Larry David Says Pairing Michael Richards With JB Smoove on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Was Deliberate

According to Larry David, Michael Richards needed a win at the time of the Seinfeld reunion season on Curb Your Enthusiasm almost as much as he needed Danny Duberstein.

By now, everyone who is remotely familiar with the cast of Seinfeld knows the story of Richards’ infamous Laugh Factory set in 2006. Irate at the disruption of some hecklers, the man who was once Cosmo Kramer unleashed a racist, slur-laden tirade that, unbeknownst to him, was caught on camera and quickly sent to TMZ for mass dissemination. Richards’ comedy career never fully recovered from the meltdown, but, three years later, he would get to relive some of his glory days during a three-episode arc in Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Seven that featured the Seinfeld cast coming together for a reunion while the fictionalized version of Richards turned to a peculiar accountant named Danny Duberstein for some help managing his Groat’s Disease.

In one of J.B. Smoove’s finest scenes in all of Curb Your Enthusiasm, an undercover Leon Black educates Richards on how to beat his chronic illness in the episode “The Table Read.” But, behind the scenes, the pairing of Leon and Kramer was really a favor from David, who, in a newly released excerpt from the upcoming book No Lessons Learned: The Making of Curb Your Enthusiasm As Told by Larry David and the Cast and Crew, admitted that he had Richards do some self-deprecating scenes with Smoove in order to smooth out his public image. “I just wanted to put him on the show,” David explained.

Of course, a couple of jokes about Richards’ 2006 scandal weren’t exactly enough for the comic to fully beat the racism allegations, but it still worked better than treating Groat’s with a hat.

“I wanted to do something for Michael (Richards). Like a little gesture for him in that episode because he was coming off of that horrible stand-up set,” David said of his semi-controversial decision to put Richards back in the spotlight barely three years after he screamed some serious slurs from center stage. “So we ended up pairing him with JB, who was playing Leon playing Danny Duberstein.”

In “The Table Read,” Richards reveals that he is hesitant to perform in the planned Seinfeld reunion episode because he is grappling with a recent diagnosis for Groat's Disease, a fictional illness introduced to the Curb Your Enthusiasm canon by guest star Rob Reiner in the Season Two episode “The Thong.” Worried that his new project will fall apart without Richards, David convinces his star to speak to one of his associates who also suffers from Groat’s, an accountant named Danny Duberstein, before making any rash decisions. Little did David know that the real Duberstein was already dead.

So, Leon, freshly converted to the Nation of Islam (purely for seduction purposes), shows up to the studio lot to talk Groat’s with the disgraced actor, leading to many hilarious references to Richards’ past indiscretions and culminating in another filmed public meltdown.

The result of David’s favor to Richards was one of the stronger Curb episodes from those mid-seasons and a mild boost in Richards’ public likability following his racism scandal. We should count ourselves lucky that David didn’t attempt to perform a similar experiment in exposure therapy for any of his other controversial Seinfeld actors — nobody wants to see Jerry Seinfeld paired up with a high school girl again.