Life, Larry, And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness “Deepthroat”

Look, I know this is just a mini-series to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country and Larry David basically quit Curb Your Enthusiasm because of his age, but…can we get more of this stuff in the future?  I’m just digging the hell out of it.

Ok, I normally dig the hell out of this show, but this episode, maybe, not so much.  The central jokes didn’t work as well for me.  The first one shows Beck Bennett’s Bob Woodward trying to get information from Larry’s Deepthroat, but all he has is useless gossip that frustrates Woodward enough to quit the conversation.  It’s an OK joke.

The final segment is maybe the weirdest, where Larry is playing Jonas Salk’s very stereotypically Jewish mother, bragging to a neighbor about how smart her son the polio vaccine inventor is before getting into an argument with another neighbor, Bobby, about how vaccines are a good idea and maybe he shouldn’t eat roadkill.  Some men in white suits show up to take Bobby away.  It’s topical!  Like, way more so than I let on here.

Slightly better is Larry as another sterotypical Jew, this time a rabbi, trying to go for a test drive with huge antisemite Henry Ford (played by Ike Barinholz).  That ends with a car crash, and the rabbi gives Ford some blood, making Ford suddenly a little Jewish.

No, the best sketch was Larry as bachelor president James Buchanan, a man many historians somewhat blame for the Civil War in that he didn’t really do anything to try and stop it.  Now, many suspect Buchanan’s bachelorhood was due to the fact he was secretly gay, but I won’t let that get in my way of a good time where Buchanan throws a dinner party with no dinner (just hors d’oeuvre) because he doesn’t want to sit down to dinner, and what he really wants to do is pick up a woman for his First Lady, not talk to Jefferson Davis about maybe stopping a potential war.  Instead, Buchanan strikes out multiple times because he’s not good at flirting (one of the women is played by Fast and Furious actress Jordana Brewster).  Davis eventually is offended there’s no actual sit-down dinner, and war may be inevitable.

Huh, maybe Buchanan was the worst president…