Curb Your Enthusiasm: Leon And Larry’s 9 Most Ridiculous Schemes

Curb Your Enthusiasm has 11 seasons, making it one of the longest-running live-action comedy shows ever, and it isn’t over yet, as J.B. Smoove posted an update while filming Curb Your Enthusiasm season 12. Smoove plays Leon in the comedy series, and though Curb has changed a lot in the 22 years since it first aired, one of the most welcome updates was Larry’s unlikely street-smart right hand man.

Leon has had a larger role with each consecutive Curb Your Enthusiasm season, and it’s gotten to the point where Larry doesn’t follow through on a scheme without Leon’s input. But Leon has led many schemes of his own too. Between fooling Seinfeld cast members, stealing coffee beans from Cabo San Lucas, and the instantly iconic pickle gambit, the Curb Your Enthusiasm team is never up to any good.

9/9 Foisting Larry’s Assistant

Curb Your Enthusiasm had one of the longest gaps between seasons, but it returned funnier than ever in 2017. At the beginning of season 9, it’s revealed that Jimmy Kimmel foisted his terrible assistant onto Larry, meaning that he made her someone else’s problem instead of having to fire her. As a result, Larry and Leon plan to further foist her onto someone else after she takes too many sick days and fails to accomplish the simplest of tasks.

Though having the idea to foist her onto Susie was completely Larry’s idea, Leon was instrumental in the plan, as he was the person who taught Larry the meaning of the word “foisted.” However, the scheme totally backfired, as Leon replaced Mara as Larry’s assistant, which couldn’t have gone worse.

8/9 Posing As A Man With Groat’s Disease

As Curb Your Enthusiasm follows the day-to-day life of the Seinfeld creator, the show is one of the best TV shows about making TV shows, and there’s no better example of that than season 7. The whole season is about Larry putting together a Seinfeld reunion, which brings back Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Drefus, Jason Alexander, and, of course, Michael Richards. But Richards is finding it hard to tap into the over-the-top, zany Kramer because he’s worried he has Groat’s disease.

To calm his nerves, Leon poses as a man who battled Groat’s disease. However, once again, the scheme totally backfires, as it’s revealed to Richards that the man Leon is posing to be had died two months earlier. Groat’s Disease is a completely fictional disease and was made up for Curb Your Enthusiasm and it has become a running gag. Groat’s disease was mentioned all the way back in season 2, as Larry attended a charity auction event that was held for the disease. But that didn’t go very well either.

7/9 House Husband

Leon was a breath of fresh air when he was introduced in season 6, and he’s the best character who joined after season 1, and that’s because of the creativity that Leon and Larry bring out of each other. After Leon learns that his intimidation tactics can keep tradesmen from scamming women by following through on unnecessary tasks, Larry encourages him to turn it into a business called House Husband.

Unfortunately, Leon didn’t stop to think that all those unnecessary jobs might be required. As a result, all of the jobs that Leon kept the workmen from carrying out led to tons of breakdowns and failures in the women’s households. While House Husband might have been a good idea, it’s useless if that house husband has no trade skills or know-how whatsoever.

6/9 The Coffee Bean Heist

If it wasn’t clear from Larry seemingly buying another house every other season and living a lavish lifestyle in L.A., Larry David is worth hundreds of millions of dollars (via The Things). However, he still has to resort to stealing every now and then. The overarching narrative of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 10 sees Larry starting a coffee shop to compete with Mocha Joe’s. Leon finds the best coffee beans for Latte Larry’s, only they happen to be in Cabo San Lucas and are not for sale.

This leads to the unlikely duo stealing the beans and putting them on a private jet back to L.A. While Larry has always been hateful and has had an erratic moral compass, he had never been a full-on criminal until now. However, this scheme again isn’t completely successful, as the private jet is too heavy with the coffee beans, and they’re thrown off. Nevertheless, they eventually get the stolen beans to L.A., and customers fall in love with the coffee, making it one of Larry and Leon’s biggest successes.

5/9 Searching For Mary Ferguson

Season 11 follows Larry as he creates a new show based on his life as a struggling comedian in New York, Young Larry. But the subplot is just as funny, as it sees Leon trying to find a woman named Mary Ferguson who can replace his ex-girlfriend, also named Mary Ferguson, after he bought non-refundable flights to Asia with her name on the ticket.

If any viewer was in doubt about how real of a friendship Larry and Leon have, this scheme proves how Larry has Leon’s back just as much as Leon has Larry’s back. Larry did everything in his power to help Leon find the perfect Mary Ferguson, and though it doesn’t totally work as Mary Ferguson goes on vacation without Leon, it’s a great example of their teamwork.

4/9 Gotta Go

Of all the guest appearances in Curb, Jon Hamm needs to return, as his two features were stand-out moments in the recent seasons. That’s especially the case in “Elizabeth, Margaret and Larry,” which sees the actor shadowing Larry for a movie role based on the comedy writer. But while Hamm is trying to imitate Larry, Leon and Larry create a new business called Gotta Go, which is an app that allows workers like cashiers to request a stand-in so they can go to the bathroom.

Realistically, there are tons of laws that Larry and Leon are breaking by replacing workers on their shifts, as the employee certainly didn’t approve of it. But despite that, it’s a great idea that has serious potential, and the only reason it didn’t work was because of Leon’s laziness. It even leads to Jon Hamm temporarily working as a cashier at a newsstand.

3/9 Leon In Glasses

Throughout Curb, both Leon and Larry have been guilty of playing the race card on several occasions, but in “Mister Softee,” Leon takes advantage of the underlying racism in society he often runs into in a different way. Larry and Leon realize that Leon is treated like a different person when he wears glasses, and he’s given opportunities that he wouldn’t have gotten if he wasn’t wearing them.

Larry gains from this as well, as he uses Leon’s glasses trick to get him into events, and a glasses-wearing Leon even convinces a therapist to drop a bill that he gave Larry. Of all their schemes, this is one of the very few that never failed and didn’t have any repercussions.

2/9 Leon Pretending To Be Larry

In “Namaste,” after Larry accidentally bumps into a parked car and leaves a note with his details, the owner of the parked car unreasonably talks down to Larry, but when the owner visits Larry at his home with the receipt of the vehicle repairs, it’s a different story entirely.

Larry has Leon pretend to be him, and as a result, the irate owner is shocked when he finds out that Larry is black, and he totally changes his attitude toward him. The owner goes from being angry and demanding money to offering to front the bill himself. While it isn’t the most inventive scheme of the dynamic duo, it’s certainly the most successful given that it saves Larry thousands of dollars.

1/9 The Pickle Gambit

The Pickle Gambit is easily the most ridiculous scheme of Larry and Leon’s, and it takes the concept of everyone wanting to be the hero by opening the pickle jar as far as it can possibly go. In “The Pickle Gambit,” Larry and Leon use a sealed pickle jar as a distraction so that Larry can sneak into a hotel from which he’s been banned. As pickle jars are famously difficult to open, Leon walks into the hotel lobby yelling that he can’t open the pickle jar.

Hilariously, the distraction works perfectly, as everyone in the hotel lobby thinks they can open the pickle jar easier than anyone else. The scheme is a perfect example of how much sillier and less realistic the newer seasons are compared to the pre-hiatus seasons. And though that has gotten a polarizing response from fans, the pickle gambit scheme brilliantly plays on men’s insecurities, which is what Curb Your Enthusiasm has always done best.

NEXT: Curb Your Enthusiasm – 10 Best Characters Who Appeared In Only One Episode