Why I'm OK with Larry David’s Jokes

“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”  E. B. White

Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator and writer Larry David is getting a lot of flak for his monologue on last week’s Saturday Night Live.  The monologue was indeed edgy and boundary pushing, touching on topics from sexual harassment in Hollywood to the Holocaust.  Many people who saw and heard these jokes were instantly outraged.  The ADL, which I support, denounced it.  Rabbis are calling for apologies.  Many people who didn’t see or hear the monologue are angry as well.  How dare he make fun of either of these topics!  The issues are personal, sensitive, and not appropriate for the subject of jokes! 

Part of me believes this was David's intended purpose, because he is a master at the comedy of making people uncomfortable.  Another part remembers that, as the converted dentist Tim Whatley teaches us, “It’s our sense of humor that sustained us as a people for 3000 years!”

I’m not shocked by the jokes; I actually found them quite funny because they pushed the envelope.  Nor was I shocked by the outcry afterwards.  In fact, as I was watching, I knew that many people wouldn’t find the jokes funny, and some would probably make that sentiment public.  That’s OK.  Humor is a matter of taste, and taste is subjective.  

Here’s what’s not subjective, though: the jokes did not make fun of the victims of sexual assaults and abuse or the abuse itself; the jokes did not make fun of Jews other than David himself; the jokes did not make fun of Holocaust survivors or their memory; and they did not make fun of disabled people.  If David had done any of this, I agree, we should be critical.  But the response shows a lack of understanding what David was doing in his monologue and what the messages of his jokes actually were.

Was it the greatest set of stand up ever?  No. Was it powerful?  Absolutely.

Let’s take a look at what Larry David said so that we can try to understand what he was saying.

First, he awkwardly transitioned to the subject of there being a lot of sexual harassment in the news of late, and he commented on the fact that “many…not all…but many” of the accused happen to be Jews.  His hesitation and discomfort in saying these phrases is important and the crux of the joke. He doesn’t like that it’s the case that there’s a lot of prominent Jews on the list of the accused.  He doesn’t even want to bring it up.  But his humor has always been about talking openly about those things we’re not supposed to talk about openly.

He goes on to say that he would prefer to see headlines about Einstein and Salk’s achievements rather than Weinstein’s bad behavior (which he referenced using a call back to an episode of Seinfeld).  He then discussed how he tries to always be a good representative of the Jewish people, such that when people see him, they’d not only recognize it, but announce him as a "Fine Jew" as he walks by.

As Jews, many of us know what it means to be seen as a token, or representative of the whole group.  We know how it feels to see a Jewish name in the paper, like Madoff, and cringe that “it’s not good for the Jews.”  Naming this anxiety and this quirk of being a minority is not about minimizing Weinstein’s behavior or making fun of his victims, nor is it about diminishing Jews.  It’s about recognizing that for some people one Jew is connected to every other Jew, and Jews have to live with those consequences.  The joke is not about sexual assault at all.

David lampoons this ridiculous notion that one member of a minority and their behavior represents the collective will and behavior of the entire group.  It’s an important statement about actual anti-Semitism, and one which can only be made after a prominent Jew does something really, really bad.  The main question of the joke remains unspoken.  Do we all now have to be on our best behavior because one of us committed some truly terrible acts?  There is a certain neurosis that might make Jewish people think so, and naming it calls it out as ridiculous.  David's monologue, which he knows is boundary crossing, is also an answer to this question: a resounding no!

David then moved on to a bit about how ridiculous men’s expectations of women are, using the fictional character of Quasimodo, a French hunchback, who only wanted to date the prettiest woman.  David did an impression of Quasimodo which some felt crossed the line into making fun of the physically disabled.  But David’s critique of Quasimodo had nothing to do with him being disabled.  Rather, it was about his being a ridiculous man, whose standards were too high and whose expectation of women is unrealistic.  It was not a joke about the disabled; and in fact, is a joke at the expense of men and the culture of masculinity which says that men deserve a certain kind of woman. No man is free from this, no matter their background.  And, it's ingrained even in our best works of literature. 

Finally, David moved into his most controversial jokes.  Watching him, it appeared that he was reconsidering the jokes even as he began.  He knew he was playing with fire.  David set up a premise, wondering aloud what he would have done had he been alive in Poland during WWII, when Hitler comes to power.  He shifted to imagining himself as an inmate in a concentration camp.

Here’s where an important distinction needs to be made.  He made a joke which takes place during the Holocaust, but is not a joke about the Holocaust.  Some may disagree with this distinction, saying that the Holocaust is never to be joked about.  That’s a valid opinion; but it’s an opinion, not a fact.  If that’s not your kind of humor, turn off the TV.  Perhaps The Producers is on another channel.

David wonders: if he were an inmate, how would he pick up a woman.  He bemoans the fact that there are no good pick-up lines in a concentration camp.  He plays a scene out for us.  Again, the joke here is not at the expense of a survivor, or the Jews who perished.  It's not even at the expense of the Nazis.  It’s at his own expense, at his ridiculous male instinct to think only about women and sex, even at the least appropriate times.  Just as in the Quasimodo joke, David makes fun of men in general.  His joke says that even in the camps, men would be figuring out how to pick up women, because that’s what men do, because that's what he would do.  If anything, the joke humanizes the victims, reminding us that they were people who had impulses, feelings, and emotions.

David knows that simply by setting the joke at a concentration camp, rather than, for example, at a modern day prison, it raises the stakes.  He could have made the exact same joke and set it during the Roman destruction, the Crusades, or the Inquisition (what a show!).  In these other settings of Jewish calamity, would we be so sensitive about a joke that at its elemental level treads the old premise made famous by Roseanne, that “men are pigs” and only have one thing on their mind?  Maybe those Jewish tragedies are far enough in the past.

Those raised stakes are, for me, one of the reasons that David’s jokes are even funnier. 

I understand and don't deny that the Holocaust and sexual assault are touchy subjects which should not be the butt of jokes.  In this case, they were not.  But there is a school of comedy which believes that nothing is off limits.  Just because he said the words concentration camp doesn't mean he was being anti-Semitic (though, self-hating would be more apt a description, maybe).  His jokes about Weinstein don't mean he condones the behavior.  Larry David is not the bad guy.

There’s a lot of real and painful anti-Semitism and misogyny in the world right now.  Larry David’s monologue is responding to that.  If we listen carefully to his words, we see that he actually tries calling a lot of it out.  I think he was successful in this endeavor.  You may not.

We are better served by listening to the actual words and messages of these jokes.  They're not about nothing.  If we lead with our outrage and neglect the message, we miss the entire point of a lot of stand up comedy today, which strives to do more than set up a joke and deliver a punchline.  It strives to make sense of the difficulties of the world around us through humor and personal anecdote, pointing out just how ridiculous human behavior and the world often are.

We can't fix our ridiculousness and foibles if we don't name them first.