The Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 Premiere’s Best Joke Is in the Credits
The first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm's final season saves its best for last.
This article contains spoilers for Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12 episode 1.
Much of “Atlanta,” the first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s 12th and final season, plays out as we’ve come to expect from a Larry David misadventure. Our favorite misanthrope heads to the city of peaches to just generally piss everyone off. Victims of Larry this time around include a wealthy South African entrepreneur (played by District 9‘s Sharlto Copley), a hotel maid at the end of her rope (Ann Hurd), and even Leon’s beloved Auntie Rae (Ellia English).
It’s all fun and good but it’s admittedly missing some of the “oomph” you’d expect from the premiere of a beloved comedy’s final season. Thankfully that oomph arrives during the show’s end credits, which play over what is surely one of the best visual gags in the series’ entire run. Behold: Larry David’s mugshot.
A Fulton County mugshot of a glowering old man with distinctive pale eyebrows? Now where have we seen that before … oh right:
Larry’s mugshot is relentless and watches the viewer like a hawk as the familiar Curb Your Enthusiasm credits roll. What makes the bit even funnier are the circumstances leading to Larry’s arrest. While Larry has displayed no shortage of incarceration-worthy antisocial behavior over the years, when the law finally does come for him it’s for one of his rare moments of kindness.
Before he jets back to L.A., Larry wants to return Leon’s Auntie Rae’s glasses to her. Since it’s Election Day, he finds her at a Fulton County polling station where the line is criminally long and the Atlanta sun is unrelenting. He gives the tired auntie a bottled water from his car and is summarily booked for violating Georgia’s Election Integrity Act.
The Election Integrity Act of 2021, originally known as Georgia Senate Bill 202, is a real piece of legislation that overhauled elections in the state. Introduced by a conservative legislature and coming on the heels of unfounded claims of mass voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the bill was viewed by critics as being an anti-democratic voter suppression measure. Section 33 of the act proved to be particularly controversial, as it made it illegal to provide food or water to people waiting in voting lines.
While this controversial bill was undoubtedly in the news at the time of the episode’s writing, the poor fictional Larry David must have forgotten all about it, as I’m sure the rest of us did. Thank God he did or we wouldn’t have gotten one of the best Curb jokes in a long while.
New episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12 premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.
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TV Editor at Den of Geek and Television Critics Association member. Based in Cleveland, Ohio. Very upset about various sporting events.