E-Mail This Article to a Friend As nasty as they wanna be The squirm appeal of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Airline BY JOYCE MILLMAN

The most oft-heard assessment of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO comedy series from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, is that it is "painful" to watch, that it makes viewers "squirm" from embarrassment. And you’ll get no disagreement from me.

But I’d like to clear up a misconception. Curb Your Enthusiasm (9:30 p.m. on Sundays) is not painful because of what Larry David the sit-com character (played by Larry David the writer/executive producer) says or does — though what he says and does is usually without tact, taste, or regard for social niceties or human decency. No, Curb is trickier than that. What makes us squirm are the exquisitely heightened over-reactions of other characters to Larry’s "bad behavior" — his punishment is often wildly disproportionate to the crime. Larry is a sarcastic, immature, abrasive asshole. But the people whom he’s offended often turn out to be the bigger assholes.

The structure of a Curb episode is simple. Larry does something wrong. Someone — often his sweet, long-suffering wife, Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), the Jiminy Cricket of the show — points out that he’s behaved badly. Larry tries to right the wrong. But despite his conciliatory efforts, he’s ripped apart with over-the-top righteous indignation by the injured party. The moral of the story — otherwise known as the David Principle — is this: no good deed goes unpunished.

Some unforgettable examples of the David Principle:

"Ted and Mary," from the first season (which has just been released on DVD; see sidebar). Larry’s shoes are stolen from a bowling alley. He orders another pair at Barneys. His original shoes are found, but he never goes back to Barneys to pick up the new pair. By chance, he meets the Barneys salesman on the street; the salesman is incensed because he’s lost his commission. Larry offers (albeit sneeringly) to pay him his percentage; that insults the salesman further. The encounter ends with the salesman blowing a raspberry in Larry’s face and blaming him for all the ills of the world.

"Beloved Aunt," also from the first season. Cheryl’s aunt dies. Larry offers to write the obituary, but when it appears in the newspaper, there’s a typo. Instead of a beloved aunt, the woman is remembered as a beloved . . . well, spell aunt with a "c." Cheryl’s church-going family, not thrilled with Larry the Jew to begin with, accuse him of sabotaging the obituary.

"The Doll," from the second season, possibly the most excruciatingly squirmy Curb ever. Larry is at a party at a producer’s house, where he innocently encourages the producer’s young daughter to cut the hair of her favorite doll. Larry also uses the kid’s bathroom, which off-limits to party guests, because the lock is broken on the guest bathroom. The producer’s wife (played with pitch-perfectly snooty outrage by Rita Wilson, Mrs. Tom Hanks), demands that Larry replace the rare "Judy" doll; other party guests wonder what Larry was doing in the girl’s bathroom. Larry’s dogged efforts to find a substitute for Judy have too many twists to describe here. Suffice to say that the episode ends with Larry in the ladies’ restroom of a movie theater with a bottle of water in his waistband and the little girl screaming, "Mommy, mommy, that bald man’s in the bathroom and there’s something hard in his pants!"

In the Larry David universe, Hell truly is other people. This misanthropic — but, as it turns out, often entirely justified — perspective was also the guiding dark behind Seinfeld. Like Larry, the Seinfeld gang’s efforts to (as George would often yell) "live in a society" always backfired or were disastrously misinterpreted, and they ended up facing the wrath of their fellow New Yorkers, all of whom were nastier and more neurotic than they.

Curb is a minefield of rules for Larry to explode. You can’t give or accept a wedding gift after more than a year; you can’t call somebody on the phone after 10 p.m.; the phone in the doctor’s examination room is not to be used, ever. Larry’s troubles always begin when he dares to argue the rules or question authority. And the genius of Curb is that you start every episode thinking that Larry is in the wrong, but by the end, as he’s being mercilessly shredded by pompous, vindictive "good citizens," you realize that you’re sympathizing and identifying with him. Larry may be a jerk, but he’s an honest one.

The long-awaited January 4 season opener of Curb was a bit of a letdown. The story lines being set up for this fourth season — Mel Brooks offers Larry the role of Max Bialystock in The Producers on Broadway (opposite Ben Stiller) and Cheryl agrees to let him have sex with someone else for their upcoming tenth wedding anniversary — feel "written" compared with past seasons. (The show’s dialogue is improvised around David’s detailed story outlines.) But the other plot nooses being tightened around Larry (he’s rumored to enjoy sex with dogs, he reveals that he prefers to pee standing up) are as intricately woven as ever — you know it’s all going to come back to him in the end. And the January 18 episode, "The Blind Date," has a couple of screamingly funny moments that rank with the finest in all of Curb-dom. One involves Larry having lunch at a Jewish deli with a group of mentally challenged men and an Islamic fundamentalist woman in a burqa. I know, I know: this doesn’t sound like an "appropriate" set-up for humor. But in David’s hands, humor is our last best hope.

Consider the finale of season three, in which all the characters whom Larry had insulted, angered, and disappointed over the previous episodes came together for the opening night of the restaurant of which Larry is a part owner. The chef — who was suffering from a neurological disorder that caused him to swear uncontrollably — made a scene. In a gesture of mingled compassion and self-interest, Larry broke the awkward silence by cursing like the chef. The other restaurant owners followed, and then the guests, until every person in the restaurant was letting profanities fly, losing inhibitions, laughing with fellow diners. It was an unexpectedly warm, moving vision of disparate people united by bad behavior, sharing the thrill of flouting the rules. You could almost picture Larry David in the old Coke commercial, standing on a hilltop surrounded by his joyful followers. He’d like to teach the world to swear.

GIVEN LARRY DAVID’S DETERMINATION to put his characters (and viewers) in the most patience-trying situations possible, it’s no surprise that a second-season episode of his show dealt with a futile attempt by Larry & Cheryl to board an airline flight after misplacing their tickets. And as A&E’s new reality series Airline (10 p.m. Mondays) confirms, air travel is enough to make anyone feel as if he or she were trapped in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Based on a long-running British reality series, Airline turns its cameras on the passengers and employees of Southwest Airlines at Los Angeles and Chicago Midway airports. So many people with short fuses, so many delays and discomforts — what a fiendishly addictive spectacle it all is. But don’t assume that the series is a glorified infomercial for Southwest (the British version was credited with raising the profile of low-cost carrier easyJet). In fact, Airline might dispel the notion that any publicity is good publicity.

In one episode, a couple with an 18-month-old infant are not allowed to check in because they lack proof that the baby is under two years old. They’re told they have to buy a seat for the baby. The incredulous couple try everything, including calling the hospital where the kid was born (the hospital can’t find the record, of course), but the Southwest supervisor is blandly implacable, repeating the rule like a robot. Finally, the couple give in and buy a seat, turning to the camera to declare that they will never fly Southwest again. Afterward, the supervisor tells us that the baby’s mother "wasn’t very nice." Another traveler is stranded in Chicago Midway for eight hours, during which Southwest loses his reservation and bumps him to stand-by, then bumps him again after a weather delay. When he finally gets to check in, the counter clerk cheerfully tells him that he needs to buy a second seat for his "comfort." According to Southwest’s rules, he is a "C.O.S. — customer of size."

And then there are the flight attendants from Hell, Fab Five wanna-be Sam and Debbie Reynolds clone Janie, who relentlessly ham it up on the cabin intercom, forcing passengers to play games and sing songs all the way to Vegas. If I were stuck at 30,000 feet with these two, I know what I’d be thinking: "What would Larry do?"