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‘Curb’ — The New Candy Store for Jewish Pride

“You’re not a get together guy. You hate to get together!” Jerry Seinfeld tells former partner Larry David in the third episode of this season’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “I’m being sold something. I don’t know what yet.”\n
[additional-authors]
September 23, 2009

“You’re not a get together guy. You hate to get together!” Jerry Seinfeld tells former partner Larry David in the third episode of this season’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “I’m being sold something. I don’t know what yet.”

Seinfeld fans will have even more reason to rejoice over the new season of “Curb” — a reunion of the cast of “Seinfeld.”

As “Curb” enters its seventh and potentially final season, David returns to the place that first made him a household name, and he’s bringing Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards with him in a faux “Seinfeld” reunion. The socially inappropriate and still wildly funny David (“Without your health you’re nothing. Some people are nothing even with their health. Like me.”) is still calling other drivers “Schmohocks!” and still scheming in the best tradition of Sgt. Bilko and Jack Benny. Taking on life’s everyday problems in largely improvised and symmetrically plotted episodes, with two disparate ideas converging in each episode to hysterical conclusion, David, who carefully outlines every episode, continues to push the creative envelope, turning every convention on its ear, including Jewish identity.

“Curb” has become the current clubhouse where Jewish comedians meet. The former “master of his domain,” David is the unbridled id of “Seinfeld” and the master of Jewish comedy. From feigning Orthodoxy in order to get his friend Richard Lewis a kidney donation, which harkens back to Seinfeld making out with his rabbi’s-daughter girlfriend during “Schindler’s List,” or a vengeful George mixing lobster into her omelet after a fight, “the formula is the same as ‘Seinfeld,’” David said, “to do awful things that people think about and sympathize with.”

Over the years, the overtly Jewish Larry has contemplated a spouse-authorized 10-year anniversary dalliance with his Orthodox Jewish dry cleaner; feigned Orthodoxy in order to curry favor with someone to get him access to a donor kidney so he does not have to donate his own to pal Richard Lewis; and refused to jump off a stuck ski lift along with his Orthodox seat mate at sundown because she does not want to violate the Sabbath. He also tells Suzie Essman’s Susie Green character, “I’m much more gentile than you” when he gets thrown out of his country club and tries to join a restricted club. A near-death drowning experience causes a spiritual rebirth and results in Larry getting thrown out of synagogue on Yom Kippur for trying to scalp tickets, and when Larry’s best friend/manager Jeff (Jeff Garlin) has a masturbation incident that is respectfully tied to his not wanting to miss the Four Questions at the Passover seder, it is a moment worthy of Philip Roth.

“I’m like every other Jew — there are things I like and things I don’t like and understand about Judaism — I just have the ability to talk about it,” David said. “I don’t think of things to do about Judaism, but if I hear or read a story, I say ‘I have to do something with that.’ The chairlift episode was based on a story I read. And Larry’s almost drowning and spiritual awakening was based on a story I read about something similar happening to Cat Stevens.”

Garlin and Essman play Jeff and Susie Green, Larry’s best friends — and the Jerry and Millie Helper to his twisted Rob Petrie, an alternate universe “Dick Van Dyke Show” that tests all the conventions of sitcoms and comedy.

“I’m very proud of my Jewish heritage,” said Garlin, also the executive producer of the show. “The Four Questions joke comes out of that. We’re not self-loathing in any way. We’re Jewish, and that becomes part of our humor.”

“To say that I use humor to show pride about my religion would be hypocritical, because I’m a nonbeliever and not religious in any way, but I do, however, feel proud to be a part of a long legacy of comedians, many of whom come from Jewish backgrounds,” said Essman, whose four recurring words “f—k you, Larry David” have earned her sitcom icon status.

“New York Jews frequently say things to me about ‘Curb,’ like, ‘I’m sure no one else in the country gets the show but us.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth. The humor in the show is universal, as is most Jewish humor — or all those great Jewish comics wouldn’t have been so popular. Anecdotally, I’ve been told by almost every ethnicity from Africans, Indians, Midwestern WASPs, etc., that they love the show.”

The tradition goes back to the early days of radio and television, where Jewish comedians would offer winks to their Jewish viewers with Yiddishisms and character names. The “Three Stooges” two-reelers were rife with Yiddish words (including “beblach,” which was mentioned a number of times in “You Nutzy Spy” and meant as an expletive, but is actually Yiddish for beans) and sometimes not-so-subtle references, including a huge sign that read: “O’Brien’s Kosher Restaurant.”

Sid Caesar (whose writers included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen) and Milton Berle crafted sketches for a broad American audience, but often character names would offer a wink to Jewish viewers. In a parody of the Japanese classic “Ugetsu,” Caesar’s Samurai warrior was named “Shtarka Yamagura.” In a World War II-movie parody, the German nemesis was named “Baron Katvasser.” Similarly, Milton Berle’s sketch comedy had him playing an upper-class Brit preparing for a tennis date with a “Lord Hamantash.”

Brooks and Reiner later created the classic “2,000 Year Old Man,” where Brooks’ old man was interviewed by Reiner about pieces of history:

“Paul Revere, did you know him?”

“Yes. Big anti-Semite. Ran around everywhere on his horse yelling: ‘The Yiddish are coming! The Yiddish are coming!’”

“That was ‘The British are coming!’”

“Really? I never knew. I didn’t even go to his funeral. I have to send a note to his wife.”

Alan King created a persona of the upwardly mobile Jew who moved from apartments in the city to homes in the suburbs. He anachronistically joked: “I could just see those gallant pioneers on Queens Boulevard in their covered wagons with their mink coats hanging out the back, yelling, ‘Onward to the suburbs!’”

Robert Klein and David Steinberg were among the first generation of Jewish comedians who did not change their last names to fit into mainstream America. The product of Second City Comedy troupe, Klein’s early stand-up focused squarely on his Jewish upbringing in the Bronx, where his father thought that everyone was Jewish (“Babe Ruth — Jewish, Joe DiMaggio — Jewish, Franklin Roosevelt — Jewish”), and his college years at Alfred University:

“I had to learn and grow. A little thing I encountered there that I really hadn’t encountered before, uh, anti-Semitism. Well, nothing — it was subtle, nothing you could put your finger on. Subtle to be sure: ‘Hey Jewboy! Where you goin’, Jewboy, High Holy Day?’ You know, just what I needed. I wanted to meet the guy next door in the dormitory. He was decorating his room with a swastika mobile. And I remember a brief phone call home to my parents: ‘Get me the f—k outta here!’”

Steinberg, the son of Orthodox Jews and both Second City- and yeshiva-trained, used Jewish identity as a platform for social critique, including of Jews changing their names. He also created sermonettes, where he came out dressed as a Reform rabbi and poked fun at Judaism in general and the Reform movement in particular:

“We’re going to talk about God, who you may remember from last week’s sermon…. God told Moses to approach the burning bush. ‘Take your shoes from off of your feet for the land that you are standing on is holy land.’ Moses approached the bush and burned his feet. God said ‘Aha, third one today!’ We’re not sure what Moses said, but we’re pretty certain that it’s the first mention of ‘Christ!’ in the Bible.”

Steinberg’s success led him to a regular gig on the “Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour” on CBS in the 1960s. The Moses sermonette generated more negative mail than any other show in CBS history. Rather than back down from the pressure, Steinberg, encouraged by Tom Smothers, fanned the creative flames. “I went on the ‘Tonight Show’ and talked about the letters. I said some of them came from Baptists, who wrote, ‘Mr. Steinberg, you shouldn’t make fun of the Jewish people; that’s our job,’ and some came from Reform Jews who wanted to know who Moses was.”

Comedians like Richard Lewis followed, whose angst was a product of his parents — he described coming from the only family that had “a menorah with a dimmer.”

“Seinfeld” had a number of Jewish-themed storylines and subplots, including Jerry going to confession to complain about his dentist converting to Judaism so he could tell Jewish jokes: “Does it offend you as a Jew?” asks the priest. “No,” replies Jerry, “it offends me as a comedian.”

In addition to pushing the creative envelope, “Curb” has also offered a haven for other masters of comedy to strut their stuff: Mel Brooks did an arc parodying the success of “The Producers”; Sacha Baron Cohen played an angel in the fifth-season finale. Shelley Berman has a recurring role as Larry’s father, and the late Bea Arthur played his mother. David Steinberg has directed a number of episodes. And semi-regular Richard Lewis said, “I use my Judaism proudly as a comedian on stage, mostly to boast about the food but also to keep my spiritual and biblical notions locked in my safety deposit box.

“I believe in separation of temple and stage.” 

As Larry David would say: “That’s pretty good — pretty, pretty good!”

Eddy Friedfeld is a film and entertainment journalist and teaches the history of comedy in America at Yale and NYU.

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