Larry David is as insensitive as ever in the show’s ninth season, and his approach to life makes him the perfect character to navigate questions of identity in 2017

Any notion that Larry David’s thinly veiled self-portrait might be toned down or adjusted for the “age of wokeness” vanished within the first minutes of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s season premiere. The opening moments of the show’s ninth series saw him make assumptions about someone’s sexuality, joke about the American military, and laugh long and hard about PTSD.

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David’s co-star JB Smoove, who plays Leon Black – the free-loading cousin of an ex-girlfriend who lives in his pool house – summed up David’s approach succinctly. “Larry is an old white man,” he said in January, filming the new series. “He’s not woke. So it’s hard to tell him to be woke.” After an uncharacteristically polished drone camera shot slowly focuses in on his LA house, we see David battling in the shower with a bottle of gel. It’s a start that lets viewers know this is the same old LD, a man at odds with all of life’s small inconveniences.

But far from making Larry an outmoded dinosaur, his pugilistic approach to life makes him a perfect character to navigate the maze of identity politics maze in 2017. Inquisitive, incredulous and insensitive – he ventures into areas few would dare, not with an agenda or a roadmap, just with a puzzled look and poorly thought out equations.

In Foisted, the first episode of his final outing, the targets are new and established. The first is triggered by an encounter with a woman entering the same building as him. He holds the door for Betty (who turns out to be his manager Jeff’s barber), then, after looking her up and down, decides she might not be the type of person who would appreciate or invite the gesture – “I have an equation: type plus distance equals no door hold”. It’s an observation that backfires.

Later, he locks horns with his old sparring partner Richard Lewis over who should relocate in a restaurant so they can have a conversation about Lewis’s dead parakeet. Recalling a similar feud with Jason Alexander, it’s the type of needlessly aggravated social situation that gives Curb its appeal.

All this is before he’s unveiled his big new idea on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which looks like it will provide the loose narrative arc for this season, involving the creation of a show called Fatwa! The Musical. In the space of 30 minutes David manages to offend a lesbian couple, his oldest friend, the country of Iran, Susie, his constipated assistant, and owners of parakeets everywhere.

One of the appeals of Curb Your Enthusiasm is that political views never really mattered to Larry (there was the affair that was scuppered by a George W Bush picture, but that’s the exception rather than the rule). Neither did race or gender. That’s just window-dressing that gets in front of the real point of interest: human contradictions and hypocrisies. As the show’s final series gets under way, it’s clear that Larry’s MO isn’t changing any time soon.

It’s hard to imagine the season ending without some serious offense being caused. Last series, his Palestinian chicken escapade proved to be beyond the pale for some, and the fatwa storyline prods at similar pressure points. “You know how hard it is to tell somebody to be woke and they ain’t woke?” asked JB Smoove back in January. It is indeed a difficult ask, and with someone like Larry David, it’d be a waste of time. The laughs may be a little more awkward, but they’re still there and David’s tried-and-tested formula is still one of the most potent on TV, 17 years after its creation.