In a midseries episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the HBO show’s star and creator, greets his No. 1 frenemy, Susie, (Susie Essman), who has turned up at a fancy gathering wearing a top hat and a morning coat.
He gives her a once-over, then announces, with all the finesse of a carnival barker, “Ladies and gentlemen, the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.”
Susie shoots him a stink eye. “Like you know anything about fashion,” she sneers.
But Mr. David, 76, might beg to differ. On “Curb,” which ends its 12th and final season on Sunday, he spews barbs like pepper spray, weighing in caustically on a welter of issues: Who gets to consume the larger share of a dessert, to cut in line, to sit at the cool kids’ table?
But his most impassioned critiques have largely centered on fashion and on tartly deconstructing what his friends and other people are wearing.
Throughout his career Mr. David, a Mr. Blackwell of television comedy, has trained a gimlet eye on human foibles. As a creator, executive producer and head writer for seven seasons of “Seinfeld,” he also lent that show his shrewd observational powers. Even those who have not watched (or rewatched) “Seinfeld” may have heard of the puffy shirt, the braless wonder or the fictionalized J. Peterman catalog company, which was inspired by a real business of the same name.
