Curb Your Enthusiasm “The Pickle Gambit”

Kudos to Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen for this season when they are both playing themselves as divorced despite being very much married today.  Heck, they even worked together recently for the second season of Man on the Inside.  Though I am pretty sure the only reason this was done was because Ted is the one supporting characters on the show who Cheryl might go out with as the polar opposite of Larry.

So, Larry is still hiding from that fatwa, and that means staying at a hotel with a strict cookie policy under the alias of “Mr. Buck Dancer.”  There’s also a prostitute there that Larry befriends who, you know, dresses like a prostitute.  Larry has advice for her:  wear a dress from Saks 5th Avenue, claiming it will increase her business.

Oddly enough, later in the episode, it is revealed that Larry was absolutely right on that idea.

Now, Larry got himself kicked out of the hotel, despite his disguise or maybe because of it, due to his refusal to use tongs to pick up complimentary cookies that may or may not have been Pepperidge Farms.  And he only reluctantly gives Ted permission to date Cheryl (Mary, when asked, tells Larry that he isn’t her type, only later for him to spot her on what looks like a date with a very Larryish-lookin’ guy).  But what about the fatwa?

Well, Larry is having trouble with Iran, a sentence that is not relevant to current events as I type this up, so can he get help from another Muslim?  Hey, what about the woman from the Palestinian Chicken restaurant that he slept with?  Well, she might help after more great sex, or it looked great until Leon’s new bodyguard showed up and tossed her out.  That man is living in Larry’s house and demanding softer towels.

Now, none of that has anything to do with pickles, and the episode title mentions pickles, so what’s that all mean?  OK, Funkhouser, who respects Larry too much to date Cheryl openly, brings over his All-American nephew, and during a scrape to see who can open a jar of pickles, the teen hits his elbow on his pitching arm against Larry’s counter and breaks it.  That makes the boy cranky because, as Funkhouser explains, the kid can’t, um, master his domain?  OK, not quite the cliche I am looking for, but that means Larry has to go back to the hotel where he was banned for improper cookie use to find his prostitute friend, something the normally moralizing Funkhouser doesn’t object to, and to do that, he needs Leon to go in with a jar of pickles that everyone will fight to open.  Good news:  Larry finds the prostitute, and she agrees to help.

Bad news:  Larry spots Ted and Cheryl and tries to follow them.

Worse news:  he can’t help himself from opening the pickle and getting kicked out of the hotel again.

The absolute worst news:  Larry is on a Zoom call with the Iranian consul to get out of his fatwa (good news the guy is a fan) when Leon and the bodyguard go to remove the prostitute from Funkhouser’s nephew in a guest room because it all happens in Larry’s house for some reason, and Leon’s shouting that his buddy is only supposed to get rid of the Muslims gets Larry hung up on.

I guess that death sentence isn’t going anywhere for a while.