While you won’t find “The Finale” on many lists of the best Seinfeld episodes, its influence on pop culture was undeniable, to the point where Larry David and Jeff Schaffer used it as an inspirational touchstone for Curb Your Enthusiasm’s twelfth season and its own final episode. Now streaming with a Max subscription, “No Lessons Learned” is a tour de force in self-reflective storytelling for a series that always kept its foot in reality’s door jamb, and CinemaBlend talked to Schaffer about his biggest laughs from filming the series finale. As well as how Jerry Seinfeld’s return led to that A+ scene with JB Smoove’s Leon.
(Image credit: Max)
How Jerry And Leon’s Hilarious Exchange Came About
In an episode filled with surprising and well-executed cameos — from West Wing fave Allison Janney to the actress who played the little girl that thought she walked in on Larry jerking off in the bathroom — easily the best was Jerry Seinfeld himself, who returned to the HBO comedy for the first time since the 2009 conclusion of Season 7, which reunited the NBC sitcom’s cast and added a lot to Curb‘s list of Seinfeld callback jokes. It allowed the creative team to have Jerry take a front-row seat to Leon’s R-rated musings, and I could have watched an entire episode of their courtroom exchange.
The sex-fueled Leon had one very specific takeaway from his Seinfeld binge-watch that served as the lynchpin for their scene together, and I had to ask Jeff Schaffer how they got to that moment, in which Jerry joked about having hours worth of sex-tape footage with the actresses who played his sitcom character’s girlfriends. And apparently the magic touch needed was just getting Jerry Seinfeld to drop his guard to match JB Smoove’s illicit improvisations. As he put it:
We knew we wanted Leon to be talking about Seinfeld, because we wanted Leon’s take on it. So even in the script, it was a show about ‘weekly ass’ for him. There were other scenes where it’s like, ‘I know you fucking. Where are the tapes?’ And there was more of that, but it was better that we cut the one with him and Larry, where Larry was trying to explain that it’s not real. Then we did the Jerry one, which was amazing. The turn, this is one of those improv things where Leon and Jerry are talking, and JB’s going off about the fuck tapes, and I remember telling Jerry, ‘Just just go with it, go with it. Agree with him, agree with him.’ And so Jerry got there and he’s like, okay, so he does the turn, and then they both knew exactly how to play it.
I love that Curb Your Enthusiasm exists on a level where one hard-to-believe concept (that Jerry would lie to anyone about having Seinfeld sex tapes) meets another unlikely concept (that Leon believes the footage is unwatchable due to being on laserdisc) and somehow creates a perfectly plausible outcome. Although if Curb went on to deliver Season 13, I have to believe Leon would learn all he could about converting laserdisc data to other mediums. If there’s ass involved, Leon finds a way.
Jeff Schaffer continued, saying the main reason that scene happened is because it’s the kind of moment he’d have wanted to see.
It was just one of those really fun improv things where you shape it right as it’s happening, and you’ve got two amazing comedians who know exactly how to play the angles. I just love that scene so much. Those two, God, they were so funny together. We wanted to do a Jerry/Leon scene, [because] if I was an audience member, I would want that.
Sadly, we didn’t get to see Jerry mixing it up with Susie or any of Curb‘s other mainstay favorites, but at least we can cross “Jerry and Leon bonding over fake sex tapes” off the bucket list.
(Image credit: Max)
Curb’s Showrunner Shared The Finale Scenes That Made Him Laugh The Most
Trying to pick a favorite scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final episode is like trying to choose the best spaghetti noodle on the plate: most are equally enjoyable, and the best ones are saucy. So I was particularly glad when I asked Jeff Schaffer what moments were the funniest to watch during filming, and he brought up the scene that caused me to pause the episode because I was laughing so hard.
He began his answer by explaining that the goal, despite its Seinfeld connections and lineup of courtroom cameos, was always for the finale to function as a standard Curb episode, right down to storylines crashing awkwardly into each other. As he put it:
When we knew we were going to do this trial, there were a few important things we wanted to do. One was we wanted Larry to be active. We didn’t want him just sitting there like a human pin cushion taking it. . . . It’s not a clip show, it’s a Curb episode, so we wanted lots of story in it. Having the stories intersect at the trial, like having Jeff and Larry stealing the salad dressing recipe from Auntie Rae, and having Suzy in the wheelchair, and having that come to a head, leading to a sentence that I am not sure it’s ever been said in the universe, which is Auntie Rae going: ‘Fuck you and your monkey ass friend Bathsheba Munderman.’ You don’t hear that every day. I really laughed at that.
As unrealistic as this probably is, Ellia English kinda-sorta-definitely deserves some kind of an Emmy nod for her Auntie Rae portrayal in Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s finale. She not only brought all the same warmth and wisdom from her previous appearances, but English also went completely off the rails when Auntie Rae was on the stand and she realized that she’d been played by Larry and Jeff. The fact that she never said Jeff’s fake name the same way twice was such a smart choice, leading right up to her flipping him off and screaming the total baloney moniker “Bathsheba Munderman.”
Having been along for the Curb ride since the earliest days, Jeff Schaffer also talked about how much he loved the very first scene of the episode, in which Larry gets chided by a flight attendant for using a mobile device, and then rats his friends out for doing the same. It’s classic Larry behavior through and through, which is why it stuck out in the showrunner’s mind.
Right off the top, I love that scene in the airplane when Larry quickly raps on Leon and Jeff. I just thought it was one of my favorite scenes. It’s just so damned funny that he turns on a dime like that. It’s really, really enjoyable. There’s so much I love about this.
As well, Schaffer brought up arguably the episode’s biggest non-sequitur exchange, which he thought was a lovely way to showcase Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s relationship. As he put it:
I love that Jerry came back. I love that we get to see Larry and Jerry talking about nothing. Talking about ‘Would you date a bearded woman if she shaved?’ and laughing with each other. You get a sense of this is how the two of them worked, that this is how they wrote Seinfeld. I think it’s really special. And I love that we brought everybody right to the edge of thinking we were doing the Seinfeld finale exactly, and then subverted it.
I have to imagine that Jerry Seinfeld went into every conversation with Larry David knowing that something completely mundane could be brought up, only for it to take a surprisingly obscene turn somewhere along the way. What starts as an innocent recap about one’s day can very easily turn into a defensive stance about how many other people have had wrongful assumptions about Larry’s penis being erect. Nothing is easy with that guy.
Saying goodbye to Curb Your Enthusiasm is anything but easy, but all twelve seasons are available to stream over and over again on Max for anyone who met their cringe quotas yet for the 2024 TV schedule.