Alas, a rift opens up when Larry leaves a watermark on JLD's obviously very expensive table and will not cop to it.
Larry basically has agreed to do the Seinfeld reunion so that Cheryl, now his ex, can get the role of George's ex-wife and fall back in love with him—but Jerry runs into Meg and offers her the part.
Larry accidentally sends a $300 bottle of wine over to The Office and Extras star in a New York restaurant—he meant to send a bottle, but the server picked out a super-expensive one. Later, at Susie's (Susie Essman) dinner party and always happy to lean into the awkward, Gervais back-handedly compliments Larry on the "broad comedy" of Seinfeld. "Love the laugh track," the single-camera specialist adds with scarf-wearing, cosmopolitan gravitas.
The Emmy winner throws political correctness to the wind in this New York-set episode from season 8. The trouble starts when he insists on chatting with his buddies while Larry's current paramour is playing ambient piano in a cocktail lounge, pointing out that they're in a bar, not Carnegie Hall. Then Larry thinks Fox—who happens to live in the apartment above him—is shaking his head in his direction, but the Family Ties star reminds him that he has Parkinson's and is "a head-shaking fool." Matters aren't helped when Larry doodles a Hitler mustache on a magazine cover in Fox's apartment—on Fox's father-in-law's picture.
Then when Larry opens a can of soda and it explodes, Fox again cites the Parkinson's for the shaken beverage. A battle of wits over the noise coming from upstairs ensues, with Larry unable to tell for sure whether it's the Parkinson's or Fox being an ass.
Larry appears on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about his big musical project, Fatwa!, but first confronts Jimmy over the host having "foisted" his inept assistant onto him, which Jimmy readily admits to, saying she was first foisted onto him by Martin Short.
Meanwhile, apparently he told one too many jokes about the Ayatollah.
Though Jeff informs him it's on every channel, Larry learns that the Ayatollah has put out a fatwa against him from the MSNBC host.
After Fatwa! turns him into a target, a disguise-wearing Larry seeks the counsel of the author, who famously had an actual fatwa put out on him in the 1980s because that Ayatollah found The Satanic Verses blasphemous. "Yeah, it is all those things, it can be scary, can be bewildering, etcetera," Rushdie tells him. "But there are things that you gain. There are a lot of women who are attracted to you in this condition. You are a dangerous man. There are many beautiful women who like that... It's not exactly you, it's the fatwa wrapped around you, like kind of sexy pixie dust."
But the key, Rushdie insists, is to own it and "fatwa sex will follow."
Married four times, most recently to Padma Lakshmi before they divorced in 2007, maybe he wasn't entirely riffing for the sake of ridiculousness.
The actress sends a drink Larry's way in a restaurant and, spurred on by Rushdie's pep talk, he heads over to chat. She's most intrigued—"I want to know everything there is about Larry David"—and, much to Larry's delight, she totally insults Susie by comparing the time she lost her cat to Susie's Little Sister, the girl she was mentoring, going missing. They even agree on a bogus story to explain to a cop how those dents ended up on the hood of his car. Alas, Banks' telling of the story is just a little over the top.
A shame these two don't work out.
The Tony winner lets his ego flag fly when Larry shows up pitch Fatwa!—and doesn't make a great first impression when he immediately asks Lin for two tickets to L.A.'s staging of Hamilton for his shucker (Steven Weber, as an in-demand oyster shucker).
As nuts as it sounds, Lin is totally into the idea, wanting to star in the show and write the songs—all of which Larry agrees to, blaming his timidity to Lin's perch behind a big, intimidating desk.
However, when Lin refuses to get tickets for the shucker, not thinking him worthy of pulling those strings, Larry says he'll take the tickets for himself—and, suspecting a ruse, Lin engages Larry in a stare-down that surely was inspired by years of his own Curb fandom.
When the woman who used to live in Larry's house keeps letting herself in and eventually steals his ficus plant, he takes her to court—Judge Judy's court. But Mrs. Shapiro did such a good job reviving the plant... Case dismissed!
The Emmy-nominated star doesn't shake Larry's hand when they meet before he's due to address an audience of sexual assault survivors (after a misunderstanding results in him being accused of sexual misconduct, because Curb leaves no potentially explosive topic unturned), explaining that she has a cold and doesn't want to get him sick. Which Larry obviously loves.
He starts digging the hole, however, when he suggests that Laverne say glowing things about him in her introduction, whether they're true or not. She explains, no nonsense, that she does not lie. And of course he asks an inane question about transitioning.
So when Laverne leans in for a hug on stage and he backs away, due to the cold, he comes off looking pret-tay, pret-tay bad. And she's happy to let him deal with the repercussions.
Of course Larry needs to tell the very serious Coldplay frontman that he probably won't stick around for his performance at Susie's surprise party for Jeff, after Chris jokingly invites him to come up and sing a song with him.
"People pay a lot of money to see us," the affronted musician says, and immediately Larry is filed away as someone who no longer deserves to hear him sing. To add ego to injury, Chris then says he pulls over when one of his songs comes on the radio and he sings in the shower when he's got company. (Larry also doesn't understand why anyone would want to shower with somebody else.)
Larry and Jeff catch a play starring the British actor and they're blown away both by his performance and by how many people start sobbing in the audience. Jeff calls Clive so Larry can leave a voicemail telling him how great he was. Eventually they meet face to face, at Jeff's for lunch, and Clive is already bearing a grudge because Larry's message sounded so unenthusiastic, he assumed he didn't really like the play.
Larry just says he has a problem with mustering enthusiasm on voicemail... but then sounds positively orgasmic over a sandwich.
The Mad Men star wants to hang out with Larry to observe him, because he's about to play a role based on the Seinfeld creator, and ends up going full method.
"What's the name of the movie, 'The Biggest A--hole That Ever Roamed the Earth'?" Richard Lewis inquires when, out for a drive, he spots the pair at a magazine stand—where, after quizzing the clerk about bathroom breaks, Larry offers to man the stand while the guy takes five. Naturally.
The Today co-hosts kick off the season 10 finale talking on the morning show about Larry's crusade against bad service, his reason for opening Latte Larry's—his very own "spite store"—right next to Mocha Joe's. "Do you ever think the problem was that you were complaining too much?" Dateline host Josh Mankiewicz asks, reporting from the scene.
Inspired by Latte Larry, the Oscar-nominated actor has opened up a "spite deli" right next to another eatery because the owner of Irv's Deli told Hill it was probably his hair that he found in his salad one day.
The two-time Oscar winner also gets in on the spite retail game, opening the slightly larger Sean's Exotic Birds right next to Ray's Exotic Birds—because Ray sold him a bird that didn't talk and wouldn't let Penn return it.
"I was never a very Zen sort of personality," says the actor, known for a short temper back in the day. "But I find myself very, very calm now. I think it's the birds—shut up!" he screams, turning toward a chirping bird.
Larry soon finds out that M.K. Jewelers—right next to the now out-of-business K.L. Jewelers—is a spite shop run by the Bad Moms star, because K.L. once sold her a faulty watch.
But no, Mila can't fix his broken watch. "Sorry, I'm just here for spite," she hisses.