Larry’s Second Arrest & 9 Other Best Moments

Summary

• Leon and Larry get banned from an all-you-can-eat restaurant and retaliate with spray paint.
• Larry finds a novel way to utilize bathroom time by memorizing the Gettysburg Address.
• Susie’s billboard gets defaced with a giant penis, leading to increased sales for her business.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12, episode 6.

From Larry’s second arrest to Leon’s rivalry with the proprietor of an all-you-can-eat restaurant, Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12, episode 6, “The Gettysburg Address,” is full of hilarious moments. After finally breaking up with Irma last week, Larry is back on the dating scene (and back to making terrible faux pas that ruin his promising relationships). Susie has started a caftan business that she’s advertising with a ludicrously extravagant billboard, Ted Danson is playing Abraham Lincoln on stage opposite Lori Loughlin’s Mary Todd, and Sienna Miller can’t perform well in a scene unless she’s chomping on a piece of fruit.

With Loughlin’s self-spoofing nod to the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and Jeff’s ridiculous recreation of the Will Smith Oscars slap, this week’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm had a lot of fun with celebrity controversies. The episode has some of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12’s best guest stars, including Ike Barinholtz as the restauranteur who runs afoul of Leon, and some of the funniest lines from the season so far (“Keep my wife’s business out of your motherf***in’ mouth!”). “The Gettysburg Address” is jam-packed with memorable moments.

10 Larry & Leon Get Banned From An All-You-Can-Eat Restaurant (& Vandalize It)

“NOT All You Can Eat”

Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12, episode 6 opens in an all-you-can-eat restaurant, where Larry has enjoyed just one plate of food and Leon is getting ready to fill a fifth. But before he can get a fifth plate, the proprietor of the restaurant, Shimon – played by guest star Ike Barinholtz – stops by the table to cut him off. The ensuing argument results in a lifetime ban for Leon, and Larry’s subsequent protest gets him banned for life, too. So, Larry and Leon decide to exact revenge by spray-painting a “NOT” in front of the restaurant’s “All You Can Eat” sign.

9 Larry Thinks Of A Novel Way To Utilize His Bathroom Time

“Four score and seven years ago…”

At the beginning of the episode, it occurs to Larry that he’s wasted hundreds of hours of his life urinating, so he decides to come up with a way to utilize that time. He starts bringing a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address speech into the bathroom with him. As the episode goes on, he doesn’t even need his document anymore as he’s learned to recite the speech from memory. Unfortunately, this later comes back to bite him in the most unexpected way.

8 Susie’s Billboard Gets Defaced

And she sees a big bump in sales because of it

Early in the episode, Susie unveils a billboard for her caftan business, bearing the image of herself wearing one of the caftans. The next time Larry drives past the billboard, he’s delighted to find that an opportunist graffiti artist has spray-painted a giant penis in Susie’s hand. At first, Susie wants to get the graffiti taken down, but she’s surprised to find that business is booming, because the penis has drawn more attention to the billboard.

7 Larry Gets In Trouble For Putting His Jacket On The Back Of His Chair

Where should theatergoers put their jackets?

At a friends-and-family screening of Sienna Miller’s latest film, Larry takes off his jacket and drapes it over the back of his chair. The man behind him objects, claiming that Larry’s jacket is giving him a lap dance, and says he should instead drape it over the chair in front of him. Larry argues that if he did that, his jacket would be on the neck of the person in front of him. This is a classic bit of Curb minutiae, and it’s a relatable dilemma: where is the most convenient place for a theatergoer to put their jacket?

6 Sienna Miller Needs Fruit To Act

She’s about to get fired until she brings a pear to the scene

During his date with Sienna Miller, Larry points out that she eats a lot of fruit in her movies, and wonders if it’s the key to her acting method. There’s a hilariously meta element here as Miller is eating popcorn through the scene in which Larry points out that she eats in all her scenes. Larry’s comment makes Miller self-conscious, so she refuses to eat in her new movie, and she almost gets fired as she can’t act well without fruit. Fortunately, Larry arrives with a pear to save the day.

5 Lori Loughlin Parodies The Varsity Blues Scandal

Loughlin lampoons her own history of bribery

Ted Danson asks Larry to endorse his new co-star Lori Loughlin for membership at the country club, since the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has gotten her blacklisted from every other country club. After putting his own reputation on the line to vouch for her, Larry is shocked to learn that Loughlin’s penchant for bribery extends beyond college admissions. She also bribed her way into obtaining an accessible parking sticker for her car. After Bill Buckner and Michael Richards, Loughlin is the latest public figure to parody their own controversies on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

4 Jeff Parodies The Will Smith Oscars Slap

“Keep my wife’s business out of your motherf***in’ mouth!”

After Susie is mocked in public for her vandalized billboard, she forces Jeff to confront the guy. Jeff begrudgingly goes over to the guy who made fun of Susie, pretends to rough him up while secretly asking him to play along, and fake-slaps him across the face. This is a hilarious parody of Will Smith’s Oscars slap, complete with a play on Smith’s notorious “Keep my wife’s name…” one-liner. This scene doesn’t just reference the slap; it also highlights the performative nature of the slap, as Jeff only confronts the guy to make his wife happy.

3 “Fish Stuck” Gets A Callback

The waiter who covered up the fish’s death returns

In one of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s most unexpected callbacks, Larry bumps into a waiter from his favorite Chinese restaurant at Ted’s play. This waiter previously appeared in last week’s episode – Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12, episode 5, “Fish Stuck” – in which Larry became convinced that he’d let a fish die in the restaurant’s fish tank. In episode 6, Larry still hasn’t let it go, and they have yet another argument about the mysterious fate of the fish.

2 Larry Has A Pavlovian Response To The Gettysburg Address

Larry discovers the downside of learning in the bathroom

After spending the whole episode reciting the Gettysburg Address every time he goes to the bathroom, Larry discovers the unfortunate downside of learning while peeing. During Ted’s Lincoln play, when he starts delivering the Gettysburg Address, Larry has the sudden urge to pee. He describes it as a Pavlovian response as he’s unintentionally conditioned himself to urinate whenever he hears Lincoln’s most famous speech.

1 Larry Gets Arrested Again

This time, it’s not quite as noble

When he sees graffiti similar to Susie’s on Sienna Miller’s movie poster, Larry does an illegal U-turn so he can snap a picture of it. He’s pulled over by a police officer for making the U-turn, and this officer quickly discovers a box of spray paint in the back of Larry’s car (from when he and Leon vandalized the all-you-can-eat restaurant). Larry ends up getting arrested again, and this time, it’s for a much less noble reason than his unintentional act of activism in Atlanta. This will surely have massive repercussions for the rest of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12.