10 Funniest Curb Your Enthusiasm Episode Endings Of All Time, Ranked

Summary Curb Your Enthusiasm's iconic twist endings are filled with brilliantly ironic payoffs to the episodes' storytelling.

Examples like "Club Soda and Salt" and "Kamikaze Bingo" showcase the show's signature absurd humor and clever surprises.

The series' memorable closing scenes bring together multiple story threads for the perfect punchline, making for some of the funniest TV moments.

One of the funniest parts of Curb Your Enthusiasm was the episodes’ hilariously ironic twist endings with the classic theme music playing the final scene into the credits. These endings are so popular and iconic that they’ve become a meme, with people playing the Curb theme over just about anything. But a lot of those memes have missed what made Larry David’s Curb endings so ingenious. In meme form, Curb’s theme tune and end credits are tagged onto any mildly amusing footage or embarrassing situation.

But David would end each episode on a brilliantly ironic payoff to a whole half-hour of storytelling. An A-plot and a B-plot would come crashing into each other for the perfect punchline to an episode’s narrative. From Larry proudly watching the patrons of his newly opened restaurant yell curse words to Cheryl’s family catching him in a compromising position with a troupe of Nativity actors, these are the absolute funniest endings from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s 25-year history.

10 Club Soda And Salt

Season 3, Episode 3

Throughout season 3’s “Club Soda and Salt,” Larry offends a store clerk who won’t leave him alone, then gets accused of stalking her when his route home happens to mirror hers. He worries that Cheryl’s new friend Brad wants to sleep with her and learns a novel way to clean up a stain: pour club soda on it, then cover it in table salt. In the final scene, these three story threads collide for a hilarious closing image.

The clerk’s husband violently confronts Larry at a restaurant, causing him to spill wine on Cheryl’s top. Brad springs into action, grabs club soda and salt, and starts rubbing it on Cheryl’s chest. The episode’s hysterical final shot sees Larry distracted from his violent altercation as he sees the friend his wife told him not to worry about smearing soda and salt on her breasts.

9 Kamikaze Bingo

Season 5, Episode 4

Any Curb ending that sees a crowd descending on Larry and backing him into a corner is always a treat. This can be seen when he’s ambushed by Girl Scouts in season 8, episode 1, “The Divorce,” and when he’s confronted by a campaign team after his vote cost them the election in season 11, episode 7, “Irma Kostroski.” Arguably the funniest example of this trope is the ending of season 5, episode 4, “Kamikaze Bingo.”

After questioning whether a kamikaze pilot who survived the war is really a kamikaze pilot and being mistakenly overheard telling an elderly woman to drop dead, Larry has infuriated just about everybody in his dad’s retirement home. As the crowd descends upon him, the veteran kamikaze pilot yells out, “Banzai!!” and charges at Larry in his electric wheelchair. This absurd slapstick gag is about as far as David could possibly take this premise (and it’s beautiful).

8 Palestinian Chicken

Season 8, Episode 3

Season 8’s “Palestinian Chicken” is widely considered to be one of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s strongest episodes. It’s renowned for reducing the long-standing conflict between Israel and Palestine to a chicken restaurant in Los Angeles – and its final scene reduces that conflict to Larry deciding if he wants to keep his friends happy or spice up his sex life. The episode ends with Larry getting stuck in traffic at a protest.

Susie, Funkhouser, and all of Larry’s Jewish friends are protesting the Palestinian chicken chefs for opening a restaurant next to a deli, while Larry’s latest lover Shara and her co-workers are protesting for their right to open the restaurant. Susie will be furious if Larry doesn’t join their side, but Shara propositions Larry for a threesome if he joins her side. The final shot sees Larry grappling with the decision as the Curb theme kicks in.

7 Mary, Joseph, And Larry

Season 3, Episode 9

The closest thing that Curb Your Enthusiasm ever did to a Christmas episode was season 3’s “Mary, Joseph, and Larry.” Cheryl’s family comes to visit for the holidays and Larry manages to turn every last one of them against him when he eats all their Nativity cookies on Christmas Eve (after mistaking them for animal crackers). In an attempt to make it up to them, Larry hires the cast of a Nativity scene from the local church to set up the Nativity scene in his driveway to surprise Cheryl and her family when they get home.

All the while, Larry is trying to get a pubic hair out of his throat. While the Nativity actors are setting up, Larry makes one off-color remark too many to Joseph and they get into a scuffle in the hay next to the manger. During the fight, Larry finally coughs up the pubic hair – just in time to see Cheryl and her thoroughly unimpressed parents standing over him. It’s a classic example of Larry trying to do the right thing and making everything so much worse.

6 Vehicular Fellatio

Season 7, Episode 2

Season 7’s “Vehicular Fellatio” has a lot of fun with the premise of oral sex in a car. Loretta fires her doctor after finding out she did it, Richard Lewis’ girlfriend breaks up with him when he tells Larry she did it, and Auntie Rae mistakenly believes Larry is doing it, prompting her, Loretta, and the kids to finally move out of Larry’s house. The final scene ties into this running gag, but it also brilliantly pays off the opening scene.

The episode opens with Larry facing a relatable frustration: struggling to open watertight plastic packaging. He buys an Exacto knife to make it easier to open this packaging, and when he comes across Jeff and Susie in a car crash caused by an oral sex-related distraction, he offers to use the Exacto knife to save them. But when he takes it out, he’s dismayed to find that the Exacto knife itself is sealed in impenetrable plastic packaging. It’s classic Curb irony.

5 The Corpse-Sniffing Dog

Season 3, Episode 7

Larry goes through a hilarious back-and-forth as he tries to do the right thing and ends up infuriating everybody in season 3’s “The Corpse-Sniffing Dog.” Jeff is allergic to his dog and Sammi chose the dog over her own father, so he can’t stay in his house as long as the dog is there. Larry convinces Sammi to give up the dog to a family he knows that wants a dog, but little does he know, he’s accidentally gotten her drunk before she agrees to that.

So, Larry takes the dog from the Greenes’ house to the Braudys’ house and tells Jeff he can go home. Then, when he’s confronted by a furious Susie, he’s forced to take the dog back from the Braudys and return him to the Greenes. The episode culminates in the hilarious final shot of Jeff eagerly getting his luggage out of his car to move back into his house, then putting his luggage right back in his car when Larry arrives with the dog.

4 Vow Of Silence

Season 8, Episode 5

Season 8’s overarching storyline of Larry going to New York kicks off in episode 5, “Vow of Silence.” Jeff and Susie are getting ready to go to New York and Larry keeps getting bothered by an old Seinfeld director who wants to rope him into doing some charity work. Meanwhile, in one of Richard Lewis’ best Curb storylines, he demands a “confirmation call” before meeting up with Larry for lunch. Larry argues that making the plan constitutes a confirmation and Richard reluctantly agrees to meet for lunch without a confirmation call.

By the end of the episode, as Larry has run out of excuses, he’s committed to taking a months-long trip to New York just to avoid one day of charity work. As Susie chastises Larry and celebrates the fact that she’s going to New York where she won’t have to deal with him, the episode cuts to Larry sitting beside her on the plane. And then it ends on the hilarious image of Richard sitting alone in a restaurant.

3 The Bare Midriff

Season 7, Episode 6

Season 7’s “The Bare Midriff” has one of the wildest and wackiest endings of any Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. It starts off with Larry and Jerry Seinfeld trying to figure out how to get rid of an assistant, Maureen (one of the witnesses who testified against Larry in the Curb finale), who wears crop tops and makes them uncomfortable with her exposed midriff. Along the way, Larry unwittingly manufactures a miracle and Maureen and her mother prepare to go on the road, showing the miracle to other Christians.

However, when they find out the miracle was a fake, the mother goes out onto a ledge to take her own life. As Larry carefully approaches her to save her, she knocks him off the ledge, and as he’s about to fall to his death, he grabs onto Maureen’s exposed midriff. It’s a slapstick gag that’s just ridiculous enough to work.

2 The Doll

Season 2, Episode 7

The first true Curb Your Enthusiasm masterpiece was season 2’s “The Doll.” After Larry cuts a little girl’s doll’s hair, he runs into problems with her dad (who happens to run the network that just picked up Larry’s new show). He spends the whole episode trying to fix the doll problem, decapitating Sammi’s doll to replace the short-haired head. He’s also drinking a lot of water on his doctor’s orders and he infuriates Cheryl by leaving his post while she’s in the bathroom, allowing the network head to walk in on her.

These story threads all come crashing together in the episode’s hilarious final scene. Cheryl leaves her post while Larry is in the bathroom and the little girl walks in. She gives Larry a hug to thank him for fixing her doll’s hair and feels the water bottle in his pocket. She then runs out of the bathroom and yells, “Mommy! Mommy! That bald man’s in the bathroom and there’s something hard in his pants!” It’s a classic Curb misunderstanding.

1 The Grand Opening

Season 3, Episode 10

Easily the greatest – and most triumphant – ending of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm is the season 3 finale, “The Grand Opening.” The season-long arc of Larry investing in a restaurant that’s plagued with disaster culminates in the hiring of a head chef with Tourette’s syndrome. In the middle of the opening night, just as Larry feared, the chef launches into a profane tirade, bringing the entire restaurant to a stunned silence.

Larry shows solidarity with the chef by yelling out his own series of swear words. Then, Jeff joins in, and all the other investors, and eventually everyone in the restaurant is gleefully shouting out curse words. The final shot swooping through the restaurant to show Larry proudly watching his customers curse is one of the funniest images from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s entire run.