Hauppauge's Lori Loughlin spoofs herself on 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

Hauppauge-raised Lori Loughlin good-naturedly spoofed her public image on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Sunday, playing a version of herself flouting rules at the country club to which creator-star Larry David’s character belongs. Former “Full House” star Loughlin had been among the dozens of parents arrested in 2019's college-admissions bribery investigation, and she eventually served a 2-month sentence.

“We had a lot of ideas we wanted to do, but we asked Lori first,” executive producer Jeff Schaffer, 54, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview posted Sunday. “We pitched the general concept of: ‘You get into the club, and then we find out how ultra-competitive you are, and how you’re willing to bend the rules or break them.’ And then once she agreed, we really started hammering out the details of the script.”

The writers and producers were unsure she would agree to satirize her legal travails. But, said Schaffer, “I guess as comedy writers we just naively thought, ‘It’s so funny, who wouldn’t want to do this?’ Well, maybe the person it’s about! But she saw how funny it was and was into it immediately.”

In this sixth episode of season 12, “The Gettysburg Address,” Larry agrees to help avid golfer Loughlin gain membership in his country club after learning she’s been blackballed from every club in town due to her conviction. Larry, a self-professed “champion of the underdog,” gives the membership committee a rousing speech modeled after President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and she gets in.

Once ensconced, Loughlin cheats on her golf scores, has a license-plate sticker dubiously designating her as disabled and allowing her to park close to the entrance, and snags a highly coveted tee time by, it is implied, at minimum flirting with the club’s scheduler. When Larry questions her about her good score for a hole in which her ball had gone into the woods, Loughlin looks him in the eye and explains, with double meaning, “I had a good lie.”

The idea was “not going to be funny with some sort of thinly veiled surrogate,” Schaffer said. “It only works if we get Lori. So we called her manager up, who loved it, and who then talked to Lori, and she said: ‘I’m in, I’m totally game.’ And she was. She was so great. Everything we threw at her, she was game to do. She makes the episode. I’m so glad she wanted to do it.”

Hauppauge High School graduate Loughlin, who was born in Queens and moved with her family to Long Island when she was a year old, is best known as Aunt Becky on "Full House" (ABC 1987-1995). She went on to star in The WB series "Summerland," which she co-created; ABC's "Hudson Street" with Tony Danza; and The CW's "90210"; as well as in a raft of TV movies including the "Garage Sale Mystery” series.

Her legal issues forced her to leave her Hallmark Channel series "When Calls the Heart” in 2019. She has since made a comeback, reprising her role from that series in the two-episode season 2 premiere of the spinoff, "When Hope Calls" (2021), on Great American Family, and starring in that cable network’s telefilms “Fall Into Winter” and “A Christmas Blessing,” both released last year.

Loughlin, 59, who has no social media, had no comment.