Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9 episode 6 review: Star Trek: Arabesque, stabbing ranges and the accidental text on purpose
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Your support makes all the difference.It was a big weekend for disregarding 2017's sensitivities even by Larry David's standards, the comedian making jokes about the Holocaust and the Hollywood's sexual abuse problem on SNL Saturday and then accidentally inviting a busload of school kids to blow him on Curb Your Enthusiasm Sunday.
We got a Curb episode exclusively about trivial things this week, which is good because they're always my favourite, ditching the fatwas and just getting bogged down in completely inconsequential but fiercely relatable and funny matters.
The first scene, with Larry boarding a plane, was a little weak, but it quickly picked up, Leon misidentifying 1966 Sophia Loren-starrer Arabesque as "one of those Star Trek films" (Star Trek: Arabesque is a sequel I would actually watch) and Larry accurately pointing out that when holding a steak knife you really want to do a stabbing motion with it (I'm so glad I'm not alone), leading to the hilarious proposition of "stabbing ranges" where people could get this desire out their systems.
The 'accidental text on purpose' was the centrepiece of the episode and its title, as Richard Lewis, Jeff and Marty Funkhouser attempted to employ it. I'm hugely enjoying Lewis this season, whose on-screen character has got somehow milder and less maudlin (the same can't be said for the real life one).
Bob Einstein (Funkhouser) also excelled this week, his societal politeness breaking down mid-dinner as he informed his girlfriend the water she was serving was "like I took a straw and put it in a frog's ass". Only Bob could come up with an improv simile this wonderfully disgusting, Bob also being behind his character's infamous joke.
The ending was lazier than we usually get and there were a lot of smarter and funnier ways they could have gone with it, but there was still a lot to love about this episode.
Curb Your Enthusiasm airs on Sunday nights in the US on HBO, and Monday nights in the UK on Sky Atlantic and through NOWTV.
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