What I’m Watching: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 8, Episode 3 “Palestinian Chicken” (B-)

And here’s where this show takes a gigantic leap and doesn’t quite pull it off entirely well. Larry may seek to be a social assassin, as Jeff calls him, but it’s better when the show doesn’t try desperately to offend as much as its lead character. The notion of a Palestinian chicken restaurant being delicious and also serving as the perfect place for Jews to have affairs is rather hilarious, but this episode takes it considerably further by simultaneously having Funkhouse suddenly become an observant Jew. That scene where Larry wrestles Funkhouser’s yarmulke from his head is almost too awful, and the same goes for anything involving Larry’s new Palestinian girlfriend. I was just waiting for Funkhouser not to be able to play on the Sabbath after the announcement of his newfound religiousness, and I’ll just say that I found the show’s ski lift episode far more profound and intellectual than this particular half-hour. Larry being pulled in two different directions at the protest was almost too staged. It’s about time that people started asking Larry to tell people what their partners found annoying about them. I enjoyed seeing a more grown-up Sami remind Larry of her mother with her rather aggressive and angry tactics, and it was fun to see Maggie Wheeler, best known as Janice from “Friends,” as the LOL-prone Ilene. My favorite line from the episode was Jeff’s rather matter-of-fact suggestion that “In most countries, you could get someone killed for $573.” That’s interesting; I had no idea.