“Curb Your Enthusiasm” has been having an amazing seventh season, which came to a crashing stop on the sixth episode, entitled “The Bare Midriff.”

It suffers from the sloppiest writing on the series by far and still surprisingly provides a few good laughs. This proves that a bad episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” just can’t help but be occasionally funny.

For starters, the show did something last night that it never has in any previous seasons and a major reason why it felt so original. A woman claims that Larry David looks exactly like her husband, who was murdered in 1962. The episode then goes to a prolonged flashback with David playing the murdered man. This flashback proved to be goofy rather than sharp or the usual insightful humor expected from this series.

If that wasn’t enough of an insult, the episode gets a little dumber as David has a dispute over the amount of napkins needed to eat a chicken cutlet parmigiana hero when the man only allows him to take two.

However, David steals several more, which leads the man to call the cops, who eventually pull David over and arrest him. (Over napkins?) This is incredibly stupid for a series that always stayed away from this style of realistic humor.

What is weird is that “The Bare Midriff” starts off promising enough with Jerry Seinfeld and David working on writing the reunion episode, when a chubby female assistant (Jillian Bell) walks in wearing a belly shirt. The two men decide that David must tell her the truth and naturally she storms out angry at David.

Then in an attempt to apologize, he goes to the woman’s house but somehow makes matters worse.

You see, he is using a bladder pill, which makes him urinate heavily and a high volume of splash back – splash back which somehow lands on a picture at eye level of Jesus Christ, which leads the woman to believe she has been blessed by a miracle from God.

The episode has one more highlight with Richard Lewis over a lunch table dispute. Lewis sees David and Seinfeld in a restaurant and decides to join them. However, neither one of the two men want to give up what they call the luxury suite of a booth by making room for Lewis, who is so great with his reaction that it almost redeems the episode.

It is sad that some lousy writing affected what could have been another winning episode. What also stinks is that the episode didn’t utilize having Lewis, David and Seinfeld on the screen, since they are all great comedians.

It seems that the “Seinfeld” reunion is getting underused this season, but it is still hard to complain when the episodes have been so funny thus far.

“The Bare Midriff” serves as a seventh season bump, but knowing David, the show will be back to normal next week.

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