Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Final Larry David/Jerry Seinfeld Punch Line Was a Last-Minute Larry/Jerry Improv

SE: Yeah, when I had to play his wife. I thought the same thing. Larry always says it’s one of his favorite scenes in one of his favorite episodes. Having to play his Orthodox wife was just one of the most fun scenes we ever shot.

JS: I’m glad you noticed that. It was really, really important for us that it wasn’t just our cast sitting in a trial, but that we had stories, Curb stories with fun Curb moments for our Curb cast woven through the show. And the stories actually propel the show. Not the flashbacks. Not the trial. That was the thing we worked the hardest at that I’m actually the most satisfied about, is that it’s a Curb episode. Not a clip show.

SE: And these two, Larry and Jeff, the brilliance of them of being able to figure those things out—it looks so organic when you see the episode. But there’s painstaking work that goes behind it of trying to figure out how to weave all these storylines together and the flashbacks and the finale and the ending and Journey Gunderson, and all of that stuff.

JS: Susie had another big moment in the middle [of the episode]. It was super funny, but the story wasn’t quite right and it wasn’t happening in the court. And we actually did a re-shoot so that her being in the wheelchair intersected with her [original moment] in court now. It makes the court feel like it’s part of the story, not like some separate thing.

Were there other story beats or character beats that you had always wanted to try that you were maybe trying to get in this episode or this final season that you just didn’t have time for?

SE: There was another storyline that we shot of mine that just wasn’t gelling. It was more of a storyline to give me something funny. And the idea of it was funny, but it just wasn’t moving the story forward, I think. Is that correct, Jeff?

JS: Yeah. And so then we got her big funny moment that moves the story forward because it happened in court. But I was about to say to you, we don’t really think like that, like, “Oh, there’s this moment that we want to get in, so let’s force it in here.” Because it really depends on exactly what Susie said: what’s moving the story forward?

But to contradict myself twice in this episode alone, Larry had this funny thing about dating the bearded woman once she shaved and he’d wanted to talk about that. It’s something that we had talked about as we were writing in many different episodes, and I’m so glad we saved it because it was the perfect thing for Larry and Jerry to talk about, a real coffee shop hypothetical.

And watching these two just talk about an idea and giving you a glimpse of what it must’ve been like for them to create Seinfeld and what it’s like for these two to work together. And then the other thing. The final scene of this show—arguing about who gets to control the plane window—we shot that scene twice. We shot it in season nine, we shot it in season 11, and we cut it both times. It was extra. It was an extra thing. And we knew we wanted a scene at the end on the plane, something they could all be arguing about. We’re like, “Oh my God, it finally fits.” So there are things that we’ve hung onto, that we’ve liked, but if it doesn’t fit the pace, it goes.