“You have to treat the audience like it’s this woman you’re trying to seduce,” he said. “You’re trying to get this woman to like you, and you have to do whatever you can to get her to like you because [you] want to sleep with her that night. Really, you’ve given her everything you’ve got. Sometimes she doesn’t like you. More often than not, she didn’t like me, so it was tough.”
However, Melber pointed out that other comics “would skip other people’s sets” to see his instead, to which David responded in his signature self-deprecating humor, noting, “They liked watching me bomb.”
“I never really did stand-up the way that I had dreamed that I would do it,” David explained. “It was my ambition when I started. I had no plans to ever be in television. I had no plans to be a writer. I had no plans to be an actor. I just wanted to be a great comic and yet that never happened.”
Later in his conversation with Melber, David responded to Drake and BROCKHAMPTON’s lyrics referencing himself and the show, noting he’s open to doing the latter’s eulogy as requested in the song “I.F.L” — though mistakenly thought the boy band was a person. He also balked at AI’s assessment of his career and looked back at scenes from the current and final season.
Midway through David’s chat with Melber, Susie Essman, who portrays Susie Greene in Curb, made a surprise appearance and joined them onstage.
Speaking about the series ending after two decades, Essman shared, “I don’t want to speak for [David], but after every season, he would say, ‘That’s it. I’m done. We’re done. We’re never doing it again.’ Then he did actually finish after season eight and had a six-year hiatus. But for some reason, it feels correct that this is the end of it. Not that I’m happy about it. I mean, if he said, ‘I changed my mind,’ I’d be there.”
The fictional Susie has become a fan-favorite throughout the series, as she continuously butts heads with Larry. Essman noted that fans expect her to be like her character and are disappointed when they realize she’s actually nothing like the loudmouth with a penchant for gaudy outfits.
“They get really sad when I’m kind and gracious,” she said. “They come up to me in the street, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I love you.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ I see the face drop. They want me to just say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ That’s not who I am in real life. It’s called acting. Larry’s not really that character.”
David has had similar experiences, as people expect him to be the socially inept jerk from the show. “I can’t even tell you how funny it is when people call me the vilest [things],” he said. “Anybody calls me an asshole or a schmuck or whatever, I just die.”
With Essman onstage, David took the opportunity to share how he ended up casting her as Jeff Garlin’s wife on the series. “I was looking for a foul-mouthed borrego…she roasted Jerry Stiller for a Friars Club roast,” he recalled. “She was filthy and vulgar, and I thought, ‘Yeah, she’s going to be perfect.’ I called her up immediately.”
Melber wondered if there were any moments in which Essman felt they’d gotten enough good takes but David wants to keep going, and she admitted that it does happen because of how much yelling she has to do at her co-star.
“I start to lose my voice because I’m screaming and he just… a lot of the times he cannot control himself. It’ll be take after take and you think, ‘OK, he knows what’s coming,'” she said. “He’ll just giggle and giggle. He’ll be like, ‘OK, OK. I’m OK, I’m OK.’ Then it’ll just start all over again.”
But Essman doesn’t mind: “Making Larry laugh is joyous. For me, it’s a great joy in my life, that I get to make him laugh,” she said.
Essman and David also discussed the show’s best improvisers, including recent guest Bruce Springsteen. “When he says, ‘I didn’t take you for a floor fucker,’ he made it up,” said David. Essman added, “Sometimes it works the other way. Sometimes people you think are going to be great, not so much.”
They both agreed that one of the best at improv is Tracey Ullman, who played Larry’s love interest Irma Kostroski. Ullman was then brought out as the second surprise guest of the night.
“She did two seasons of the show. I never saw this person. I only saw Irma Kostroski,” said David, after Ullman remarked that she wasn’t wearing the ginger wig she dons on the show.
Speaking about her role, Ullman said, “I loved it. You asked me to be the worst person in Los Angeles. I was like, ‘There’s so many people to choose from.'”
While Ullman came up with many of Irma’s most hilarious moments on set, she credited her son John McKeowon with an unforgettable line. “I said, how would I describe having seen Susie’s vagina?’ He went, ‘It would look like a melted cave,'” she shared.
The talk ended with a Q&A, where fans asked questions like David’s pronouns (answered with the expected groan and shrug), to his favorite Seinfeld episode (it’s “The Contest,” by the way).
Following the panel, a reception was held at the venue, with David’s wife Ashley Underwood and Essman’s husband Jim Harder in attendance. Attending fans who hoped to see what David is actually like in real life weren’t so lucky, as David, who joked onstage that he would only spend exactly 17 minutes at the reception before leaving, was tucked off in a corner by a group of security guards.
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