Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Wesley Morris, published in The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration Credit: Giacomo Gambineri

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He’s a wild, monomaniacal jerk. He’s also our greatest interpreter of American manners since Emily Post.

Suppose you’re out at brunch and find yourself in a buffet line that a fellow diner does not appear to have noticed. He casually approaches with his plate and tries to serve himself. Do you A. join the hangry mob cursing him or B. rise to this man’s defense, because you can see that he’s holding a plate, which means he already waited in line and is now returning for another helping? If you’re Larry David, not only is the answer B. but the misunderstanding warrants, in your scratchy Brooklyn accent, a triumphant clarification: “That’s not how we do things here in America! We don’t wait for seconds! Never!”

Larry knows from buffet breaches. He once caught someone pulling what he termed a chat-’n’-cut, gaining proximity to food by talking to someone with a choicer position in line. He doesn’t like it but is impressed anyway. (“I respect your skills.”) Another time, when a restaurant employee accuses him of violating its buffet policy by sharing his plate with his manager and main man, Jeff, a lawyer magically appears to clarify for the employee that after a diner purchases a meal what he does with it is his business. Justice — and brunch — have been served.

But now let’s suppose that you’re a serious, middle-aged woman named Marilyn, and you’ve decided to host dinner for your new beau’s closest friends, and the guests include this Larry David, whom you’ve already had to shoo from the arm of one of your comfy chairs. The group raises a glass and toasts your hospitality — well, everybody except you know who. Susie, who is married to Jeff and clearly finds Larry as much of an irritant as you’ve begun to, asks, “You can’t clink, Larry?” Why should he? “Because it’s a custom that people do, which is friendly and nice.” Larry takes a sip of water and asks the most peculiar question: “What is this, tap?” It is. His response? “Surprised you don’t have a filter.” Do you A. serve him your coldest glance and witheringly reply, “You have no filter,” or B. ask him to leave your home? If you’re Marilyn, you do both.

These stories hail from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is scheduled to deliver its final episode on April 7, after 12 seasons and 24 years on HBO. In each incident, bald, bespectacled, wiry, wealthy Larry has stepped out of line, once physically, to defend or offend. I went back and watched the whole series and would like to report that television has never had anything like this show, nothing as uncouth and contradictory and unhinged and yet somehow under a tremendous amount of thematic control, nothing whose calamity doubles as a design for living. It presents the American id at war with its puritanical superego. Sometimes Larry is the one. Sometimes he’s the other. The best episodes dare him to inhabit the two at once, heretic and Talmudist.

Even people who don’t watch the show (and that’s most of the country) seem to know the gist, that Larry, as performed by Larry David, is a monstrously entitled crank, the Godzilla of western Los Angeles. But “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is about more than Larry’s probable narcissism. It’s a supreme comedy of manners. How, it asks, do we share a meal, a drive, a party, a meeting, a bathroom, an office pantry, a city — how do we courteously enforce norms and, with modesty, uphold standards? Are courtesy and modesty necessary? It’s the only show we have left that’s been this curious about, this keen on the fine print of living an ethical, civic life, about interpersonal candor and the maintenance of a kind of civility while also allowing for the liberty of letting you do you.

Larry makes liberty want a drink. He is insensitive, selfish, monomaniacal, prone to flagrance, frequently wrong in every single way a person can be wrong — by accident, via misunderstanding, out of malice. He can be a bad friend and has been a lousy husband, a worse boyfriend, a dubious lay and an iffy boss. Don’t go into business with Larry or tell him a secret. Don’t invite him to your funeral. Don’t rely on him to watch your newsstand so you can pee. Probably, don’t be his co-star or co-author, either.

I’ve never seen any actor with David’s grasp of how to play skepticism for laughs. Eyebrows as up-yanked drawbridge, forehead creases as lasagna of vexation. That rawboned voice of his soars, if not in octaves, then certainly with tickly, prickly dynamism. He can shout anyone down. For insinuation and seduction — for seductive insinuation — he can drop it low. David has imbued Larry with so much guilt, exceptionalism, cluelessness, terror, cowardice, innocence, avoidance, vindictive zeal, genuine curiosity and joie de vivre that the performance becomes what Larry loves: a buffet. Also, what a liar. And yet who else in the last quarter-century has done more to insist on some standard of alternative etiquette, to speak to the humiliating, exasperating paradoxes of doing just about anything in 21st-century America?

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Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The Times.