if you played competitive magic you might have a better grasp of what is "good" but please do not degenerate this into a discussion of power-max
more seriously: haha come on the world of Curb is full of preposterous female characters. obviously the preposterous characters are not limited to women. marty funkhouser is a prick too. about half of larry's one-off antagonists also have penises. yet i am not sure who would find the character cheryl's personality attractive. analogous people come out of the woodwork in social media regularly. they stand on ceremony and are such 'good' people they would rather ruin a friendship than countenance an unkind word. (i will go on at the risk of overexplaining the joke.) they will judge people on a lack of ideological purity, however, this ersatz sense of judgment (inseparable from their non-existent senses of irony) makes them very easy to manipulate. manipulating them is mean, but at least it can be funny. treating them with respect can only end in boredom and misery, yet they excommunicate everyone who doesn't (convincingly pretend to) and thereby treat the symptoms of their low self-esteem. when i hang around this kind of person, male or female, i realize i am unhappy and have that same sense of being a 'good person' and have forgotten how to make a joke and i dislike myself. i have often hung out with women i would not have hung out with if they were dudes and i assume this is a common experience, as well as a running joke on curb, a joke that is on the larrys. as for the larry character, i admire his attempts to rise above this, but i wonder why he hangs out in such terrible company. i couldn't manage six seasons about "annoying people on MTS"
anyway, this sort of person does exist and their hypocrisies are amusing. like other unhappy people, they assume everyone else thinks like them and thereby attribute self-righteousness and mean-spiritedness to jokes, which is not always untrue. were these people to be cast as ridiculous (if harmless) anti-larrys in curb, and they generated a few laughs there, then they would have found their true calling. it's quite noble of larry to make fun of them. they don't really enjoy themselves. someone might as well. if someone never laughs at themselves, you see, it is imperative you do that for them. yet the joke can get old fast. it may be the case the show is impossible to enjoy unless you see yourself, through old-man glasses, as larry. my read is that it's pretty self-indulgent, but as far as that kind of humor goes it's a thousand times less insufferable than Woody Allen
