Wait, Larry David is Jewish?

Zach Luck

In the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David pretends to be an Orthodox Jew in an attempt to convince the director of the Kidney Consortium to give his friend a transplant, just so he can avoid donating the kidney himself. Each time the (genuinely) Orthodox Jewish director says something in Hebrew or Yiddish ("baruch ha'shem" or the like) Larry responds with a nonsensical "acchhhhh… acchhh."

My extended family watched this episode together over Thanksgiving. I laughed until tears rolled down my checks at Larry's ridiculous interactions with Orthodox Judaism as I sat next to my uncle's girlfriend's 12-year-old daughter, one of the few non-Jews in the room. She laughed along, but commented, "He's not Jewish at all; he's just lying." Barely able to speak through my own laughter, I replied, "No, you don't understand. That's the point—it's funny because he's Jewish."

Before his debut on Curb, Larry David was the co-creator and writer of Seinfeld. Seinfeld drew heavily on American Jewish themes, stereotypes, and humor while only rarely acknowledging explicitly that any of the characters were Jewish. There is nothing new about this type of ethnic sugarcoating. From the earliest days of film, Jews have been re-tooling Jewish stories, stereotypes, and situations in order to obtain wider popularity. Even more than in cowboy movies based on the shtetl, tales of Hollywood's golden age (Cossacks became Indians and the pogroms became Wild West raids), the Jewishness of Seinfeld's Upper West Side humor was abundantly clear.

Nonetheless, for the first few seasons even Jerry Seinfeld's own Judaism was ignored, and it ultimately came into play only in the now famous episode where his dentist converts to Judaism. ("'He converted to Judaism purely for the jokes' … 'And this offends you, as a Jew?' … 'No. It offends me as a comedian.'") Jerry's posse—Kramer, Elaine, and George— are ostensibly non-Jews even though George's relationship with his mother could not possibly be more stereotypically Jewish. Yet, by refraining from explicit references to Judaism and Jewish culture, Seinfeld was able to gain popularity with a mainstream American audience.

Seinfeld's popularity was based on how successful the show was at making the characters truly seem like everyone else – it is incredibly easy to identify with Elaine, George, or Jerry, or to say one of your friends "is just like ______." The show was extraordinarily successful at getting the audience to relate with the protagonists despite their nearly meaningless lives and narcissistic attitudes. Really, we all know it is because of their meaningless lives, shallowness, and inability to fit in that we identify with them. Audiences love to root for the underdog and find it easy to identify with the outsider. Fans of Seinfeld identify with this outsider quality— not with the implicit Jewishness of the characters. Judaism is simply a small part of the broader outsider identity of the characters, and since it reinforces rather than contradicts that identity, it remains in the background.

George Costanza's character was based on Larry David, and Larry David, the character on Curb, is George taken to an even greater extreme. While George would passively fail to fit in, Larry seems to actively make decisions so that he ends up on the outs. A source of social discomfort for everyone around him, Larry always says the wrong thing at the wrong time. Beyond the George/Larry comparison, everything in Curb is more explicit, blunt, and painfully awkward than in the gentler world of Seinfeld. But perhaps one of the biggest thematic breaks between Curb and Seinfeld is that in Curb Judaism is directly addressed. Larry's relationship with Judaism is one of the overarching themes of the most recent season and has been brought up repeatedly during the show's history. What changed? Why is Judaism suddenly central to the life of Larry David, the writer and the character, when he could have easily chosen to gloss it over as in Seinfeld?

Lenny Bruce once said that he changed his name because "Leonard Alfred Schneider was 'too Hollywood.' " My hunch is that post-Seinfeld Larry David knows, and moreover knows that we know, that he's a rich Hollywood Jew—a deeply "insider" identity. In a sense, Larry David, in the post-Seinfeld world, has become "too Hollywood." References in the show to individuals who want to meet Larry or befriend him because of his connection to Seinfeld, constantly remind us that he is in fact rich and famous. But, if he is going to remain funny, he must find a way to convince his audience that he is still an outsider, an identity viewers can feel comfortable laughing with and at.

Rather than shy away from the reality that has become a part of one of the most successful, connected insider groups in America, he decides to show us what it is like for Larry David, the outsider and social failure, to go to High Holy Days services and to hold a Passover Seder. In doing so, he has found a surprising way to convince his audience all over again that he is truly an outsider despite fame and success. He does this by showing us that even within the supposedly "insider" world where he should belong, Hollywood Judaism, he finds himself all the more out of place.

In one episode Larry decides to go to synagogue for high holidays but doesn't have a ticket. He scalps a ticket in front of the shul and gets great seats for himself and his wife. Ultimately, as he is thrown out of the synagogue by security for using scalped tickets, he shouts accusingly "This is some example you are setting for my gentile wife! It's her first time in temple!" He proves to his audience not only that he fails to fit in with Jews (he doesn't belong to the synagogue in the first place), but that he specifically fails to fit in with a Jewish community that is rich and elite enough to have others covet synagogue membership enough to warrant scalpers selling tickets for High Holiday services.

Of course, Larry doesn't actually belong among Hollywood Jews. Like the Seinfeld characters he created, he is the stereotypical Upper West Side Jew. Curb draws humor from the deeply different attitudes towards Jewish identity that exists on the respective coasts of this country. Specifically, Larry plays up the stereotypes of the Upper West Side's loud, brash, Yankee-loving, New Yorker-reading, neurotic Jews and their shallow, status-obsessed, pop culture-versed, Los Angeles counterparts. The trappings of Southern California—from SUVs to McMansions to movie stars—are all aspects that help to define Curb as a departure from Seinfeld. Larry, the embodiment of the East Coast Jew, is an awkward fit in this environment, and this awkwardness guarantees laughs.

An example of this comes in the episode where a rabbi calls Larry and asks for permission to bring "a survivor" over to dinner. Larry assumes he means a survivor of the Holocaust and tells the rabbi to bring him along. After much deliberation ("Do they like to talk to each other? Do they talk about the camps?") Larry decides to invite his father's friend who survived the Holocaust to the same dinner so the two can meet. Bragging about his hardships on the show Survivor, the fit young man explains that he didn't even get snacks some days. The Holocaust survivor can take no more and begins a debate, which escalates into each of them screaming at the other "no, I'm a survivor!" The two Jewish worlds have collided: one connected to the vanilla fun of American pop culture and the other rooted in the sordid past of European atrocity. Larry fails to fit in comfortably with either image of Jewishness, and as he looks out over his kitchen table, the audience feels his incapability to fit in with any particular image of Judaism—Larry always will find a way to end up uncomfortable and hilarious.

If Larry doesn't fit in with the brand of elite Reform Judaism of the West Coast, or with any more traditional Jewish identity, does he at least find a way to patch together what little Jewish practice takes place in his own home? When Larry's gentile wife decides to hold a Passover Seder "for his father," it is her clear attempt to bring the David family more in line with the Jewish community around them. The neighbors are invited, as are family and friends. After receiving a series of "life-changing" golf lessons from a neighbor, who Larry knows is a convicted sex offender, Larry invites him to the seder. The second to last scene ends with a young female guest choking on her food and a call for anyone who "knows mouth-to-mouth." Of course, only the sex offender can help her. Why wasn't there a gentle Jewish doctor at this Seder? In fact there had been, until Larry accused him of repeatedly stealing his newspaper. This is the only way for Larry to "do Jewish."

As the season draws to a close Larry gets important news from the private detective he has hired to investigate whether he was actually adopted. Much to his own surprise, Larry finds out that his "true" birth parents are non-Jews. Suddenly, Larry is no longer an outsider. He is no longer neurotic, conniving, bitter, or jealous. He goes fly-fishing. He fixes the roof. He runs into the baptismal waters and ultimately decides to give his kidney to a friend that he had avoided all season. The roof-fixing goyish Larry is funny precisely because the audience has grown so accustomed to knowing him as a socially awkward Jew. We see his relationship, this conversion narrative, as totally unbelievable because we, the audience, believe we know the real Larry. And of course, as he is being taken to the emergency room to give his kidney, Larry gets the news that he wasn't adopted. His conversion instantaneously reverses and his easy-going, fly-fishing spirit of charity is gone.

This part of the season's ending is a relief because we find out that we have not been duped. Larry is a Jew and an outsider. His days of fitting in were a farce. For all his discomfort among Jews throughout the season, the lesson is not that deep down he is a goy. The lesson is simply that Jews have become mainstream enough that it is funny (and also important) to distance ourselves from whatever images of homogeneous normality that any segment of the Jewish community is projecting. If Jews achieved total homogeneous normality, we would risk the most terrible fate of all-—not being funny anymore.

ZACH LUCK will graduate in May with a major in Economics and a concentration in History. He still needs a job for the fall.