Curb Your Enthusiasm Recap: Car Periscope

Larry David is an idea man. He’s not an inventor. He’s not good with his hands. He probably can’t even tell you the difference between a wrench and a screw. But at least the man has got some great ideas.

And one of those ideas is that you can tell a lot about a man just from looking at his wife. This is all a man like LD needs in determining one’s character. If your wife looks like she’s been hit with the ugly stick one too many times, then you must be a man of great character — especially if your greatest contribution to society is a car periscope. What an invention by the way. I’ll admit I had my doubts, much like Susie did, but once I saw that sucker in action. Yeah buddy, I’m a believer.

Now that we know that a man’s integrity can only be trusted if his wife is ugly, Larry promptly fires his business manager who recommends that he leave the ideas at home. Not because he didn’t like Larry’s snap together ski idea (I didn’t either), no, it was because his wife walked in and she seemed just a little too good-looking for this gumpy looking accountant. If Larry is nothing else, he is a man of principle and a man of principle sticks to his principles.

Judge Horn was some sort of reality TV judge, kinda like Judge Judy, except underneath that robe was a closet bigot. Larry’s father was a big fan watching him on T.V., but their first meeting together doesn’t go as planned. Never have I heard the word “kike” uttered on T.V. before, so even I was taken aback. Larry is in there long enough to get accosted by the old man’s son who instantly accuses Larry of cheating his poor, senile old father at Scrabble. But it wasn’t him! “It was the one-armed man!” And thus Larry gives us a laugh to help us forget about the uncomfortable hate being spewed by this anti-semite. Showing Larry David giving the finger to an old man on the way out certainly helped as well.

After a lunch meeting with the inventor, his wife, and Jeff, Larry runs into the judge’s angry son at the restaurant. LD, always the opportunist, takes this chance encounter as an opportunity to show the man just how integeral(?) integral he really is. He pretends that the inventor’s wife is his not-so-attractive girlfriend. This was a stunt that that could have backfired on him, but thankfully society is truly that easy to figure out. The angry son apologizes for misjudging Larry’s character and asks him for a favor. Lose a game of Scrabble to his father. Easy enough when the old man is pulling out racial epitaphs like he’s Archie Bunker!

Of course when he goes to intentionally throw a game of Scrabble against the old man by spelling out words like “had”, he’s immediately thrown off his game when Judge Horn drops “coon” onto the board.

Speaking of black people, guess who shows up soon after? The always a pleasure, Wanda Sykes (who’s got some huge knockers now). She just so happens to be jogging with Larry’s cure all trainer who just so happened to cancel their time together. Larry is rightfully pissed off because he was the one who recommended the trainer to Wanda in the first place. So does it really come as a surprise that Larry asks the honorable Judge Horn to mediate over this case?

But the chase for the “one-armed man” is what brings the episode to a close. After LD’s encounter with the man in the Judge Horn’s room, Larry chases after this mysterious party guest like Captain Ahab chased after his great white whale. Periscope and all, Larry pulls out all the stops trying to chase this goon. And when he’s being upstreamed for a taxi, he’s on him. How Larry ended up in a sling pushing away a one-armed man is beyond me, but it made for a hilarious chase sequence.

And of course it ends up bad for Larry David. “But it wasn’t me. It was the one-armed man!”