The Big Picture

• Larry David continues to find new and hilarious ways to make situations worse on Curb Your Enthusiasm, keeping audiences entertained with over-the-top absurdity.
• The addition of J.B. Smoove's Leon Black in Season 6 shifted the trajectory, showcasing a strong friendship between unique characters.
• Tracey Ullman's portrayal of Irma Kostroski injects a new dynamic into Curb Your Enthusiasm, adding physical comedy and a relatable, quirky character.

For 10 seasons, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has succeeded with a simple formula: something bad befalls Larry, he’s upset, more often than not justifiably, but every single time, as only he can do, he finds a way to make things much, much worse. Audiences love the over-the-top absurdity. He gets to say and do the things we’d never dream of. It’s a perfectly concocted, exaggerated look into the life of the man who created Seinfeld, and a fix for those who miss that series. It’s as if George Costanza never left us, but simply packed up and moved to California.

The only problem with this setup, if it’s a problem at all, is that we know what to expect. That’s not to say the show is lazy. Far from it. Some of Curb Your Enthusiasm's best comedy has come in the last few seasons alone. Sometimes, however, something happens that shakes things up and sets the series on a different trajectory. The addition of J.B. Smoove’s Leon Black in Season 6 is the best example of this, as we see a crazed but surprisingly strong friendship grow between a Jewish curmudgeon and a younger Black man, who, like Larry, is more than a little odd and willing to do and say anything he feels.

What Happens in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' Season 11?

The first half of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 11 revolves around the shenanigans we’ve grown used to. As is usual, life isn’t going well for our favorite bespectacled crank. The dominant plot revolves around Larry being blackmailed. In the opening scene of Episode 1, a burglar breaks into Larry’s home late at night while he’s asleep. As he rushes out into the dark, he falls into the pool and drowns. Worse, to Larry anyway, is that when the police show up to investigate, they point out that city law requires a five-foot-high fence to be put around all private pools. If Larry had followed this, tragedy could’ve been prevented. The brother of the burglar, aware of the law, threatens to sue Larry unless he casts his daughter in the new Young Larry TV show being shopped to Netflix. Larry is screwed, especially when the man’s daughter is shown to be the worst actress imaginable, and a threat to derail the series.

Then comes Episode 7, simply titled “Irma Kostroksi,” and Curb gets shaken up once more when we meet Irma Kostroski, a Santa Monica city councilwoman, played by an unrecognizable Tracey Ullman who has continued her fantastic run in Curb Season 12. Hidden beneath big glasses, big jewelry, and an even bigger wig, Ullman gets lost in the role before she even says a word. Larry is sitting with Richard Lewis at a campaign rally for a Santa Monica mayoral candidate when he taps Irma on the shoulder to ask her to get someone’s attention for him. She quickly gets annoyed by Larry’s relentlessness as one usually does, her voice a thick nasally whine that borders on but never quite crosses over into Jewish mother mimicry.

Tracey Ullman's Irma Mirrors Larry David

"She’s repugnant,” Larry tells Susie (Susie Essman), his on-again, off-again arch nemesis, but when he overhears that Susie’s going canvassing and the laws her choice for mayor can get repealed if he’s elected, Larry stops dead in his tracks. Suddenly he needs to know the name of that “horrible, horrible obnoxious woman” who was sitting in front of him. A new plan is forming in his bald head, one that we know will not go well.

Larry worms his way into Irma’s life, bombarding her with fake praise for the work she’s doing. He can’t stand her, the disgust etched on his face at the way she casually lifts at her bra to itch her chest, or the frequent mentioning of her gas issues (“I get a bubble,” she often says), but he’s utterly fascinated at the same time. “It’s almost like she was made in a lab by Dr. Frankenstein” he says to Leon, to which Leon tells him that he’ll need to become the Groom of Frankenstein to get what he wants.

What Larry wants is to get the pool fence ordinance repealed and Irma Kostroski is the one who can do it. With her unwitting help, he can be free of the threat of blackmail and fire the actress who’s turning his show into chaos. Soon Larry’s canvassing door-to-door with Irma, giving the performance of his life, as he pretends to care at all about the mayoral race. He only cares when she’s watching though, which costs him dearly. He gives up on voting when he sees a long line at his precinct, and of course, as Larry’s horrible luck would have it, his choice for mayor loses by one vote. His plan has failed. No worries. Larry can still get Irma herself to get the ordinance repealed. It only means he has to step up his game. If he’s going to be the true Groom of Frankenstein, he has to bed the monster.

This is where the brilliant comedic timing that Ullman developed over the decades through her various sketch comedy shows comes through. Larry tracks Irma down, schmoozes her with more praise and a bouquet of flowers, before asking her to dinner. Irma is angry but it subsides. We can sense a loneliness in her, as if she doesn’t get much or any attention from men. But before we can be sad, Irma follows it up with a frank, “You can call me, but not tonight. I’m finishing a cleanse. I’m preparing for a colonoscopy.” Irma is either painfully unaware of how she comes across, or just like Larry, she doesn’t care.

After going out for dinner, Larry makes his move and invites Irma home. She is nothing but frank again, as she casually tells him, a mouth full of food spilling out, that she hasn’t had sex in 13 years. She follows it up with the best line of the season: “It’s like whistling into the Sahara up there.” Ullman struggles to get the line out, as if she’s about to break, and you have to wonder how much of the dialogue is improvised and how many takes it took to get through it. After the deed is done, and they’re lying in bed, Irma says, “It was better than I expected. But I have low expectations.” She’s not teasing him. It’s just how it is, which makes it so much more uncomfortable. But before the cringe can set in, Irma sticks a giant retainer in her mouth and gives Larry a sloppy kiss, leaving us laughing instead.

Later in the season, Irma moves in with Larry after a screw-up by Leon accidentally cuts her power out. She shows up, bruised from falling down the stairs, with an immediate list of things Larry needs to do for her, getting some Metamucil and pickles being among them. It’s the simplest moments with Ullman that work the best, such as her eating oatmeal the next morning, the gloop falling from her spoon between bites, or how she asks Larry for a kiss with a mouthful of food, before asking him to add GasX to his shopping list. Her comic timing can be minimalist at times, a simple portrayal of a character not a caricature, who is funny for the fact that she doesn't know how weird she really is. She’s not in on the joke. She’s just a sure woman living her life, gas and all.

Irma and Larry Reunite in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' Season 12

Ullman gets the bigger moments of physical comedy as well and proves that she still has the magic that made her such a success. One night of sex brings out Irma’s inner passion, and she makes a show of trying to start things up with Larry again the next day, posing for him and running her hands over herself in the least sexy way imaginable. She tries over and to get Larry to watch her take a shower, not backing down from all of his excuses, before she finally climbs the stairs seductively and yells, “Come and watch me!”

When Irma finally agrees to help Larry repeal the ordinance, he offers to buy her something. We wait for her to ask for a new sweater, some earrings, but instead, matter-of-factly, she announces that “I’d like vaginal rejuvenation surgery,” before going into great detail about the damage her daughter did, kegels, leaking urine, and how she’d like to be able to wear white pants. Like Larry, she will say anything that pops into her head.

Through it all she never picks up on Larry’s ulterior motives, even going so far as to gush to Suzie about how Larry is a beautiful man. So, while we may laugh at her eccentricities and the crazy things she says, we can’t dislike her. She’s not like the rest of the horribly self-centered people Larry has hung out with throughout the seasons. With the way she dresses and how unaware she is of how others perceive her, we can relate to her. She could be our own aunt or mother. We can’t wait for the moment that Larry gets caught and his wild plan fails.

That moment comes in the season finale. Finally, Irma asks the council to repeal the fence ordinance, and the votes are there to make it happen, but of course as we knew he would, Larry messes it up in spectacular fashion (just a little thing where he steals shoes from a Holocaust museum display, which just so ended up belonging to Irma’s grandfather), sending Irma into hysterics. She no shows the vote, causing the ordinance repeal to end in a tie. Larry has lost…by one vote.

The last we see of Irma, she’s at a bar drinking away her pain. Luckily, Ullman has returned for the 12th and final season. It’s hard to imagine that Irma would want Larry in her life anymore, but then again, if Larry needs something bad enough, and he can grovel and schmooze hard enough, who knows. The chemistry of two loud and stubborn people playing against each other is a joy to watch, and Ullman’s mastery needs to be celebrated as much as possible. And maybe, in the meantime, she can do something about that gas bubble.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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