Curb Your Enthusiasm's 10 Best Leon Black Episodes Of All Time

Summary Leon Black became a game-changer in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and his best episodes are unforgettable.

J.B. Smoove's Leon is a comedic force, stealing scenes with absurdity and innovative ideas.

Leon's antics, from exposed testicles to taboo-breaking jokes, make him a highlight of the show.

Curb Your Enthusiasm changed forever with the introduction of Leon Black, and he ended up headlining some of the show’s best episodes. At the beginning of season 6, Cheryl convinced Larry to open up their house to a family who were left homeless by a massive storm called Hurricane Edna (a satirical stand-in for Katrina). Loretta Black, Auntie Rae, and Loretta’s kids promptly flew out to Los Angeles to move in. A couple of days later, Loretta’s motormouth brother Leon showed up and began occupying a guest bedroom (despite already living in L.A., far from the hurricane’s path of destruction).

Leon ended up staying with Larry for the rest of the series. Even after his family moved out, Leon continued to take up a room in Larry’s house. The longer Leon stayed with Larry, the funnier it got. The cast of Curb Your Enthusiasm is full of great improvisers, but J.B. Smoove just might be the show’s best improviser – he’s in a league of his own. From his Danny Duberstein impersonation in “The Table Read” to his brief stint as Larry’s assistant in “Foisted!,” these are the best Leon episodes from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s entire run.

10 The Rat Dog

Season 6, Episode 6

Larry ends up going to a middle-school production of Grease with Jeff’s exterminator in season 6’s “The Rat Dog.” There are a ton of classic Leon moments in this episode. When the exterminator arrives to pick up Larry, Leon sizes him up like a nosy, overprotective father interrogating his daughter’s prom date. When Leon and Larry get their phones mixed up, Leon unwittingly offends Larry’s friend, who thinks that Leon is Larry doing a racist impression of a Black man.

J.B. Smoove once again proves what a perfect foil he is for Larry David as they get a few minutes’ worth of comedy gold out of a discussion about toast: “If I put this toast back in that toaster, it’s gonna lose its essence!” On the whole, “The Rat Dog” isn’t a particularly strong Curb episode. But it is a great showcase for Leon.

9 Vertical Drop, Horizontal Tug

Season 12, Episode 3

In season 12’s “Vertical Drop, Horizontal Tug,” Leon’s entire storyline sees his testicles repeatedly popping out of his shorts. Larry realizes that people will cut a conversation short when they see Leon’s balls hanging out of his shorts, so he decides to use that technique to his advantage. When Mr. Takahashi wants to have a word with Larry in his office, Larry shows up in a pair of short shorts. This is a great example of Leon being an innovator in a wildly unconventional way.

This episode has one of Leon’s all-time most hilarious lines. After Leon’s exposed testicles get Larry out of yet another jam, Larry thanks Leon, then thanks his balls. Leon quips, “My balls said, ‘You’re welcome.’” This beautifully absurd J.B. Smoove ad-lib was one of the biggest laughs in Curb’s final season.

8 Foisted!

Season 9, Episode 1

In the season 9 premiere, “Foisted!,” Larry is dismayed to find that Jimmy Kimmel has “foisted” his terrible assistant onto him. Kimmel recommended an awful assistant to Larry to get her off his hands. This episode eventually leads to Larry getting a death sentence from the Ayatollah after announcing a musical comedy about Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, but the assistant subplot leads to one of Leon’s funniest B-stories.

While Larry is searching for a replacement, Leon temporarily becomes his assistant. The obvious flaw with this plan becomes apparent within seconds when Larry’s phone rings and Leon answers with the profane greeting, “Larry David’s office, what the f*** is up?” Larry’s death sentence is ultimately Leon’s fault, because he forgot to pass on a message from Jeff not to make fun of the Ayatollah on late-night TV.

7 The Bisexual

Season 8, Episode 7

Midway through Larry’s adventure in New York, Leon shows up outside his apartment building with Larry’s beaten-up Prius, which he drove across the country with a caravan of hitchhikers. Larry is baffled to see a baby seat in the back of the car, suggesting Leon picked up a baby at some point during his road trip. Immediately upon his arrival in the Big Apple, Leon starts “living large,” as he eats a croissant “filled with motherf***in’ champagne!”

The episode’s A-plot sees Larry and Rosie O’Donnell caught in a love triangle vying for the affections of a bisexual woman. Leon offers a convoluted but hilarious analogy about how “bats and balls run the f***in’ world!” and gives Larry performance-enhancing drugs to give him the edge over Rosie. Naturally, this scheme ends up blowing up in Larry’s face.

6 The Watermelon

Season 11, Episode 4

Larry and Leon nobly defy stereotypes in season 11’s “The Watermelon.” Leon is ashamed of his affinity for watermelons, because of the stereotype, so Larry wants to help him break the taboo and takes him to a supermarket. Leon proudly buys a watermelon and Larry proudly buys a jar of gefilte fish. “The Watermelon” is a prime example of Curb’s uniquely taboo-busting style of comedy.

This taboo-busting extends to the rest of the episode, as Larry befriends a Klansman and assumes responsibility for his dry cleaning. Larry spills coffee on the Klansman’s robe and promises to get it cleaned, but struggles to find a dry cleaner that will take it. He gets Susie to make the Klansman a new robe, but she sews a Star of David onto it, which leads to a relentless beating. This episode proved once again that there was no line Curb wouldn’t cross.

5 The Lefty Call

Season 6, Episode 4

Season 6’s “The Lefty Call” primarily revolves around Larry damaging his hearing with a loud toilet flush and being prohibited from making right-handed phone calls for a few weeks. He accidentally offends a couple that just suffered a miscarriage and unwittingly gets Richard Lewis’ girlfriend fired from the job he recommended her for. Leon plays a minimal role in the story, but he steals the show with arguably the funniest moment in the episode.

During one of his visits to the doctor’s office, Larry is threatened by a white supremacist. He asks Leon how to deal with bigots and Smoove goes off on one of his greatest Curb monologues as he tells Larry to “get in that a**!” This scene solidified Leon as an invaluable addition to the Curb Your Enthusiasm cast; it’s a masterclass in improvised absurdity.

4 The Therapists

Season 6, Episode 9

While Larry is trying to win Cheryl back in season 6’s “The Therapists,” he learns that Cheryl won’t do anything unless her therapist recommends it. So, Larry starts hatching a scheme to make the therapist see him in a new light, and decides to stage a mugging where he’ll swoop in and save her from a nefarious crook trying to steal her handbag. His first choice for the role of the mugger is Leon.

Before his sister and aunt put a stop to it, Leon is all in on the plan. But he doesn’t want to appear weak, so his plan for the fake mugging involves “f***ing Larry up.” Larry trying to convince Leon not to “f*** him up,” and Leon arguing in favor of it, is one of this classic comedy duo’s funniest scenes together.

3 Vehicular Fellatio

Season 7, Episode 2

Leon has a unique way of getting Larry to share his problems. In season 7’s “Vehicular Fellatio,” Leon has a friend who’s a big Seinfeld fan and needs to be cheered up, so he asks Larry to give this friend – who, he mentions in passing, has a beautiful wife – a call. Larry calls Leon’s friend and ends up mentioning that Leon said his wife is beautiful, which leads him to suspect that Leon and his wife are having an affair.

This problem would be easily fixable if Leon wasn’t sleeping with his friend’s wife – but, Leon being Leon, he is. Larry doesn’t think he has any culpability in the matter, but Leon informs him that, as far as his friend is concerned, both Leon and Larry are at fault: “WE f***ed her!” This is a classic case of Leon landing Larry in a world of trouble over nothing.

2 The Anonymous Donor

Season 6, Episode 2

Leon’s first ever Curb Your Enthusiasm episode still holds up as one of his funniest appearances. In season 6’s “The Anonymous Donor,” Leon arrives to move into Larry’s house with the rest of his family – except he wasn’t displaced by a hurricane; he already lived in Los Angeles. After Leon’s first night in the house, Cheryl finds a mysterious stain on his bed.

From the moment that Larry first confronted Leon about the stain, J.B. Smoove instantly proved himself as the best new addition to the cast since Bob Einstein. He goes from trying to identify the stain to mispronouncing the word “ejaculate” to pondering what pornographic material he could find on basic cable in the space of a couple of minutes. This episode also sees Leon stealing t-shirts off people’s backs and admitting that Susie’s “smart-a** mouth” turns him on.

1 The Table Read

Season 7, Episode 10

Larry’s Seinfeld reunion gets closer and closer to a reality in the penultimate episode of season 7, “The Table Read,” but the show is threatened when Michael Richards gets some bad medical news. He finds out he might have Groat’s disease and worries he can’t be funny if his mind is preoccupied with this illness, so Larry offers to introduce him to a friend of his, Danny Duberstein, who had Groat’s and survived. There’s just one problem: Danny Duberstein is dead.

So, Larry recruits Leon to pretend to be an Ethiopian orphan who got adopted by a lovely Jewish couple. Smoove has so much fun with this scenario, making up all kinds of wild details about Danny Duberstein’s battle with Groat’s (and his sex life). There were plenty of great Leon-centric episodes in Curb Your Enthusiasm’s run, but the Danny Duberstein riff in “The Table Read” is arguably his finest moment.