Quick spoilers for last night's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" coming up just as soon as I get you in my wallet... Much as I love "Curb," every now and then the series will do an episode where I don't laugh once, and "The Hot Towel" was unfortunately one of those.
I want to pin it on the idea that I prefer episodes where there's some grain of wisdom in Larry's behavior - Why shouldn't he be allowed to ask who else is coming to a dinner party? Why can't he pay another person to ride in his car and make him eligible for the carpool lane? - and that he was being both obnoxious and wrong in this one, but that's not it. Larry was mostly being an ass, but he was dead-on with Christian Slater and the caviar, and he was right that Sammy's song was unbearable, even if you're not supposed to point that out in polite society.
Or I could pin it on the recycled "Seinfeld" jokes - George Costanza also had trouble going left, and the caviar bit was close, if not identical, to George's double-dipping incident - but because both "Seinfeld" and "Curb" are drawn from Larry's own life, this wasn't the first time the new show has featured storylines similar to the old one, nor will it be the last. So that's not quite it.
I just didn't, for whatever reason, find any of "The Hot Towel" funny (except maybe Ted Danson's usual contempt for Larry), and had to watch several scenes (Sammy's song in particular) through the horror movie finger filter, which I haven't had to employ on a "Curb" episode in quite some time. After a while, to get through the episode, I started pondering where the fame threshhold is where people have to play themselves (Christian Slater) or get to play a character (Sherry Stringfield, Philip Baker Hall). Any theories on that?
And what did everyone else think?
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