When is it too late to wish someone a happy new year? In this opening episode of the 10th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, belated felicitations join soft scones, wobbly tables and human bowls borrowed by dogs as the latest prompts for Larry David’s raging misanthropy. With characteristic cleverness, though, each of these minor irritants transitions into a crucial plot device with astonishing agility. After a two-year absence, this is a strong, confident and very funny return for the Seinfeld co-creator.

Some fans thought season nine was underrated, but I felt it lacked the vitality of the best of Curb – occasionally, watching it could be a bit of an endurance sport. The Guardian described its slapstick as “fourth-rate Benny Hill”, Vulture said it felt “like a throwback in a bad way”. It got better as it went along, but pegging the whole season to Larry writing a musical comedy about the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, which turned into him dealing with a fatwa of his own, felt like a stretch – even if Hamilton’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, did arrive to brighten everything up.

For season 10, Curb appears to have gone for a back-to-basics reset. The show has been on the air for 20 years, and despite sometimes branching out into more high-concept ideas, it is often at its finest when it simply does what it does and does it well: Larry is a terrible person, and then everything goes wrong. In the hands of a lesser show, the fact that he never learns from his mistakes would be repetitive, but Curb rewards viewers for their masochism.

Mocha Joe, last seen in the season seven finale, is back and Larry finds his new coffee shop to be lacking. The coffee is too cold, the tables are wonky and, worse, the scones are soft. “I’m not quite sure you know what a scone is, Mocha Joe,” he complains, though as a British viewer, watching him stuff what appears to be a flat cake into his mouth with no butter, cream or jam on it makes me wonder if he does, either. His fury at the cold coffee leads to a half-hearted boycott of the shop, followed by all-out war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bullshit detector ... Cheryl Hines as Cheryl in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Photograph: HBO/Sky Comedy

This was the funniest episode of Curb I have seen in a long time, not just clever-funny, but laugh-out-loud, total idiocy funny. Larry’s “big goodbye” technique, an over-the-top farewell designed to disguise the fact that he has been avoiding the recipient of it all night, fails to work on Phil Rosenthal, who has seen it all before. So Larry goes nuclear, and procures a red Maga cap. In the fanciest parts of Los Angeles, it is a people-repellent, much to Larry’s delight and convenience.

But it may backfire on him. It takes some skill to craft a running #MeToo gag predicated on the fact that women have misunderstood the situation, but here we are. Jeff complains that he is constantly being mistaken for Harvey Weinstein (the resemblance is certainly there, and it turns him into the human equivalent of the Maga cap). Larry is accused of ogling a waitress when he has been, in fact, ogling a tray of pigs in blankets. Curb has largely avoided being sucked into cancel culture and public shaming before now, but its world is a world of celebrities, so it’s hard to see how it could have avoided it.

With the Mocha Joe feud, the Cheryl dilemma (Larry and his ex-wife share a moment at Susie’s party that blossoms into something more) and the #MeToo subplot, this is vintage Curb, weighed down by nothing but the need to be furiously funny. As Cheryl tells Larry, not without affection: “You’re such an asshole.” Would we have it any other way?