Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

As a big fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the brainchild of Larry David who previously helped write and produce Seinfeld, I was completely let down by the season premier.

It showed signs of what happens when writers run out of new ideas so instead they get more extreme in their plot points.

First, Larry’s fictitious manager Jeff has sex with a mentally impaired person on the drop of a dime (Larry goes to the bathroom and comes back to find Jeff in her bedroom romping away.)

Second, Larry tries to race home to break up with his girlfriend before she’s told she has cancer, reasoning that you “can’t break up with someone who has cancer.” But apparently it’s perfectly OK to break up with someone a few minutes before they are diagnosed.

Not believable and not funny.

I was accustomed to laughing out loud at least several times at Larry’s often mundane but hilarious social faux-pas. But during this first episode of Season 7 I didn’t laugh out loud once. I even tried but it came out more like a forced cough.

Of course we are also getting ready for the Seinfeld reunion episode of Curb, but after seeing this first installment I can only guess it’s just another ploy to keep viewers watching as the true hilarity of Larry David now seems like a parody of itself.

The actors too often were smiling at their own cleverness, another sign of how success can spoil authenticity.

Now for a word about the nature of true comedy, it’s supposed to be uniting and affirming of the goodness of human nature, often by allowing us to laugh at the bad. But if the characters are making decisions that are so inherently wrong that is destroys any possibility of a truly happy ending, then we might as well be dealing with tragedy.

I will watch the next episode and if things improve, I’ll be back here with an update.