The second season

Friday and last night, I watched the ten episodes of the second season (2001, according to Wikipedia) of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I watched them in such quick succession that they're mostly a blur in my memory already, but I remember that I liked them very much. And one of them (though not the best of the lot) I do remember quite well because of its hilarious (and all-too-true) comment on people's religious behavior.

I'm referring to Episode #9, "Baptism," in which the sister of Larry's long-suffering wife Cheryl (played sympathetically by the lovely Cheryl Hines) is getting married. Now Cheryl and her sister aren't Jews, and while Cheryl may be married to one, her sister will have none of it and has prevailed on her fiancé to convert to Christianity in order to become her husband. He is to be baptized into the faith immediately preceding the wedding.

Predictably (for nothing ever goes quite according to plan for Larry) Larry and Cheryl's itinerary from L.A. to Monterey gets derailed and they arrive late for the proceedings. Larry staggers out of their rental car into the woods and walks a few feet before spotting down below two men standing in the edge of a fast river, one of them apparently trying to drown the other—the one with the apprehensive look on his face. Right, the apprehensive one is Cheryl's sister's about-not-to-be-a-Jewish fiancé.

Well, anyway, Larry (always eager to help and try to make things better) spontaneously yells "stop" and starts to run down the hill. Startled, the church officiant who has been in the act of dunking the fiancé lets him go, and the bride and the rest of the wedding party, after turning around briefly to see where the "stop" came from, turn back to the river to see the fiancé starting to be carried downstream. They all rush into the river to save him from drowning.

You've got to see this for yourself, but the upshot of it is that the groom refuses to go back into the river to complete the baptism, claiming that during the moment he was initially dunked he had the impression that something or someone was telling him that it just wasn't right, what he was doing.

"Not right to become a Christian," his horrified bride asks?

"No, no, not that," he says. "Wrong to renounce my Jewness." [That isn't the actual dialogue, but I'm too lazy today to go transcribe the exact words, which of course are better than my paraphrase and deserving to have you find out for yourself by renting the DVD.]

The episode ends in the more or less standard way of Larry (joined in this case by Cheryl) looking into the short distance trying to make sense of it all as the Christians on one side and the Jews on the other jeer and shake their fists at one another.