Look away, Susie Greene. A Curb Your Enthusiasm billboard in Los Angeles — advertising the Susie Essman character’s Catch as Caftan business — was defaced in the same explicit way that it was defaced on the HBO comedy’s March 10 episode.
In that installment, “The Gettysburg Address” Susie meets the fictionalized Larry Davidon Santa Monica Boulevard and proudly shows off the billboard. Later, however, Larry sees that someone has spray-painted a penis onto the billboard. Susie is horrified, but her business takes off in what Larry calls a “post-penis bump.” In fact, Larry encourages her to have the billboard graffitied with a second penis to really juice sales.
On Wednesday, Curb’s Instagram account showed off that HBO had recreated the un-graffitied version of the billboard near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Centinela Avenue, where Los Angeles meets Santa Monica. A web address listed on the billboard leads to a caftan on HBO’s online shop.
And within days, someone had spray-painted two penises on the real-life billboard. (Scroll through the photos in the Instagram post below to see the NSFW art.)
In a Hollywood Reporter interview published last week, Curb executive producer Jeff Schaffer foretold such a twist. “Imagine the traffic jams if we actually had a Susie poster on Santa Monica Boulevard where she was getting double dosed,” he said. “I don’t know how many graffiti artists are fans of the show, but I’m praying for a few dicks. If we’re lucky enough to get a few on that poster, I think the sales are going to go through the roof.”
The Hollywood Reporter announced on Friday that the activist art collective INDECLINE had taken credit for the graffiti. In a statement to THR, INDECLINE said that as ‘90s kids, they grew up loving David’s work on Seinfeld and being inspired by the “galvanizing nature of comedy, particularly in the face of adversity or social/political unrest.”
INDECLINE’s statement continued, “A few nights ago, we watched in awe as one of our favorite pastimes, ‘billboard liberation,’ was incorporated into the latest episode. We received a flood of texts and DMs about the existence of the billboard in Los Angeles and even saw that [Jeff Garlin, who plays Jeff Greene, Susie’s husband] was on Instagram calling for it to be altered. So, as a thank you to Larry David, for his contribution to the field of art imitating life, we give you our contribution to the practice of life imitating art.”