A Curb Your Enthusiasm short too spicy for Apple has leaked

Larry David as the app approver.
(Image credit: Apple / Curb Your Enthusiasm)

Update: The mighty lawyers of Apple did not find this funny, and the original upload is gone from Youtube. You should be able to find a mirror with a quick google.

Original Story: A 10-minute long episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, made to open Apple's 2014 World Wide Developer Conference but ultimately rejected, has leaked online. It features Larry David as the 'App Approver', who reads the elevator pitch for iOS Apps and accepts or rejects them with a big ink stamper. Other members of the cast play Apple employees, App developers and so on, with the most amusing recurring theme being Larry's deep dislike of Snapchat.

"And by the way, why are birds always so angry in these apps?"

It has to be said that it's pretty obvious why Apple rejected this. It's very true to the tone of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which gets much of its humour from picking apart awkwardness and social taboo, and while it's a funny old time there's just a lot in here that wouldn't quite fit the pristine Apple image.

An early eyebrow-raiser is the comparison of slavish adherence to Apple's door security rules to Nazi Germany (Larry: "well, they were organised!"), before we get into the realms of extreme bad taste with some of the made-up apps, and then Larry has an argument with J.B. Smoove, a black colleague who won't let white people bite his sandwiches. This last exchange ends with the two airing their respective mottos at each other, "No bites for whites" and "No snacks for blacks", at which point I imagine Tim Cook himself was slamming down the 'Rejected' stamp with some considerable force.

Doubtless Larry David didn't mind though: he doesn't normally do promotional stuff, so the sum involved must have been staggering. And until it leaked this was surely the dream job: all that lovely lolly, without the ignominy of it ever being aired.

Rich Stanton

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."