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I.
A man is trapped in gridlocked traffic on the freeway. He is alone; he is late. He is never going to make this damn Dodger game, and he would really to make to this damn Dodger game, because while he may be a Yankee fan at heart, sports are sports. The carpool lane is moving, but he cannot use the car pool lane while driving by himself, he tells his friend over the phone, because that would be unethical, and our man adheres to a moral code, even if that code is often vexing and perverse.
And then inspiration strikes: The man spots a prostitute. He pulls over, picks her up, and merges into the carpool lane, where the traffic flows freely. He fulfills his dream: He makes it to the Dodger game, a hired hand at his side. At the ballpark, accompanied by his new acquaintance, he can join a chorus of other sports fans who also think they know the ways of the world better than everyone else.
The year is 2004. The episode of television is called “The Car Pool Lane,” and the show is called Curb Your Enthusiasm. Two decades later, the actor who plays this man is not only the most brilliant interpreter of American manners since Emily Post and one of the greatest American comic minds since Mark Twain; he is also the epitomal sports fan—never happy, always griping, and yet willing to throw himself into this one thing, over and over again, because it’s easier to feel something at a ballpark than it is at a therapist’s office. He is a talk-radio caller who happens to be the star of a T.V. show.
The man’s name is Larry David. He is played on T.V. by a man who also happens to be named Larry David. He is a rude and prickly curmudgeon, but deep down, he is also a believer. And in a lot of ways, sports are the only way he can truly explain his beliefs to the world.
II.
There is a moment in last Sunday’s finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which an emotionally challenged Larry insists he has experienced both love and loss. As proof of his experience of loss, he mentions watching his New York Yankees lose four straight to the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 American League Championship Series; as proof of his ability to love, he cites the New York Rangers winning the Stanley Cup in 1994 after a 54-year drought.
It is both an entirely stupid answer, and an entirely relatable answer.
III.
“I’m 76 years old,” Larry David the character says to a misbehaving child in the Curb finale. “And I’ve never learned a lesson in my life.”
IV.
Sure, I grew up in a Jewish-American household with a father who bears a striking resemblance to Larry David—both in look and in manner—but it’s not just me: Among many of our people, sports are a safe outlet for kvetching about the state of things, a way of expressing our emotions while still maintaining a safe distance from them. The world is not fair, life is not fair, and sports are not fair. You are going to be disappointed far more often than you will be happy. You will cycle through periods of hope—a highly ranked preseason team, a hopeful spring training, a winning streak—and then you will fall into a period of despair. And you will never learn your lesson on this one, because sports are here to ensure that you don’t.
“Sports provide a socially acceptable forum for his nonstop complaints, regrets, shoulda-woulda-couldas, and laundry lists of enemies and perceived slights,” wrote The Ringer’s Katie Baker of the David’s propensity to weave sports plotlines into both Seinfeld and Curb—and to spout off with ridiculous real-life opinions to people who will actually listen. He is miserable, but he is also hopeful. If the Rangers can win the Stanley Cup, maybe people can be better. Maybe he can be better. I mean, probably not, but you never know.
“That, I think, is what we’ve been watching this show to experience: Larry’s duality,” writes Wesley Morris in The New York Times Magazine. “A whole other side of his character and David’s performance radiates warmth, generosity, concern, devotion — joy in people, belief in them, patience for even those of us in error. Empathy stirs within him.”
V.
“The Car Pool Lane” is one of the best Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes of all-time; includes not only the Dodger Stadium/streetwalker subplot, but a digression into Larry buying and smoking weed and experiencing an existential crisis while looking in the mirror, as well as maybe the best closing scene in Curb history. But “The Car Pool Lane” is also the most socially impactful Curb episode ever, as it literally saved an innocent man from prison.
This, of course, was entirely coincidental; neither the real-life Larry David or the fictional Larry David knew what to do with a coincidence of such magnitude. But it was fitting that it took place at a ballpark, the truest—and the only—place for the greatest malcontent of the past three decades to confront an actual emotion.
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