Larry David Wants To Wring The Necks Of People Who Call ‘Curb’ Cringe

The legacy of Curb Your Enthusiasm, according to J.B. Smoove, might be that life’s cringe moments will forever be compared to scenes from the show. Surprise, surprise – Smoove’s prediction made Larry David furious last night at a Curb Your Enthusiasm PaleyFest panel session hosted by Judd Apatow.  “About this cringey thing — I never dreamed in a million years that it would have that kind of effect on people,” David ranted, according to Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the event. “After the second or third show I hear, ‘Oh it’s cringey, I’m cringing, I have to leave the room.’ When people call it cringe comedy, I want to wring their necks.”

Give Apatow credit for pushing back, pointing to a clip that had run earlier in the evening in which David stores a plastic water bottle in his pants before hugging a little girl.  “Mommy, Mommy!” she cries. “There’s something hard in his pants!”

Doesn’t that scene qualify, wondered Apatow?  Not according to David, who fired back, “I don’t understand how that’s cringeworthy.” At least according to Cheryl Hines, it could have been worse. She recalled that several times, she told her onscreen husband he could not tell some of the jokes he had written. Most of them got told anyway. “I kept waiting to get canceled, I guess,” says David. “I was a little disappointed that I didn’t.”

David’s disappointment didn’t last long -- not after “a week of basking” in the afterglow of the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale.  “Honestly I was kind of blown away at the response to the finale, yeah,” David said. “It exceeded my wildest expectations. Of course, I never have expectations for anything.” 

Curb’s conclusion was a chance for David to right the perceived wrongs of the Seinfeld finale, even if he still defends it. He enlisted Jerry himself for the finale, with executive producer Jeff Schaffer acknowledging that Seinfeld joked about getting it right this time. When the PaleyFest crowd cheered at the idea, David flipped them off. “Oh fuck you, you didn’t like the first one?” (He was joking, of course, and the crowd loved it.)

Despite giving audience members a friendly version of the bird, David did acknowledge being bummed out about bad reviews of the Seinfeld finale. “At the time,” he said, “I think it did bother me.”  But the reaction was more positive this time around, even from David’s old Seinfeld co-workers.

Schaffer says that he “got a wonderful very sweet email from Jerry and I got an amazing, sweet email from Julia (Louis-Dreyfus) the next day too, which was great. They loved it.” And amazingly, no one seemed to cringe this time around. “The reaction tells us that we ended at the right time, in the right way.”