Of Course Larry David’s Favorite ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Episode Pushes the Most Buttons

Variety recently stopped a tuxedo-clad Larry David to ask him if he had an all-time favorite episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. 

“Probably ‘Palestinian Chicken,’ yeah,” replied David. Oy vey. With the situation in the Middle East continuing to be the hottest button in comedy (and pretty much everywhere else), the Curb star just had to go with one of the series’ most outrageous stories.

A quick recap if you haven’t seen the Season Eight episode: Larry and Jeff check out a new Palestinian chicken restaurant. The food? Amazing. The posters on the wall? Not exactly friendly to Jews like Larry or the newly religious Marty Funkhouser, who’s furious about Larry eating at the new joint. Add Larry’s sexy affair with a beautiful Palestinian woman from the chicken place — “Fuck me, you Jew bastard! Fuck me like Israel fucked my people!” — and you have all the ingredients for a powder keg.

“Some day in the not-too-distant future,” wrote A.V. Club when it reviewed the episode in 2011, “lazy undergrad students will be writing lengthy essays about Jewish-American male identity based on little more than this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Considering the AV Club gave “Palestinian Chicken” an A+, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world. And now that David himself has anointed the episode his personal favorite, he’s just added to its historical significance. 

On today’s episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Simmons marvels at how David got a free pass for the “Palestinian Chicken” episode, which was “about as far as you pushed the line." 

“Yeah, I’m lucky,” David admits.

Was that the biggest blowback David ever received for Curb? Turns out that “Palestinian Chicken” doesn’t get that honor. “Peeing on the portrait of Christ,” David offers. “Yeah, that was bad.” 

In Simmons’ opinion, comedians could get away with more in the 2000s than they do today. Would David like to go back and make any Curb updates so as not to offend? “Any show that I did then, the early 2000s, I would do now,” David declares. “I can’t think of anything that I would delete.”