Curb Your Enthusiasm Recap: A Breakfast Grudge

This season, Larry keeps finding himself in leadership positions, whether it’s his status as a water-giving hero of the MSNBC set or the leader of the post-11 a.m. breakfast movement. But at the beginning of this episode, when an anonymous complaint letter is posted to the bulletin board of the men’s locker room at the golf club, Larry is shocked as anyone that he wasn’t the plaintiff.

For once, Larry is not Disgruntled. (Disgruntled, maybe, but not Disgruntled.) This time, it’s Jeff who has brought complaints to Mr. Takahashi and the management of the Ocean View Golf Club in the form of a bullet-point list of grievances, mostly about the food, the dress code, and the golf course (”Why are there no benches?”). (Note: This last complaint might imply that management responded to Larry’s bench snafu from the last episode not only by roping off the benches but ultimately removing them from the golf course altogether.) The open letter, which concludes with a “Shame! Shame on you!” bullet point, is signed by an anonymous “Disgruntled.” Of course, everyone from Mr. Takahashi to Susie assumes it’s Larry.

At a post-golf breakfast with Susie, Jeff, and Irma, Larry misses the breakfast cutoff by ten minutes. He tries to reason with the waitress, asking if she can “take the eggs from the Cobb salad, take the bacon from the Cobb salad, and put it on some toast.” But, like the diner waitress who insists on “no substitutions” in the Five Easy Pieces scene Larry references, she won’t allow a “breakfast loophole.” To make matters worse, Larry has instituted his own BYOE policy; he brings his own organic eggs to the club because the ones they have at the restaurant are full of antibiotics. As Irma points out, “Larry could grow breasts” — a thought that disgusts Susie but delights Larry, who says he’d be “pretty, pretty, pretty cute.” Irma may not be factually correct about nonorganic eggs giving men breasts, but she’s completely right that you can’t eat a beet-pear salad at 11:10 a.m. — 11 is, objectively, too early for a breakfast cutoff. The waitress ends up making an exception and allows them to order breakfast but regrets it as soon as everyone chimes in demanding breakfast, too.

Irma is also right that she and Larry could probably benefit from couples therapy — that is, if they were a regular couple and Larry weren’t literally counting down the days until he’s allowed to dump her. Larry reluctantly agrees, and they end up, per Susie’s recommendation, at the office of Melanie Stainback, who is married to a guy named Hobie Turner, who was a writer on Seinfeld. Though Larry knows her and Hobie, Melanie insists that whatever happens in her office will remain 100 percent confidential, a statement that invites rightful skepticism from Larry. Irma uses the session as an opportunity to unload everything that annoys her about Larry, including his “thing about phallic-shaped vegetables,” which results in him stroking eggplants and cucumbers at the supermarket. The irony, of course, is that Irma’s very presence repulses Larry to his core. If he started going down his own “Disgruntled” list, he would have to be dragged out of there.

Tracey Ullman’s performance as Irma continues to get better with each appearance, particularly in the therapist’s office. In the waiting room, she’s singing the J.G. Wentworth jingle again, even getting a bothered Larry to duet with her. During the session, it’s one impeccably timed Irma line after the next: “Does your husband have a very low-hanging scrotal sac?” she asks Stainback, to Larry’s chagrin. “A lot of guys do.” “How long is it?” “When he goes to the bathroom in the night, can I just say —” Irma says, and, before Larry can respond, “No, you can’t just say!”, she proceeds to just say, “I hear them slapping on his thighs. It sounds like a flip-flop in a Mexican resort.” Hand motions and all. While Stainback insists this is a “safe space” where she is not a friend but a therapist, mere seconds later, when their time is up, she invites Larry and Irma to Sunday lunch.

Larry is mortified, even more so when he sees Jeff and Susie, clad in head-to-toe fake pearls, in the waiting room. Like Irma, Susie uses the session as an opportunity to unleash a litany of grievances against Jeff, including, despite his objections, Jeff’s own “Disgruntled” list. (“Can I tell her about the letter? He wrote a letter.”) Jeff is bothered by a loud sneeze he can hear through the wall, which, to him, signals that whoever is on the other side must be able to hear them, which would thus reveal his Disgruntled identity. Anyone who lives in a New York City apartment building has likely had this exact thought. It’s an unprovable hypothesis, of course, unless you’re uncharacteristically friendly with your neighbors or, like Larry, you ask your friend Leon to make an appointment with the urologist on the other side of the wall during your couples-therapy session just to test it out. Leon is appalled when he finds out the appointment doesn’t only involve peeing in a cup — or a bowl, for that matter — but something far more invasive. “You an ass doctor!” Larry and Irma hear him scream through the wall. (Now imagine if it was all happening in the doctor’s office, and they had one of those curtain separators to substitute for a wall. I can’t be the only one to have overheard a guy drone on about his late-in-life CBD gummy use at the doctor. It’s a HIPAA violation waiting to happen. To that guy, if you’re reading this, I hope the “weed-without-the-high gummies” are still working better than Ambien and that the divorce is finally settled.)

At lunch with Hobie and Melanie, Irma and Larry have a brief conversation about Seinfeld, with Stainback pointing out that Larry came back to write the finale. Larry is clearly unhappy she brought it up; once again, Curb is winking at its audience, pointing to the largely panned Seinfeld finale, hinting it may be building up to something self-referential in its own curtain call. Could this be Larry’s chance to undo what many perceive as his biggest career miss?

Larry rushes Irma to order so they don’t miss the breakfast cutoff, but because she was rushed, she ends up regretting her order of the pancakes, and Hobie offers to swap with her. Larry insists the eggs in his dish are not the organic eggs he had brought, accusing the waitress of having a “breakfast grudge” against him after he went all Jack Nicholson on her the other day. The egg debacle has Mr. Takahashi once again accusing Larry of being Disgruntled. His response: “I do scowl. And I will admit to muttering. But I am not Disgruntled.” Cue Takahashi’s Japanese flute music and the finger-pointing face-off.

Meanwhile, Larry is still riding on the coattails of his accidental heroism in Atlanta. Willie Geist of NBC has come to L.A. to do a profile of Larry for the Sunday morning show, calling him a “liberal darling.” (As proof of his altruism, Larry offers the story of how he took in the Blacks and how one of them is still living with him.) Larry also insists he would take the water-bottle case to the Supreme Court if he has to, pretending it was his plan all along to take it to trial. But in doing his background research, Geist has become increasingly interested in the whole Disgruntled story. When Larry sees Geist at lunch talking to a woman named Nora (who he suspects was the source who called Larry an asshole), he decides to offer Geist a different story and bring him into the kitchen, proving the club didn’t use his preferred eggs. Obviously, this is an even less interesting story than the already droll Disgruntled thing, which is hard to believe would catch Geist’s attention, even as a joke. And obviously, this just serves to prove the source’s point that Larry is an asshole who brings organic eggs — and his own bread! — to the club. (Remember: Per Disgruntled, the bread is stale.) If Larry didn’t already blow his spot then, he further upsets the NBC crew when he goes on a rambling tangent about strawberries instead of talking about the Atlanta moment — “It’s like people, Willie. You don’t really know them until you taste them.” When Geist asks if he is Disgruntled, Larry tells the camera he is not Disgruntled. But Geist doesn’t leave without one more question: Does Larry know a urologist?

Back on the golf course, Hobie confronts Larry for giving his wife a hard time in his couples-therapy sessions. Once again, Larry is accused of giving off not just little d but “Big D Disgruntled energy” (a likely reference to the viral BDE, or “big dick energy,” phenomenon of 2018). When Jeff finally admits he is, in fact, Disgruntled, it prompts a whole army of golfers to say, “I am Disgruntled!” in a Spartacus-like social chain. Once again, Larry has become the impromptu leader of a social movement — a cause célebrè, an unlikely hero. If the revolution will be televised, Larry will be leading it, golf club in hand.

Unfortunately, the whole Spartacus thing doesn’t really work because, yet again, Dr. Stainback violates doctor-patient confidentiality by telling Hobie it’s Jeff who is the True Disgruntled. Not only that, but it has been the chef at the club who is eating all of Larry’s organic eggs. (The call is coming from inside the house!)

Of course, because this is Curb, Willie Geist hears this all through the wall at the urologist’s office. His investigation has concluded; Larry escapes blame once again, becoming the country-club hero he was always destined to be. Someone call Elmo; Larry might just be on another morning show.

Tying everything up into a neat little bow, this episode pulls off a classic Curb converging of plotlines with even pacing and plenty of memorable laughs. The therapist who does double time as a golf-club gossip is the kind of hypocrite that Larry loves to hate, and the “breakfast loophole” is the sort of term Curb loves to coin. (Seinfeld fans might recall the “dating loophole” Todd found with Elaine in “The Calzone.”) Willie Geist, playing himself, was pretty great as Larry’s foil and surprisingly sinister, too. And Larry’s rants about the color of the eggs (“There’s a sheen, Willie!” …) are the “LOL, Larry” moments that make me nostalgic for the show before it even ends.

Leonisms

• “The man that makes corn chips on the cob is gonna be a fucking billionaire.”

• “You’re an expert on pee. What do you know about urine?”

• “Sometimes I’ll pee right in the condom, and I’ll just take it off, tie a little knot in that motherfucker and throw it in the trash, and keep on fucking.”

• “I love peeing in cups. I like peeing in big-ass bowls, but I’ll pee in a cup.”