Posted on 11/06/2017 12:26:49 PM PST by nickcarraway
What is the sound of America cringing?
Larry David now knows. And, its not pretty.
This last Saturday night, comedian Larry David was the guest host on NBCs Saturday Night Live.
Lets get clear on something: over the past month, SNL has had two Jewish hosts. That might be unprecedented.
Yet, while Israeli superstar Gal Gadot filled the Jews with pride, especially with her Hebrew shout-out, Larry David successfully pushed every Jewish button.
First: Larry told us how embarrassed he is, as a Jew, that so many of the men who have been accused of sexual harassment happen to be Jewish.
It felt like a flashback to an earlier generations fevered whisper: What will the goyim say?
Then, he imagined himself in a Nazi concentration camp, and wondered if he would have been checking out the women inmates. Did the Jews in concentration camps still, um, want to hook up?
The problem is, he tried to quip, there are no good opening lines in a concentration camp Hows it going? They treating you OK? You know, if we ever get out of here, Id love to take you out for some latkes. You like latkes?
The phones at the ADL are probably ringing with the intensity of a thousand shofars.
How bad was Larry Davids performance?
Lets put it this way: Lorne Michaels, SNLs producer, could do worse than take over the cold open next Saturday night, and offer a public apology.
Lets consider the second shtick first the one about sex during the Holocaust.
Was there, in fact, consensual sexual sex in the concentration camps?
It is hard to imagine that such opportunities would have existed.
But, after the war? Absolutely.
The greatest baby boom in Jewish history happened right after the liberation of the camps. In the Displaced Persons camps, men and women met, fell in love, and had children. Sex and fertility was the ultimate affirmation of life.
When you think about it, Larry David has been leading us to this moment for decades.
Remember the famous Seinfeld episode The Raincoats. It is otherwise known as the making out during Schindlers List episode.
Newman, the loathsome mailman, spies Jerry making out with his (kashrut-observing) girlfriend, Rachel, in a movie theater during a showing of Schindlers List. Newman self-righteously reports the incident to Jerrys parents, who are horrified.
Larry David was one of the writers of that episode.
On one level, this was great social commentary.
People who are dating have been known to make out in a movie theater.
But, to do it during Schindlers List seems wrong.
Because Schindlers List had become an American Jewish cultural icon. For some people, Schindlers List was a symbolic representation of the Holocaust. To make out during the movie would have been tantamount to making out during the Holocaust itself. The cognitive dissonance would have been overwhelming.
In religious terms, it was nothing less than a desecration of the holy.
And then, there was the famous Survivor episode of Larry Davids HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm. A Holocaust survivor gets into an argument with a cast member of the Survivor reality show over who is the real survivor? Who had it worse an inmate in Auschwitz, or a healthy young man stranded in the Australian outback?
What was that episode teaching us? That the term survivor is in danger of losing its meaning so that almost anyone can claim its sacred mantle.
What about the piece about the (perceived) prevalence of Jews among men accused of sexual harassment?
Here is what Larry David either does not know, or does not want to know.
Throughout history, anti-semites have imagined that Jewish men were either effeminate (and that they menstruated), or the opposite that they were over-sexed, often portrayed with grotesquely enlarged genitalia.
To make men into the sexual Other its an old trick, and it played again in anti-black discourse.
The Nazi propaganda master, Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer, took this notion to the next demonic level that Jewish men had abnormal sexual desires, which they directed against pure Aryan women.
True to the example of their literary ancestors, some anti-semitic web sites have made the same case that Harvey Weinsteins outsize sexual and power stuff is directly linked to his being Jewish.
At 11:35 pm this past Saturday night, Larry David handed an easy victory to the modern-day ideological descendants of Julius Streicher.
That is why Larry Davids opening monologue was not only tasteless.
It was not only unfunny.
With the preponderance of anti-semitism in this country, it was also dangerous.
If youve never seen any Seinfeld episodes, it would seem a strange topic for a comedy. IMO, the episode wasnt so much making fun of the movie Schindlers List nor of the Holocaust as much as it was pointing out, in a comedic way, the way some people viewed the movie with a near religious zeal. In the episode, among other intersecting plot lines, as there are always intersecting plot lines, Jerrys parents have come from their retirement home in Florida to visit Jerry and are staying at his apartment but putting a crimp into his relationship with his new girlfriend; they cant get any alone time together because his parents are always showing up and interrupting. And everyone is asking Jerry if hes seen Schindlers List and when he says no, is admonished that he Must! go see it.
So he and his girlfriend go to see it but they end up in the back row of the dark movie theater, and being sort of like hormonal teenagers, they start making out before the movie starts but keep making out after the movie starts. And Jerrys arch nemesis, the postman and neighbor Newman, sees them and rats him out to his parents.
But Seinfeld was after all, a show about nothing. At lot of it, while often over the top and greatly exaggerated, really boiled down to everyday things happening to every day people, especially every day New York things and people or lampooned normal conventions and in retrospect, poked fun of a lot of political correctness.
One of my favorite episodes takes place in a big shopping mall garage where Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, leave the mall but then cant find where theyve parked the car in this huge garage. That actually happened to me and some friends once and we, much like in the episode we wandered around for what seemed like hours trying to find it. It doesnt sound like something that would make for a half hour of comedy but it worked and was really funny.
Speaking political correctness:
Kramer won't wear an AIDS ribbon
Seinfeld Native American (Full Scene)
There are two kinds of people, those who love Seinfeld and those who hate it. Well, three if you count those who have never seen it but then No Soup For You!
Well there was “The Producers” with “Springtime for Hitler”.....
Well I was in a different category of “lukewarm” about Seinfeld. I have seen maybe 10 or so episodes over the years, and it gets some chuckles out of me, but I neither love it nor hate it.
He’ll “joke” about anything.
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