Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9 episode 3 review: Salman Rushdie and Larry David form 'The Fatwa Boys'

Only in a show with such freewheeling narratives and absurd cameos could you get a set-up like we saw in this week's Curb: Salman Rushdie encouraging Larry David to embrace the sexual frisson that a fatwa provides, and wingmanning him with Elizabeth Banks.

Episode 3, 'A Disturbance in the Kitchen', bound together a missing girl, an affronted cop, an unlikely date and a late entrée in gloriously ridiculous fashion, as Larry ditched his disguise and exploited the danger surrounding him. "The Fatwa Boys", he christened himself and Rushdie, who was bold enough to poke fun at his real-life fatwa in the episode, while dealing competently with the improv the show demands.

Elizabeth Banks, a vocal advocate for more substantial roles for women in Hollywood, clearly had a lot of fun throwing this reputation aside for half an hour meanwhile, playing a fictionalised, ditzy version of herself taken in by Larry's fatwa allure and winding up Susie with a false equivalence between human and cat.

Is the new season perfect? No, there are moments where Larry is acting so impulsively it defies belief (see: beeping a cop) and I don't know that every episode need tie up so neatly with a very squared, close-up-on-camera-A callback to an earlier joke. But the smaller observations and encounters alone justify its existence; this week's 'front of mind vs. back of mind' exchange had me howling.

Curb Your Enthusiasm continues Sunday nights on HBO in the US and Monday nights on Sky Atlantic and through NOWTV in the UK.