It seems as though Larry David hates Jews. A surprising range of critics make this charge, alleging further that Larry, himself a Jew, is a “self-hating Jew.” In a 2005 Jerusalem Post editorial, Arye Dworkin condemned Curb Your Enthusiasm for “teetering on the tightrope that separates humor from self-hatred.”
Michael Savage, a talk radio personality who makes Glenn Beck look like Bill Moyers, even suggested that “if Hitler were alive and he hired a propagandist to create an image of the ‘ugly Jew,’ he couldn’t do better than to hire Larry David.”1 The veneer of humor, the critics claim, conceals anti-Semitic attitudes that distort and slander Judaism while providing David with the cover of “it’s just entertainment!” From the Catholic League to the Anti-Defamation League, Larry’s antics have been described as tasteless and sometimes even harmful to Jews, Judaism, and religion in general. The good Jew never mixes meat and milk. Is Larry David at fault for mixing his acerbic brand of humor with Judaism?
If it’s true that Larry is guilty of such a non-kosher mix, then maybe he’s not the only one in the ethical hot seat—for if he’s a self-hating Jew, then perhaps we’re laughing where we should be scolding. Criticism of the show forces us to address an interesting philosophical question: what happens to faith when we “curbs our enthusiasm”? Is the kind of perspective on life represented by Larry’s character in Curb essentially inauthentic when it comes to religion?
Is Larry a bad Jew? Are we bad people for laughing with Larry? Or, is there a philosophical perspective from which we can see Larry’s take on religion as genuinely authentic and, consequently, continue to think well of ourselves as we watch and enjoy Curb?
As a result of the many historical diasporas (“scatterings”) that flung Jews from their home in Palestine to the far reaches of Africa, Europe, and Asia, the story of the Jews is one of continual dislocation, movement, settlement, and more dislocation. Jews repeatedly found themselves as outsiders surrounded by decidedly hostile majorities. In such situations, it’s common for some members of an oppressed group to begin seeing themselves as others see them. Stereotypes become internalized.
Take Larry’s disgust at self-hating bald people. The bald man who hides his baldness is, for Larry, someone who has “bought into” the non-bald agenda: a self-hating baldy. “False consciousness,” to borrow Karl Marx’s term, can result, where the stereotypes and worldview of a dominant group are adopted by those in the minority. This process is insidious since the self-serving and arbitrary world-view of the dominant group may come to seem natural, as “just the way things are.” This phenomenon is called “ideology”—not just seeing reality through a distorted “lens” that serves the interests of a dominant group, but also not realizing that the lens is there in the first place.
Historically, denigration and dehumanization of the Jewish minority by non-Jewish majorities was exacerbated by claims among Jews themselves that some sub-sets of Jews are “bad” Jews. Jews who were suspected of “assimilating” to Western cultures (dressing, acting, and speaking like non-Jews) found themselves labeled as “self-hating” Jews, betrayers of their tradition and people. The idea of Jewish self-hate emerged in these contexts as a pernicious shorthand for understanding, and often caricaturing, the complexities of Jews living among non-Jews.
Theodor Lessing, a German Jewish philosopher, helped popularize the image of the self-hating Jew in, appropriately enough, a book titled Jewish Self-Hate (1930), where he branded as self-hating those Jewish intellectuals who opposed Zionism (the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland). The organizational psychologist Kurt Lewin further cemented the phrase in the Western cultural vocabulary with his “Self-Hatred Among Jews.” Lewin focused on Jews who, he claimed, “dislike everything specifically Jewish” and “show dislike for those Jews who are outspokenly so, and will frequently indulge in self-hatred.”2
What’s the evidence that Larry David is a self-hating Jew? In “Meet the Blacks” (Season Six), Larry refers to himself as “Larry Jew” after noting the irony that a black family’s last name is, in fact, “Black.” While perhaps innocent in itself, this scene does reveal the ease, and potential carelessness, with which Larry makes light of all-things Jewish. In another episode (Season Two, “Trick or Treat”), while in a line at the theater Larry offends a fellow Jew and theatergoer when he carelessly whistles a Wagner melody. Hitler just couldn’t get enough of Wagner, you see. Confrontation follows, with Larry screaming at the offended Jew: “Judaism, where are you?” But Larry has his revenge—he hires a string-quartet to play Wagner on the Jew’s lawn. Elsewhere, Larry calls temple “a trial” (Season Two, “The Massage”), says of a Bar Mitzvah “Can you think of anything worse?” (Season Three, “The Benadryl Brownie”), argues with Susie about who has more of a “Jew face” (Season Four, “The 5 Wood”), and consistently pokes fun at Orthodox Jews (Season Five, “The Ski Lift”).
Curb Your Enthusiasm has offended other religions as well, most notably when Larry infamously, though inadvertently, splashed a painting of Jesus Christ with his urine (Season Seven, “The Bare Midriff”). This did not go over well with the Christians. But to his critics the treatment of Jewish culture and themes in Curb is fundamentally more disturbing; after all, Larry is a Jew.
The arc of the last episodes of Season Five, which includes a storyline about Larry’s reluctance to donate a kidney to the ailing Richard Lewis, seems to support the charge that Larry is a self-hating Jew. To avoid giving Lewis his kidney, Larry ingratiates himself with the head of a kidney transplant bank (a Dr. Heineman) in order to move Lewis’s name to the top of the list. Heineman is an Orthodox Jew, and Larry attempts to woo him by playing the part of a good Jew. This Larry listens religiously to Jewish radio, gets worked up when talking about Israel, and would never go to a ball game on the Sabbath. Because Cheryl is a shiksa (a non-Jewish woman), in “The Ski Lift” episode (Season Five) Larry even has Susie play his wife, complete with Tichel (a head-scarf worn by Orthodox Jewish married women) and tales of how she met Larry at a Hillel function at college.
At one point Larry finds himself stranded on a broken ski-lift with Heineman’s daughter. When she mutters “Hashem” as an aside, Larry has no idea what she means. (Hashem is one of the names of God in Judaism.) Later, as they remain stuck on the lift, the daughter points out that as an unmarried Jewish woman she cannot be alone with a man after sundown. When she asks Larry to do the right thing and jump, he responds: “What are you, fucking nuts?” He then calls Lewis to tell him his name won’t be put at the top of the list after all—Larry’s gig as a good Jew was up.
But the most troubling scenes are from the last episode of Season Five, “The End.” Larry is told by a private detective—who originally was hired to get the dirt on Heineman—that he is adopted. “Larry Jew,” it turns out, is a goy—his parents are gentiles (“Cone,” not “Cohn”). Yet, instead of feeling loss, Larry actually seems relieved, as if a great Yiddish weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Rather than “Oy vey!,” Larry’s every action screams: “Yay!” In scene after scene, Larry embraces his gentile heritage with passion and uncommon cheer, a transformation in everything from dress (Larry adds a fanny pack to his wardrobe) to his very character (Larry begins attending church, and actually enjoys it—witness his rendition of “Go Tell It on the Mountain”). From kvetching Jew to kneeling in a church pew, the gentilification of Larry is complete.
But there’s more.
As a gentile, Larry gets ethics. His gentile mother begins to soften his selfish resistance to helping Lewis when she advises, “You must practice love and forgiveness. Give him the benefit of the doubt. What would Jesus do?” Larry nods, moved by her words. His transformation into a caring and selfless friend is clinched when he attends church and is deeply moved by the pastor’s sermon on friendship. As a result, Larry resolves to give Lewis his kidney. As a Jew, Larry is selfish and uncharitable—as a gentile, Larry becomes a mensch (a good person)!
Finally and perhaps most potentially damning, when he finds out the private detective’s mistake, that he is, in fact, a Jew, Larry seems crushed. Larry’s enthusiasm seems curbed only when he is a Jew—as a gentile, he embraces life with zeal (Larry chugging brewskies with the boys at a sports bar?!) and compassion. A critic might point out that while Larry does go through with the donation of his kidney to Lewis, he does not do so willingly. In fact, Larry is told of the mistake regarding his adoption on the way to the operating room, and screams in response: “I’m not adopted. Get me the fuck out of here!” Fortunately for Lewis, Larry’s effort to escape fails and the operation takes place. Unfortunately, Larry takes ill during the operation and dies. Larry ascends to heaven and meets his real, Jewish mother (a Jew in heaven? Larry’s Judaism seems a bit Christianized). Bea Arthur, in her last role as the deceased Mrs. David, scolds Larry for giving his kidney to Lewis: “What kind of schmuck are you?” How different from Larry’s gentile “mother,” who lectured him on the virtues of friendship and sacrifice.
These scenes certainly do not paint a flattering picture. Larry pokes fun at Orthodox Jews, misrepresents their customs, and seems to revel in offering stereotype after stereotype of the “ugly Jew,” hence Savage’s comment that Larry would have done well as a Nazi propaganda minister. To borrow a line from Jeff, this certainly does seem to be one “big bowl of wrong.” Can “Larry Jew” be redeemed?
Those who claim that Larry David is a self-hating Jew seem to assume that there is an authentic way of embracing faith and being a “real” or “genuine” Jew. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre identified inauthenticity with self-deception and what he called “bad faith.” Sartre was an existentialist philosopher, which means he focused on how the individual confronts her responsibility for being the sole source of meaning and value in her life.
Rather than having some fixed “human nature,” we are, according to Sartre, what we make of ourselves. Human nature, were it to exist, would be common to all and would provide the parameters for what a genuine, authentic human life should be. But the idea of human nature is intelligible only if God exists as the source of that nature; since Sartre denies that God exists, he denies any form of human nature. That’s why Sartre famously claimed we are “condemned to be free”—we have no choice but to embrace our freedom and make of ourselves what we will, even though in the absence of God there are no objective standards to guide us. In this sense, radical freedom creates absolute responsibility, and thus a perpetual anxiety in the face of choices we must make but for which we have no ultimate justification. So, for Sartre, authenticity involves embracing oneself as an ongoing project of radical self-creation.
Bad faith is a matter of rejecting responsibility for one’s freedom and of treating oneself as a mere thing in the world. Mere things lack genuine possibilities. By contrast, a person, Sartre claims, is nothing but a wellspring of possibilities and choices, and a choice that brings one possibility to actuality at the same time that it closes off other possibilities.
Decisions matter! Yet, if Sartre’s right we routinely try to escape the burden of that responsibility by having others decide for us, or by justifying our choices in reference to some external authority such as a religion. “I had no choice!” we often plead, but for Sartre we are nothing but our choices. Denying that there are many possible choices and believing that you have no choice—that is to treat yourself as a thing.
When Jeff succumbs, again and again, to his cheating ways, rationalizing that Susie’s coldness leaves him no choice—that is bad faith. A person living in bad faith fails to honor what Sartre calls “facticity” and “transcendence.” Facticity refers to those “facts” about ourselves that we did not choose but that limit us, concrete details such as sex, language, race, and nationality. Our ability to go beyond what we are and to embrace our creative freedom is what Sartre refers to as transcendence. I may be Italian (my facticity), but that doesn’t mean I have to act like a character from the Sopranos (my transcendence is my freedom)! Bad faith would be my justifying acting like Tony Soprano by saying, “But I’m Italian!”
Bad faith may be a matter of a person denying his transcendence and identifying wholly with his facticity. For example, in “The Special Section” (Season Three) Larry’s father fails to tell him of his mother’s death, claiming that his mother didn’t want to ruin his trip to New York. The senior David is fleeing from his responsibility, claiming that some “fact” of the situation—the mother’s wish—decides for him. On the other hand, bad faith also results when someone denies their facticity and wholly identifies with their transcendence (translation: they presume that their past is unimportant and, like a God, can create from nothing). When Larry assumes that he can simply become a gentile and leave his Jewish past behind (Season Five, “The End”) he seems to exhibit this form of bad faith. Immediately after learning that his biological parents are gentiles, he adopts those beliefs. He similarly dismisses them and re-adopts his Jewish beliefs when he finds that he was not adopted.
If Larry is in bad faith, then isn’t there some merit to the claim that he’s a bad, self-hating Jew? Since comedy is a relation between an artist and his audience, perhaps we can get a handle on the charge that Larry is a self-hating Jew by approaching the issue from our perspective—after all, we’re “buying” what Larry is “selling.” The charge against Larry necessarily implicates us as well, and leads to the more general question: Is there an ethics of laughter? The supply-demand nature of entertainment links the ethics of supplying questionable comedy with the demand that makes supply possible. So, if we can determine our status as Friends of Larry, then we may be in a better position to determine whether Larry is a friend (or enemy) of Jews.
In “Krazee-Eyez Killa” (Season Three), Larry strikes up an unusual friendship with a rapper, the boyfriend of Wanda Sykes’s character. When Krazee-Eyez asks, “you’re my nigger, right?” we laugh at Larry’s response: “Yes, I’m your nigger.” Later, Larry gets more mileage out of the bit when he turns the tables, asking Krazee-Eyes, “Are you my Caucasian?” Is it wrong to laugh at such humor? Is it wrong even to call it humor?
When it comes to humor, context is everything. Consider the question: “Is it ever wrong to laugh at a joke?” One possibility is that we are using ethical language and concepts incorrectly when we apply them to humor. The idea is that just as I can’t use my scale to tell me my mood, I can’t use ethics to evaluate humor. Humor, so it is argued, is meant to be extreme, exaggerated, transgressive, and outrageous. According to this philosophical position, we check our ethical hats at the door when we enter a comedy club—or watch comedy shows such as Curb. Let’s call this the “Just Joking” Defense, since someone challenged for making a racist or sexist joke often relies on this way of thinking when they respond: “I was just joking! Can’t you take a joke?”
Ronald de Sousa, a contemporary Canadian philosopher, rejects the Just Joking Defense, which he argues in The Rationality of Emotion is based on a faulty assumption.3 The error is in assuming that laughter is involuntary. Here’s the idea: since generally we are only ethically accountable for acts that are voluntary, it follows that we can’t really be held accountable for laughing at jokes, even offensive jokes. Laughter, like sneezing, is on this view something that simply happens to us.
Take the scene when Larry and Jeff bust a gut while reading the freak book during Ted Danson’s birthday party, thus disturbing the festivities. If the Just Joking Defense is correct then they should not be blamed. They did not choose to laugh—the book’s freakish photos simply made them laugh, in the same way pepper makes us sneeze. But this ignores the fact that while Larry and Jeff may react mechanically, they nevertheless are responsible for allowing themselves to become the kinds of people who are powerless to restrain themselves. By not practicing restraint in the past, and by not recognizing that laughing at a “freak” may be mean-spirited, they put themselves in a position where they would be helpless to laugh at the freak book. So, not everything is really a laughing matter, after all.
As de Sousa further notes, the Just Joking Defense is unacceptable since it incorrectly assumes that humor is ultimately trivial—it is, if the defense is correct, not something that should be taken seriously. Humor, in other words, can be neither moral nor immoral since it is essentially amoral. For instance, Larry gets himself into trouble when he meets Richard Lewis’ dermatologist. When he finds out that the dermatologist, a black man, has been Lewis’ doctor for fifteen years, Larry jokes: “Even with the whole affirmative action thing?” (Season One, “Affirmative Action”). The doctor is understandably offended, and Larry’s response that “it was just a joke” seems to indicate a kind of amoralist interpretation. For the amoralist, humor creates a space where right and wrong don’t apply. Making a bad joke or laughing at a bad joke is playful rather than serious. And, so the claim goes, one may be playing with a concept like affirmative action without using that concept in the usual sense. This is the heart of the Just Joking Defense.
Perhaps Larry was attempting to poke fun at the attitudes of some whites towards affirmative action, with the joke being his “wink and nod” to the doctor, essentially saying, “I’m not one of those white people who think affirmative action is reverse discrimination—I’m okay.” Philosophers who believe that the essence of humor is a feeling of superiority may find this interpretation attractive, as would those who, like Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, see humor as a “safety-valve” that allows us to release feelings and ideas that we normally repress.
Philosophers who point to incongruity (the unexpected) as being the basis of humor may add that Larry is banking on the doctor seeing the incongruity of a progressive white man saying things that racist whites say. But what each of these perspectives misses is that the joke is offensive and the doctor is understandably and rightly offended. The “joke” offends since no context is provided that would allow us to see anything but offense. The doctor does not know Larry, so Larry cannot presume he will be “in” on the joke. There are no extenuating circumstances that would lead the doctor to be anything but offended—and we’re shocked as viewers that Larry (the character) could be so clueless. Without establishing the proper context, Larry’s statement is free-floating and thus offensive.
By “setting a context for humor” I mean clearly establishing some frame of reference that makes transparent—or as translucent as possible—the intentions and purpose of the humorist. This setting of context allows us to distinguish between an African-American comedian who uses the N-word and a comedian hired to entertain the crowd at a White Supremacist rally who also uses that word. In the latter case, the context establishes the use of that word as racist. By “putting a frame” on the event, language that in another context would be offensive may become funny; we do not take Chris Rock to be racist when he uses the N-word. When a Polish comedian tells Polish jokes, that can be funny—but only because the frame has been set and the possibility of free-floating interpretations (What did he really mean?) are diminished as far as possible.
Taking into account the “context-setting” feature of some humor can shed light on Larry’s alleged bad faith. The Larry we see in “The End” (Season Five), a Larry who giddily embraces all things goyish and seems relieved that he’s no longer a Jew, must be seen in the proper context. It certainly would be odd if we were to take the beliefs of Larry-the-happy-gentile as representing Larry David’s genuine stance on Judaism! Larry-the-happy-gentile, like “Larry Jew,” is a character, a caricature.
Larry’s gentilification is meant, perhaps, to cast even greater light on the overarching “moral,” if there is one, of the show: we all need to “curb our enthusiasm.” In fact, couldn’t we take Larry David (the writer) to be pointing to just the kind of “bad faith” that Sartre discusses? The difference here is that David knows it’s bad faith and is poking fun at it by setting a humorous context, whereas his critics would take “Larry Gentile” as evidence of Jewish self-hate.
Now, I’m not claiming that Larry had Sartre in mind, or even that he knows who Sartre is! But great philosophers don’t so much invent wisdom as make explicit the wisdom in life that is implicit for the rest of us. Larry David may not be influenced by Sartre, but perhaps his comic brilliance and the philosophical insights of Sartre are, in the present case at least, in the same neighborhood. They’re both dealing with the human potential for self-deception, but they’re doing so from different sides of the street.
If I’m correct and the bizarre transformation of “Larry Jew” into “Larry Gentile” in “The End” is recognized by Larry David as absurd and mock-worthy, then we can see the response of Larry’s mother when his spirit meets her in the afterworld—“What kind of schmuck are you?”—in another light. Her response may refer to the giddy conversion itself rather than to the actual donation of Larry’s kidney to Lewis. Perhaps Larry is a schmuck because his experience as a gentile reveals just how caught up he was in the “enthusiasm” of believing that you can leave your old life behind and become anything you want. This would mean that Curb is actually mocking the bad faith of “Larry Gentile” rather than disparaging Judaism. This would also cast light on Larry’s startling reversal on the issue of donating his kidney to Lewis. Wouldn’t it be absurd if finding out you were gentile would be enough to cause such a change? How silly. Larry’s flirtation with the gentile world would be just another example of his tendency to forget his own “golden rule”: curb your enthusiasm. In fact, isn’t this Larry’s problem in general?
Jerry Seinfeld commented in the original HBO documentary that “This guy proves ‘You are what you are.’” Larry David (the writer) seems remarkably unaffected by changes that would normally transform even the best of us. Wealth and fame, his friends claim, really have not changed him. This being the case, and given Curb’s contextualizing everything in terms of the pendulum swing from blind enthusiasm to humiliation and social disaster, it certainly is plausible to turn the table on the critics and respond that the “bad faith” that Larry allegedly exhibits is actually the butt of writer Larry David’s joke. The critics mistake the gag itself for reality. “Larry Jew” becoming “Larry Gentile,” and the miraculous transformation of character that ensues, is the punch line of the joke rather than any indication about the “real” Larry David’s authenticity. If I’m correct, the issue of “authenticity” is a non-starter since the point of “The End” is to mock Larry’s flights of enthusiasm rather than endorse them.
But this raises a further question: What value is there in the “curb your enthusiasm” ethos itself? What happens to faith when it is curbed?
Seinfeld, that other job Larry had back in the day, was famously a “show about nothing.” Actually, that is not quite right. Seinfeld was a show about a group of people dealing with the perceived loss of purpose, meaning, and value that seems a feature of modern life. Faith in institutions—community, church, education, and government—that previously “grounded” our lives has eroded. We are, as a contemporary philosopher put it, “a community of those who have nothing in common.”4
Optimism in the future and progress seems replaced with a deep cynicism toward the ideals and sense of belonging that, correctly or incorrectly, many identify with past generations. Everyone and every institution appears to have its own agenda, and skepticism with respect to seeking genuine accord and resolution to our problems seems pervasive. In this climate, the questions “What is of value?” and “What kind of life should I live?” seem to have as many answers as there are individuals. When faced with people who offer answers different from our own, we tend either to adopt an “agree to disagree” stance or to view the person with contempt and as an opponent in a “cultural war.”
Our situation is characterized by what Friedrich Nietzsche, the German bad-boy of philosophy who declared “God is dead,” called “nihilism”—a disbelief in any value whatsoever. Nihilism, he argued, was actually the result of the success of Christianity, which placed ultimate value and meaning in a world beyond this one. However, with the rise of science and other cultural changes, belief in God became less tenable. The infamous “Death of God” is the result—not the literal death of a divine being, but the loss of anything in our lives that could perform the God-function of providing ultimate meaning.
Let’s assume that there is something to this interpretation of modern culture and, worse still, that feelings of meaninglessness may even have increased (perhaps due to further dislocations of an economic and political nature, and certainly as a result of the staggering technological advances of our times). Now, to return to Seinfeld from Nietzsche-land, we could say that instead of becoming dark, brooding presences, contemplating the meaninglessness of it all, the Seinfeld folks went to great lengths to create meaning in their lives. Granted, they created ultimately trivial meanings about everything from “low talkers,” “close talkers,” “man-hands,” “re-gifting,” “double dipping,” yadda yadda yadda (see what I did there?). Where meaning seems absent, we create meaning. The Seinfeld bunch did this to excess and with great zeal.
Something similar is going on with Curb Your Enthusiasm, but Curb approaches questions of meaningfulness from a different angle. Where Seinfeld was largely a show about trying to make something from nothing, creating meaning no matter how trivial, Curb is a show about our tendency to get carried away when we create meaning. Here is what Larry David said about the show’s title during one of the “bonus features” found on the Season Seven DVD:
We don’t want to see people happy. And we want them, if they are happy, to keep it private and not subject the rest of the miserable world to it. We don’t want to see it, hence: curb it!
The idea, I suppose, is that people are so enthralled by their own experiences that they feel a need to share their “enthusiasm” (or anger—it works both ways) with everyone else, as if their feelings do not exist unless they are made public. In a Time magazine interview, Larry pointed out that “people should keep enthusiasm curbed in their lives. Always keep it. To not is unattractive. It’s unseemly.”5 Certainly, when discussion turns to politics and religion, this tendency to equate self-esteem and self-value with public displays of enthusiasm becomes more pernicious. Perhaps this is the heart of the Curb Your Enthusiasm ethos—a sensibility oriented by the need for restraint, especially in a culture in which a sense of meaninglessness may cause us to overvalue whatever meaning we do create.
In the end, we’re dealing with civility, which P. M. Forni—a guru of all-things-civil—defines in Choosing Civility as being aware of how we affect and are affected by others. In this sense, Curb Your Enthusiasm could be seen as a kind of civility training manual.
In a New York Times interview, Larry David remarked that “Religion should be made fun of. It’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it? Think of how people spend their lives. They have no idea, yet they go around as if this is a fact. It’s so insane, you know. If I really believed that stuff, I’d keep it to myself, lest somebody think I was out of my mind.”6 This, I would claim, is what happens to religion when it is curbed. Notice, David is not saying a person should stop believing in God, only that it seems perverse to inflict our enthusiasm on other people. To “curb” something is to restrain it, not to end or negate it. From humor directed at religious rituals (Season Two, “The Baptism”) to rules of conduct—some Christian Scientists’ avoidance of medicine in “The Benadryl Brownie” (Season Three), we need to keep our eyes on the context.
Larry’s biting humor generally is directed either at people who “make an issue” out of religion, using it as a force of criticism or evaluation in social interaction, or, who, in Larry’s opinion, take their religion too far into unreasonable territory. It’s not their faith to which Larry objects, but what he takes to be “unseemly” public displays of their faith. Rather than railing against the irrationality of faith or demeaning the role of faith in personal life, Larry seems most concerned with public displays of religious affection. This comedic stance against some forms of religious behavior and expression is consistent with tolerance toward a more restrained, personal context for faith.
Rather than exhibiting “Jewish Self-Hate,” Larry ridicules how some religious people (Jews included) express their faith. This context of Curb’s humor is crucial since what saves Larry from being a self-hating Jew is precisely a recognition that he is viewing religion through the Curb lens. Viewers of the show can be seen similarly, as being “in” on the joke regarding how some people treat their faith.
Some may object that the intentions of the creator and viewers are irrelevant—centuries of discrimination (and outright violence) situate language within a context greater than that envisioned by either artist or art-lover. This is an important consideration. But charges of Jewish self-hate on Larry’s part and laughing at such a display on ours fail to account for the place of humor and, at times, acerbic self-criticism in Judaic history.
The Book of Jonah tells the story of a reluctant prophet (the one swallowed by a whale) whose missteps and vacillations are portrayed in riotous and instructive detail. Midrash, an important part of Jewish intellectual history focusing on the interpretation of biblical texts, is by nature contentious and rife with high-brow puns, similes, jokes, acerbic criticism and self-criticism.
Then there’s Yiddish itself, which abounds with humor and play, so much so that a recent book on Jewish culture is titled Born to Kvetch.7 “Kvetch” means “complain.” A particularly pernicious stereotype is the cranky, complaining Jew. However, and given the proper context, Jews can cope with such discrimination and tell their story by appropriating what elsewhere is a term of abuse. In this regard, it may seem odd to charge Larry with Jewish self-hate rather than place him in a larger context that appreciates the place and role of humor in Jewish culture and history.
I’m not claiming Larry had this in mind when he named the show, but “curb” means “an enclosing frame” and can refer to a raised border that confines. Perhaps critics see Larry as a self-hating Jew because they fail to see the “enclosing frame” that the ethos of the show—the motto “Curb your enthusiasm”—creates for the show’s humor. The critics’ enthusiasm, it seemed, precluded them from connecting the words uttered by “Larry Jew” and “Larry Gentile” with the comic and philosophical perspective that give meaning and context to those words.
1 Savage Nation, Talk Radio Network, November 7th, 2009.
2 Resolving Social Conflicts (Harper and Row, 1948), p. 164.
3 Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (MIT Press, 1987).
4 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Indiana University Press, 1994).
5 Bryan Alexander, “Q&A: Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David,” Time (June 3rd, 2010).
6 “Times Talk,” May 2006.
7 Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).