Jewish comedy, p.6
Jewish Comedy, page 6
On the other hand, Bruce was able to have his pumpernickel and eat it too. In an immediately infamous routine, he continued and expanded his definitional activities:
Now, a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That’s what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is—One Who Killed Our Lord . . . Alright. I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: “We killed him. Signed, Morty.” And a lot of people say to me, “Why did you kill Christ?” “I dunno . . . it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.” We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.
The shock value here is doubled. First, admitting—for laughs!—and speaking out loud the most powerful anti-Semitic canard in Western history, and daring—daring!—the Christian audience to do something about it. Only in America could worries about a resulting pogrom reflect more on the worrier than the joke-teller. And second, ringing the changes on a kind of ethos of self-hatred, here of the hip for the postwar, aspirational, bourgeois Jew in the grey flannel suit: if there’s a reason to hate those Christ-killing Jews, it’s because they, boringly, want everyone to be doctors and lawyers, like they now—thanks to American vistas of possibility—can be. (Bruce’s flaying of the Scheckners, Jewish squares he meets on tour, is a case in point.) Whither American Jewish comedy of anti-Semitism then, when persecution becomes a dead letter and Jews can get into (almost) all the best clubs?
The interesting comparand here is Israel itself. Israel constitutes the second pole of Jewish historical success, where a Jewish state means a relief from state-sponsored anti-Semitism and the sentiment of minority culturehood. Well, that would be the theory, anyway. As Arthur Koestler put it, writing before the establishment of the state, “Palestine has the size of a county and the problems of a continent.” In reality, Israel not only faces the constant threat of military aggression from enemies on all of its borders who specialize in genocidally eliminationist rhetoric that would have done Haman proud, but also a kind of increasing pariahhood among members and citizens of other liberal states. For some, this feels like a double standard that comes uncomfortably close to anti-Semitism itself, whether or not Israel has committed actions that were wrong or criticism-worthy. (As Israelis and others point out, this pretty much describes every state almost all of the time.)
This is not a recent Israeli sentiment. One of the blackest versions of this I’ve seen came from the pen of Ephraim Kishon, one of Israel’s leading humorists in the decades immediately following the establishment of the state. Kishon generally engaged in gentle satire of Israeli life, in newspaper columns that show how classic Jewish tropes—verbal one-upsmanship, puffed-up fake knowledge, and the like—persist in the transference from the diaspora to the new society. But in “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy,” written after the 1956 Suez Crisis, he ventured into much darker territory.
Satirically castigating Israel for its military triumphs, Kishon suggests that the key for the world to find genuine sympathy for Israel will be for the state to be destroyed. After the remnants of the Jewish state are gathered “on the shores of bombed-out Tel Aviv and Haifa,” Kishon writes, “then, world conscience awakened.” Kishon’s detailed accounting of the copiousness and variety of the world’s crocodile tears—although that’s not quite accurate, since the bite of the satire is that the tears are genuine, now that Israel has been moved out of the pesky status of actually existing—is bone-chilling; you don’t know whether to laugh or shiver. The piece ends: “Israel did not wait until May, 1957, but rashly smashed the Egyptian war machine in the Sinai Peninsula and thereby lost the opportunity to win the whole world’s sympathy. And that is a great pity. God knows when we shall again have such a chance.” Kishon died in 2005, having seen, alas, how many other chances would come to suggest themselves.
Notwithstanding Israel’s frequent efforts to separate itself from diasporic cultural stances, this comic stance shows real continuities with the Jewish past, even if the self-consciousness of that continuity ebbs and flows. It may have been most pervasive during the first Gulf War, where international politics forced Israelis into a particularly inactive mode of response to Saddam Hussein’s bombings, but it persists. There’s the black humor that results from the recognition of free-floating hatred (high school students, army-bound, may part from each other with the phrase: “We’ll meet on the memorial plaque”), matched, perhaps, by the rueful acknowledgment that the hatred seems to violate all dictates of common sense and moral proportionality. These sentiments are often linked—in Kishon’s piece, implicitly, if patently—to the Holocaust; and it says something about the vicissitudes, and continuities, of history, that the following joke could have the resonance it does:
Sara in Jerusalem hears on the news about a bombing in a popular café near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that thankfully, the family is all safe. “And Anat?” Sara asks after the teenager whose hangout it had been. “Oh, Anat,” says her mother, reassuringly. “Anat’s fine. She’s at Auschwitz!”
Such sensibility is shared, I think, by some of the increasingly beleaguered Jewish communities of Europe. There, the ever more straitened gap between liberal and Europeanist and universalist affiliations and a sense of growing inhospitality to the Jewish state—and an increasing comfort by some of those inhospitable elements to blur the lines between Israeli and Jew—leads to works like the British writer Howard Jacobson’s biting comic novel The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. In that novel, Jacobson, like Heine in reverse, excoriates the Jewish left and their Israel-shaming stances for playing into the hands of more traditional cases of anti-Semitism. Jacobson depicts a charged relationship between two old friends, Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler. The former becomes increasingly obsessed with matters Jewish after being mugged by someone who may or may not have hissed “You, Jew” at him; the latter joins a provocatively named group, “ASHamed Jews,” which protests Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. The spiraling, traumatic conclusion, shrouded and shot through all about with fundamental concern about the possibilities and prospects for an Anglo-Jewish community, seems impossibly alien to an American context.
Which may explain why much of the twenty-first-century American humor of anti-Semitism has turned away from country club humor, from aggressions that for all intents and purposes no longer exist, and back toward the hoariest, most archetypal tropes of anti-Semitism, which can loom large in the American imagination—even if in the imagination is where they largely exist. And there’s no better person to illustrate this than a man who depicts himself, in the climax of an episode of his television show, as literally being chased by a furious, cross-wielding Jesus.
LARRY DAVID—by which I mean the character that shares his creator’s name and appears on a series of quasi-improvised half-hour blocks on HBO—has nothing to complain about. He, like his namesake, has made fortunes beyond his wildest dreams as the cocreator, along with Jerry Seinfeld, of one of the most successful television programs in the history of the medium. He is respected for his talent and envied for his success by peers and sycophants alike. David’s golden California lifestyle is as far away from the eliminationist anti-Semitism suggested by his attacker than at any time in two thousand years of Jewish history. And yet he’s constantly dissatisfied, constantly irked, and constantly picking fights and alienating friends, neighbors, potential business partners, random passersby, and, on more than one occasion, Ted Danson. What’s up with that? Or more precisely, what’s up with him?
The question is sharpened by David’s enthusiastic willingness on Curb Your Enthusiasm to include far more explicit Jewish content and theme, and embrace a far more explicit Jewish identity for his character, than he ever did for his alter ego George Costanza and friends on Seinfeld. That decision is illustrated most profoundly by the way David often presented the primary structural domestic tension in the show, between himself and his wife Cheryl, as a set of differences between a Jew and a Christian that revolve around religious strife, rather than simply ethnic or cultural stereotypes, despite the fact that neither is particularly religiously observant.
And not just any old Jewish-gentile friction: David, who was expelled from Hebrew school for laughing at his rabbi, is replaying medieval Jewish-Christian relations for laughs—uncomfortable laughs as they may be—presenting himself as the Jew Christians, and indeed Christendom, love to hate. There’s the episode where Larry eats some of the cookies that were part of his wife’s family’s Christmas manger diorama (thus participating in one of the oldest of anti-Semitic stereotypes, the desecration of the Host). And then there’s the one in which he prevents his potential future brother-in-law from getting baptized. And then the one in which he actually (if accidentally) urinates on a picture of Jesus, where the urine drops are then taken by credulous Christians for a miraculous display of Christ’s tears. And, of course, the one where he’s being chased down the hall by Jesus (a man named Jésus, actually, who believes, through a series of misunderstandings, that Larry has attempted to seduce his wife).
That last isn’t the only mock-pogrom on offer in Curb: On one episode, set on Halloween, David’s house actually ends up getting attacked by gentiles. The attack consists only of toilet paper and graffiti; the attackers are just disgruntled trick-or-treaters; and I wouldn’t make much of the fact that Halloween is originally All Hallow’s Eve, a Christian holiday. But I do think the reasons for the assault speak, in a nutshell, to Larry David’s difference, and the way others respond to it. David refuses to offer candy to two teenagers who come to his house and who aren’t wearing costumes. He’s got plenty of candy, of course; it’s the principle of the thing that matters. He awakens the next morning to find his house TP’d and the words BALD ASSHOLE spray-painted on his door; an argument with his gentile wife ensues; Larry defends his position; finally, in utter exasperation, Cheryl shouts, “No one understands your rules, Larry!”
These discussions about rules, one of Curb’s main continuities with Seinfeld—what are the boundary lines in nebulously defined situations? What constitutes the limits of social acceptability? When does this status change to that one?—were dubbed a “dark Talmud” by Larry Charles, the longtime Seinfeld and Curb writer, producer, and director. For Charles and David, adherence to those rules—in fact, an identity built around following those rules—creates a different approach to the world which is not only the basis for comedy, but hatred. David, when it comes right down to it, is certain that he’s right: and there’s a kind of antiheroic pride that he, along with Seinfeld’s Jerry, and George, and Elaine—not Kramer, usually; he’s too popular and beloved, despite or perhaps because of his particular kind of weirdness—takes in avoiding the tyranny of the (polite, decent, and moral) majority. Seinfeld itself, as a show, seemed to take on this attitude toward the character of its lead protagonists, their difference from the rest of the world: an attitude evoked—and responded to—in the show’s controversial, David-penned series finale.
In that hotly anticipated program, the foursome end up in jail because they refuse to help someone in trouble. In fact, not only do they not help, but they stand on the sideline and make jokes. Now, standing on the sidelines and making jokes—observing life and placing it through your own societally askew lens—is the province of comedians. But it is also, in its own ways, the province of minorities, and Christendom’s great minority in particular—and I don’t think it’s totally coincidental that David makes much of the fact that the crew end up in jail for having violated a Good Samaritan law. They’re not, in short, behaving like Christians; they violate the standards of regularly upheld social behavior, which makes them a threat that must be purged from the community. Jailed, in fact. In this sense, as David—and the Seinfeld characters—repudiate everything that the culture stands for, it’s hardly a surprise that, in the finale, they become nothing less than enemies of the state. (The judge tells the “New York Four,” as they’re known, with all the Jewish subtextual coding that implies: “Your callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built.”) Such claims remind us uneasily of Haman’s whispers to Ahasuerus—and, perhaps more uneasily, of the idea that there’s some truth to those whispers. All great comedians, at heart, take themselves as a target first and most of all.
But let’s not be too quick to call Larry David—or “Larry David,” at any rate—a self-hating Jew. When challenged with just this epithet by a man who hears him whistling Wagner, identified by his antagonist as the Nazis’ favorite composer, David’s response is “I hate myself, but not because I’m Jewish.” Which is, of course, a direct lift from Woody Allen, who had a thing or two to say about Wagner, Nazis, and anti-Semitism himself. Fans of Allen’s film work can remember Alvy Singer’s testimony in Annie Hall about New York, that, per Bruce, essentially and entirely Jewish city, and his jabs at neurotic obsessiveness with vestiges of anti-Semitism where none exists (“Wagner, Max. Wagner,” those unmistakable adenoidal tones say, plaintively). But they also remember Granny Hall, who envisions the man who enthuses over “dynamite ham” in black hat, full beard, and sidelocks.
Both Allen and his contemporary Mel Brooks—who David also pays tribute to; the entire fourth season of Curb is dedicated to a brilliant meta-joke reproducing The Producers—have a less complicated take on anti-Semitism, perhaps befitting their pre-Boomer status and identification. (Brooks fought in the Second World War; Allen was slightly younger, but still identifies more strongly with the prewar generation; David, by contrast, had just turned twenty-one when The Producers came out.) Both older figures stress the importance of comic minimization in “triumphing” over anti-Semitic threats like Nazism—a triumphalism that, one could argue, could only be advanced in the flush of success of the allies (with Jews in their forces) over the anti-Semitic Axis. Brooks makes the point explicitly, in interview after interview about The Producers; Allen less so, and his treatment of the subject gathered nuance as his career continued. Even in that classic dinner scene from Annie Hall, it’s a bit difficult to determine precisely who the joke’s on. But in works like “The Schmeed Memoirs,” purporting to be the tale of Hitler’s barber, Allen cast the Nazis in no less bumbling, preening, and feckless a light as Franz Liebkind does in writing the script seized upon by Messrs. Bialystock and Bloom. (“The world needs to know that Hitler was a terrific dancer!”)
As much as he repurposes Brooks and Allen on these matters, though, David goes further. There’s the notorious Holocaust set piece on Curb, in which David invited two survivors to his house, thinking they’d have a lot in common because they both went through the Holocaust (though agonizing about whether such thinking was offensive). The twist: the “survivor” his friend brought to dinner was actually a reality show contestant from the television program Survivor who attempts to equate his trials with those of the former prisoner of Auschwitz—there’d been mosquitoes, after all, and he and the other contestants had been deprived of snacks. But it’s Curb’s fifth season that truly stretches the limits, despite its seemingly innocuous and sitcommy premise.
After discovering his father (played by the old-time Jewish comedian Shelley Berman, another tip of the hat to his comic heritage) may not be his biological ancestor, Larry hires a private detective to check out his roots. Believing he’s found proof positive of his Gentility, he begins behaving, as Lenny Bruce would have put it, goyishly. But if Bruce’s response to non-Jewish discrimination is a reverse discrimination that casts the goyim as squares, David goes the other way, turning the joke on himself. For David, Jews are pushy, cowardly, and selfish, cast, perhaps in his own Costanzaish image; whereas the gentile Larry is polite to flight attendants, cheerfully offers to provide a leadership role in the case of airline disaster, and, most prominently, offers to donate a kidney to Richard Lewis—something the “Jewish” Larry was avoiding like the plague.
In short, David’s fantasia is, in its own way, a classic fantasy shared by genocidal anti-Semites: Wouldn’t it be great if there weren’t any Jews? Jews, who have all of these negative characteristics, and none of the positive ones? Even the season’s deflationary finale—Larry is told, on the way to the operating table, that it’s all been a mistake and that he’s Jewish after all, but it’s too late to do anything about it—seems in its own way to be a cautionary tale, the same from Seinfeld, the same from the medieval era: Don’t try to change. It always ends badly.
David isn’t the only one who’s employing these classic models of the comedy of Jewish anti-Semitism in an age when we might have thought, or hoped, that they’d lose their relevance. Take the stand-up comic and film and television actress Sarah Silverman, for example, who handled the topic of interfaith relationships—which has increasingly lost its transgressive power in American society as social acceptance of Jews has become the norm—by describing her very public (former) relationship with the comedian Jimmy Kimmel in consciously medieval terms. She claims that she wears a St. Christopher’s medal he gave her:
It was cute the way he gave it to me, you know, he said, if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me, which is . . . [makes aww, cute face] who cares, different religions, you know, I mean, I guess the only time it’s an issue I suppose would be like, if you’re having a baby, you gotta figure out how you wanna raise your baby or whatever, you know, which wouldn’t even still not be an issue for us because we’d be honest, you know, and just say, mommy is one of the chosen people and, uh, and daddy believes that Jesus is magic!
