2000, TV

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)

I get this, I appreciate it intellectually, and I often find it amusing, but I have to say that, as someone who had a love-hate relationship with George on Seinfeld, I have trouble watching parts of this show. My problem is that I don’t like people like this and I have trouble relating to the most extreme segments.

This past TIFF, I was in the theatre to see No Place on Earth – a documentary about people surviving the holocaust by living underground for a record 500+ days – and this Jewish New Yorker sat down in front of me. She was related to the cast. She was apoplectic about not getting to sit in the reserved seats – TIFF reserves seats in each screening for cast and crew, and these could be considered “the best seats in the house – even though some other family members apparently got to sit in them. She wouldn’t let it go. Her husband was trying to talk to a friend of theirs and she would interrupt. When they started ignoring her, she kept talking out loud to herself about the injustice.

I don’t like conflict, and I try not to be rude to other people, but if she hadn’t shut up when the movie started, I might have said a few things I would have later regretted. (It’s not nice to scream at old people.) This woman had no sense of perspective: here we were watching a film about the holocaust and she was livid about not sitting a few rows higher up in the theatre.

Watching Larry David’s caricature of himself get mad about being bumped for a doctor’s appointment sent me right back to that moment. People like this have no perspective of the luxury of their lives. They may live in the moment, but that moment is apparently a painful, maligned one. They make life worse for the rest of us.

Frankly, though I get that this is clever and funny, I don’t want to watch the remaining seasons because I want to avoid people like this as much as possible. I don’t need them. I am happy with the privilege I was born into. I will not be watching the rest of the show.

8/10

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