C for "Coffee"

In the last episode of season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry David has an argument with Mocha Joe about the nature of a favor.  Mocha Joe believes a task performed for Larry merited a tip due to the nature of their relationship whereas Larry believed it to be a simple favor between friends.  To actualize his claim Larry agrees to pick up some coffee beans on the other side of town, and, when traffic prevents him from arriving in time to pick up the beans, Larry feels his effort fulfilled his obligation, that trying was enough.  This disagreement on the practicality of semantics is classic Curb Your Enthusiasm.  However, this episode is the climax of the Seinfeld reunion plot of the season, and Larry’s perception is compromised with his counterpart in the reunion, Jerry Seinfeld; when the argument ensues the next day on the set, Jerry happens to be present and meanders into the conversation.

            Jerry sides with Mocha Joe, that he needs coffee beans, not someone driving around for him.   The audience, or at least myself, tends to side with Larry in such arguments, though this privilege has grown highly unstable in the most recent season, most uncomfortably in “The Black Swan” in which Larry is cast as a heartless and murderous mobster silencing the dissent of his closest friends through appeals to their own self preservation.  However, in this particular quarrel we have the other side of the argument privileged through the “icon” Jerry Seinfeld, who can now drown out the “no-con” Larry.  Larry storms off shouting the childish cliché “E for effort” to which Mocha Joe replies “F for favor” and Jerry contributes in pure comic perfection “C for coffee.”

            The essence that each creator brings to both Seinfeld and this season, or at least the episodes with Seinfeld, comes into clear view in this interchange: Mocha Joe is the substance of an episode—the discussion of the nature of a “favor”— this is, indeed, the only one in which we see him; Larry/George is the emotional, self-righteous appeal to process—“effort” as a valued product; Jerry is the indifferent, ironic commentary that favors bourgeois logic—the currency is “coffee,” which Larry does not produce.    That Larry has millions of dollars, is on HBO, and has the critical clout to claim smugly to himself that he was the genius behind Seinfeld makes him everything that George is not; unemployment is a privilege, not a bane; NBC is a joke, not a humiliation; disagreement is the fault of everyone else.  But in the presence of Seinfeld, and Seinfeld, Larry is demoted to the status of George all of a sudden.  He is employed; we can only assume NBC is once again his boss; and Larry has perversely cast his ex-wife as George’s ex-wife, and written their reunion, in an effort to reunite himself with her, thus needing the help of others.  As it turns out, when Jason Alexander quits when Larry changes the ending, he insists that he, Larry, play George, and the cast refuses—though we see a sublime rehearsal of what it would look like had Larry performed George—and Larry is demoted even further, not even allowed to be George.

            Mocha Joe is the episode—both the guest star of this episode and a representative of the archetypical episode—and Jerry and Larry are the opposing interpretations of the episode: for Jerry it is coffee, the physical commodity that stands in for process; for Larry it is process which, in the aesthetic ideal, does not end in any product and may not be represented in any product.  In, “The Pilot” episode of Seinfeld, what is essentially Jerry’s show, Jerry warms up the crowd before the taping and discusses what Jerry is in the exact words that he may describe the successful produced show he is, thus reaching a moment in which the process reaches a product.  However, he is cut off by Crazy Joe Devola who leaps from the crowding shouting Sic semper tyrannis, and it cuts to commercial.  In Larry’s show Jerry interrupts Larry’s conversation—the epitome of the preoccupation with process (dealing with the man who sells coffee on the set of a show) over product (the show being produced on the set)—and interrupts his ideal.  Thus always to tyrants.