So Larry David was on Saturday Night Live last night and offended people with his Holocaust humor.
Here is a personal story people may find perhaps amusing and perhaps move the debate forward a bit: When I was in the eighth grade, in 1970, the Jewish teacher in the English public school class I was attending was considered a "radical" because she thought Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon were poets--unlike a lot of English teachers elsewhere at the time. Also, because she was so "radical," she liked to say to the class that they should feel free to say what they wanted, and she would accept anything from a student with the only proviso that it was to be well-spoken and well-written. She therefore properly agreed that decorum was important in a public school class, but she wanted us to free our minds and explore the outer reaches of creative and critical thinking.
Anyway, sometime during the school year, she assigned the class "The Diary of Anne Frank." By that time, I had been force fed the diary (of course it was, we later learned, the misleading expurgated version, which also had some changes designed to turn Anne into Franz Werfel's "Bernadette" character) since I was seven years old in Hebrew school and into my bar mitzvah that year. And starting in 1969, I became acquainted with Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, and by 1970, a young comic named Richard Pryor. So, for my paper on the book, I was told we could be "creative." And I decided I had enough with what the late Peter Novick called the sacralization of the Holocaust that was underway (I of course did not know about him or his later book on the subject), and wrote a parody based upon what happened to Anne Frank once she and her family were caught and placed into separate death camps. I wrote it as a play, as I was fond of doing at the time. In the story, I included the brutality of the camps, but I then took a sharp turn into Lenny Bruce-land and had the women's side raided by the guys' side because they got tired of not hanging more with the women. My folks went nuts when they saw it the night before it was due, and even my closest friend at the time, Barry Haberman, who agreed with me in most things at the time (Barry still loves "Harold & Maude" as my wife does, while I find myself more recently sympathetic to Harold's mother's pain), said, Oh boy, this may be too much, Mitch....
We were supposed to read our reports or plays to the class, and I did so. It turned out everyone was shocked, especially as I was of course Jewish. What I realized is that the world is a bigger place than my own life, and one has to recognize that what had become trite and old hat to me was new to these non-Jewish students in 1970. They were crying when they read the Diary and learned about the Holocaust, and I was like, what the hell do you mean that you don't know this already? I also learned that comedy can be really scary sometimes. I scared the teacher that day, as she had to confront the limits of her own sense of radicalism (she was a Lenny Bruce fan, as I recall, too).
And what I learned is maybe keep certain levels of humor inside the room, so to speak--something the Wayans Brothers made a lot of money not following, I should say. Yes, I considered the Wayans Brothers' humor in their show, "In Living Color," to be a send up of minstrel humor directed at African-Americans that I felt much of the white audience ended up going to themselves, "See? Even they admit that blacks are lazy and shiftless." So, yeah, I am calling out the Wayans Brothers though I know their defense is they were being "ironic."
I will also say the following: Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is not a favorite at all of mine as I grew tired in the past 25 years of the "Seinfeldian" style of mean humor of "You fell in the mud, ha-ha," which is a different humor form than, "I fell in the mud, and I am laughing too, because at some point we all fall in the mud." It is a difference between Nelson Muntz going "Ha-ha" and us recognizing shared experiences together. It is also the difference between Howard Stern's humor attacking women, homeless and minorities and Lenny Bruce's humor going after those in power, as Paul Krassner recognized early in the Howard Stern mania years of the 1980s. I also grew tired of the whiny Jewish guy, who makes these sort of tasteless jokes, and get the "shiksa" (non-Jewish blond or otherwise beautiful woman) in the end. I realized it was becoming tiresome, as whines do, and the indirect attack on Jewish women became more and more abhorrent to me. So, don't get me started on "Meet the Fockers," either. At some point, in the late 1980s, Woody Allen's films became laborious and tired, and frankly unwatchable. And as a I said, I dissented from revering Larry David's "Seinfeld" shows and David's subsequent career, though I find myself laughing at some points when I see an interview with him, and I know, if we knew each other, I would enjoy his company.
I must also say here I got a kick out of David's Weinstein joke on SNL last night as I have felt the same way he has from the start. Bad publicity about Jews is not a good thing (the old saying "Is it Good for the Jews?", something this novel played with, had some solid insight and was a good read, too)...so thank you, goyish Kevin Spacey! Time for the gay-goys to get defensive too!...
At some point, though, maybe we can decide, once and for all, it is not the ethnicity or sexual orientation that accounts for the bad behavior. It may be though that it is about giving men, in particular, power and money over others without the protection of sexual harassment laws, and overcoming a culture where the "casting couch" continued to exist despite those laws. The last time I checked, Nero and Caligula were not Jews--nor gay in the way we think of today. At the end of the day, it is about money, power and testosterone.
But let's also say something else here: The outrage here is just one more example of the manner in which social media has become oppressive itself. I frankly don't care that someone on Twitter is outraged by something. It is just humor and yes, I know it re-enforces stereotypes. But really, enough with the outage machine already. If Lenny Bruce was alive today, he would be literarily crucified by the outrage machine. At some point, the outraged are too often people who are oversensitive and ultimately can't laugh at a joke. My only exception to that anti-political correctness line of thinking concerns humor or speech referencing and promoting stereotypes regarding African-Americans. For me, the history of the United States is deeply grounded with the oppression, repression of, and injustice against, African-Americans that resembles in many ways the history of European Christian treatment of Jews. And after the Holocaust and World War II, many European nations, trying to come to grips with the cruelty and hate that fueled the Holocaust, appear to have been wise to limit speech preaching hatred of Jews or denying the genocide now known as the Holocaust. There should be some cultural suppression of the mores that led to the degrading and eventual killing of Jews. It goes against my principles for free speech, but I also recognize that when one is attacking groups within a national history that deeply oppresses that group, maybe it is not the wisest thing to allow speech that re-enforces what the nation needs to learn from and avoid. I think it has worked fairly well in Germany without doing damage to the commonweal and its freedom of speech in all other matters. As for the humor here, I would say it is appropriate for us Jews to keep in our own rooms their own style of humor that David uttered on television about Jews last night. It works better around the kitchen table among one's own "tribe," perhaps. It's kind of the way I felt about much of (but not all of) the Wayans' humor back in the 1980s when they literally used blackface tropes where the irony was so far buried most could not even see it.
So, yes, if you want to say how offended you were at Larry David, I am good with that. I myself winced a bit at David's bit, but in the end, it's comedy. Comedy is sometimes not pretty, and the outrage is more petty than anything else. My not humble advice is this: There are lots of other things in matters of public policy with which we should be concerned. So turn off the outrage machine already.
