Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 6 - Episode 1, "Meet the Blacks"

Like Season 6, Part 2 of The Sopranos, Season 6 of Curb Your Enthusiasm opens with our beloved hero asleep in his bed.

Larry and Cheryl are awoken in the middle of the night by a smoke alarm in the kitchen. Larry gets up on a stepladder and unscrews the alarm, but can’t deactivate it. After a hilarious close-up of Larry’s face twisted in aggravation, he fixes the problem with a baseball bat. Naturally, the absence of the fire alarm will prove to be a liability later in the episode.

Larry, Jeff, and Richard Lewis congregate in the changing rooms of Larry and Jeff’s country club while the television broadcasts news of “Hurricane Edna.” Richard acts pissy while Larry and Jeff devise an alibi to explain to Marty Funkhouser why they were not at his party the previous evening. Larry decides he’ll tell Marty he confused tonight with yesterday. Jeff says he'll use his young daughter as an explanation, which Richard finds reprehensible. Larry: “It’s a perfect excuse. No one can argue with that…It’s a great reason to have kids.”

As Larry and Cheryl drive to a party at Ted Danson’s house, Cheryl proselytizes about how the “Edna” victims need help desperately and how they should adopt one of the displaced families. Larry says he’ll need a couple of months to “…mentally prepare for that.” Larry tells her they need to make a quick stop by Marty’s so Larry can lie to him about the party. Larry and Cheryl show up on Marty’s doorstep displaying faux bewilderment at the lack of party guests. Marty insists that they stay. Cut to Larry slouched in Marty’s living room.

Jeff and Susie show up with Larry’s stolen excuse. Jeff, Susie, Cheryl, Marty, Marty's wife, and Larry eat cake, delicious, delicious chocolate cake whose bakery Cheryl asks the address of from Marty.

The three couples play the Newlywed Game and when the question “If you could have sex with one of your friends’ wives or girlfriends, who would it be?” comes up, Larry makes the mistake of saying Cha Cha, Richard Lewis’s new girlfriend, which pisses off Cheryl enough to exile him from their bedroom later that night. Standing outside the bedroom door holding blankets, he says he’ll do anything. She opens the door, “Anything?”
Larry: “Well, you know…short of adopting this Hurricane family…”

Cut to Larry and Cheryl driving to the airport to pick up the displaced family they’ve adopted. But Larry tells her they have to make a quick stop by Ted Danson’s house, whose party they missed last night because they got stuck at Marty’s. Faux bewilderment. Ted insists they stay.

Cut to Larry slouched in Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen’s living room. Richard Lewis and Cha Cha (Tia Carrere) show up using Larry’s excuse.

Cheryl and Larry pick up the family, the Blacks, who are black and consist of Loretta (Vivica A. Fox), her Aunt, and her two kids, Keysha and Daryl . Loretta smokes cigarettes, which Larry does not want her to do in his house. Cheryl decides to throw a party to welcome the Blacks.

Cheryl and Larry stop by the 26th Street Bakery, the one Marty recommended to them, and I couldn’t help but be distracted by the giant erect penis exhibit in the background of the store. Then the guy behind the counter places a giant brown penis on the counter, confusing Larry, which is a reasonable reaction from someone who has asked for cake and finds himself staring at a penis. He is told that the giant brown penis is the cake and that he and Cheryl are standing in an erotic bakery, an establishment I had never been introduced to, though whose existence does not surprise me.
Larry (to Cheryl): Funkhouser! He knowingly served us penis!! What is wrong with that guy!! What an idiot!!” (and then to the baker) “Cake is uh…delicious by the way…

At the party, Jeff brings over a cake from the 26th Street Bakery, and before Larry can stop it, one of Loretta’s children has been traumatized.

Cut to Larry sitting alone at his kitchen table eating the penis cake. Loretta, cigarette in hand, comes down to talk to him.

He asks her if Keysha is okay and then asks if she could perhaps not smoke in the house. She then rudely extinguishes her cigarette in his plate of penis cake. The plate ends up in the wastebasket at the foot of the wall formerly manned by a smoke alarm, and the episode comes full circle as Loretta’s not quite snuffed out cigarette begins a fire in the kitchen.


Choice lines

Cheryl: “I can’t stop thinking about the Hurricane”
Larry: “Oh my nose is really itching me....”


Cheryl: “Imagine for one second if you lost every single thing you had in your life.”
Larry: “What do I have? I dunno…What do I have? I like this sport jacket…”


(Jeff and Susie compete with Larry and Cheryl in offering excuses to Marty Funkhouser about why they can’t stay any longer)
Larry: “My dad has a virus…
Susie: “Your dad always has a virus.”
Larry: “Fuck you – he doesn’t always have a virus.”


(Ted Danson offers Richard Lewis a drink.)
Richard: “I’m a recovering alcoholic."


Cheryl: “Where have you been?”
Larry: “Ate some penis.”


Stray Observations

- I am flummoxed as to how a nebbish little goblin like Richard Lewis could bag Tia Carrere.


- Why Jeff is cooler than Richard Lewis:


Larry: “You stole my ‘wrong night’ bit!”
Jeff: “I didn’t steal it - I gave you full credit! It’s a brilliant idea! I told Susie it was your idea.”


Larry: “What’d you steal my thing for?!”
Richard: “What thing?!”
Larry: “Showing up the wrong night thing!”
Richard: “What - you have a fucking copyright on this stupid little thing?!”


- In the wrong hands, the erotic bakery gags could have been terrible. Maybe it’s just me and my unreasonable faith in Larry David, but he made penis cake pretty goddamn hilarious.


- Couldn’t they have gotten somebody better than Vivica A. Fox to play Loretta Black?


* Larry’s Biggest Act of Assholery: He was pretty well behaved in this episode, and wasn’t really an asshole. Lots of faux pas (“Your last name is Black? That’d be like if my last name was ‘Jew.’”) but nothing that bad. So far.