Curb Your Enthusiasm

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About

Curb Your Enthusiasm is an American television sitcom produced and broadcast by HBO that began airing on October 15th, 2000. Created by Larry David, the co-creator of the 90s popular TV sitcom Seinfeld, the series is centered around a fictionalized version of the comedian as a semi-retired TV producer and follows his day-to-day social interactions with his family, friends and colleagues in Los Angeles, California.

Premise

In continuation from the eponymous hour-long comedy special, the TV series stars Larry David as a fictionalized version of himself, who has a celebrity reputation in the entertainment industry as the co-creator and main writer of the 90s sitcom Seinfeld, living in an affluent neighborhood of Los Angeles with wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines), and co-stars Jeff Garlin as his close friend, Jeff Greene, Susie Essman as Greene's temperamental wife, Susie, and later on, J. B. Smoove as Larry's accidental roommate, Leon Black. In addition to the recurring cast members, the show is well-known for frequent cameo appearances by popular celebrities and public figures, including actors, comedians, athletes and politicians, all of whom play caricaturized versions of themselves.

History

The concept for the show originated from Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, a single-episode HBO mockumentary special that aired on October 17th, 1999, which is centered around a fictionalized version of Larry David who tries to make a comeback as a stand-up comedian with his own hour-long HBO special after many years of hiatus. Following the successful reception of the comedy special, the idea was further developed into a TV series with the same name, which began airing on October 15th, 2000. Since its premiere, the show ran for eight seasons in a total of 80 episodes over the course of the next decade, before it was placed on indefinite hiatus in 2011.

Reception

From the beginning, the series has been met with mostly positive reception and widely regarded as one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of the 2000s, with Metacritic consistently rating the series a score of 80 and above and many others praising its high quality of screenwriting, use of improvisational comedy and bold sense of humor previously unseen in Seinfeld. Over the course of its run, the series has received a total of 39 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, five Golden Globe Award nominations and four Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) nominations, among others.

Fandom

Aside from the official HBO website for the TV show and the Facebook page, the latter of which has over 1.4 million likes, Curb Your Enthusiasm maintains little branded presence in the social media; however, the show is still widely celebrated online through several fan blogs on Tumblr^[4]^[5]^[7] and Twitter,^[12]^[17], a devoted subreddit^[14] on Reddit, as well as various collections of animated GIFs and still shots featuring memorable quotes from the show that can be found on Tumblr^[7], Giphy^[6], Pinterest^[8] and BuzzFeed.^[9]

Quotes

"Because of Parkinson's"

On September 11th, 2011, HBO aired an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm titled “Larry vs. Michael J. Fox,” guest starring Michael J. Fox as himself. The episode featured a number of jokes on the topic of Parkinson's disease, including a scene where an annoyed Fox gives Larry David a shaken soda drink, claiming it was due to the illness.

Theme Song Remixes

Online, the show's opening and closing theme song, "Frolic" by Italian composer Luciano Michelini, has been used as background music for comedic effect in FAIL or cringeworthy videos that illustrate Seinfeld-like dilemmas and socially awkward situations, creating Curb Your Enthusiasm theme remixes. On December 21st, 2015, one of the earliest viral remixes sampling the outro theme was uploaded by YouTuber Jake Rasmussen, featuring the video clip of comedian Steve Harvey's mix-up of the winning pageant at the 2015 Miss Universe ceremony. On December 22nd, Redditor SNAFU01 created the subreddit /r/memeyourenthusiasm^[19] to catalogue various remixes that soon followed afterwards.

[This video has been removed]

On March 24th, 2016, Dan Brill and Phillip Pastore, New York City-based ad agency copywriters, launched Curb Your Enthusiasm^[10], an audio-video mashup generator website that allows its user to create custom remix videos by cueing the tune during playback of any YouTube clip.