//essays//
Spring 2013
Stinky Chicken:
Reevaluating a Key “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Episode
David Fine
In the pantheon of television shows that Jewish college students obsess over—and there are many—Larry David’s Curb your Enthusiasm sits on the throne. Game of Thrones may bedazzle, New Girl may mimic our quarter-life crises, and 30 Rock might forever be memed, but there’s something about Curb that speaks to the deeper ancestral soul just beginning to percolate in young Jewish collegians. The show itself seems to address them on an existential level at a time when they’re trying their hardest to figure out what exactly it means to be Jews within wider American society. Perhaps no single episode speaks more to that identity than Palestinian Chicken, which aired in 2011. On a campus where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict elicits electric emotions, Palestinian Chicken has become a cultural touchstone for many Jewish Columbia students, lending commonplace symbolism to conversations ranging from political debate to comical quoting sprees. But, is Palestinian Chicken all it’s cracked up to be?
The episode combines two hallmarks of Larry David’s career: the skewering of established social norms, and the comic diminution of serious issues. Palestinian Chicken rolls up issues like marriage dynamics, religious identification in America, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into an episode that is one of the most consistently funny thirty minutes in David’s long oeuvre of funny Curb moments. Executed perfectly, the episode does not miss a humorous beat as it navigates rather turbulent waters. With Palestinian Chicken it seems that Larry David accomplishes something where many others fail, reducing the importance and size of the Middle East conflict to one between neighboring restaurants in Los Angeles, and thus reducing the stakes of the conflict’s outcome. It allows us to eschew via laughter an issue that we, and many of others who have different opinions from ours, actually take very, very seriously.
This is something that David often does to social norms on Curb Your Enthusiasm, effectively illustrating the ultimate vapidity of those norms. There is a strong argument to be made that David’s criticism of the often-neurotic social rules that pervade his life is one that those rules indeed deserve. Seinfeld (which David co-wrote with the show’s eponymous star) was famously a show “about nothing,” because the everyday encounters of life that it examined and satirized were arguably worth nothing. David’s comic diminution of those social norms is a natural exposure of their own worthlessness, covered under our unwillingness to behave otherwise. Palestinian Chicken reduces the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an inconsequential level with the same effect. David’s message in the end seems similar to his social criticism: why does this stuff even matter? By choosing to satirize the conflict within that framework, however, David neglects to offer a substantive critique of the conflict itself, and thereby raises the uncomfortable prospect that we may not be able to laugh about such serious issues.
With Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David has developed a character that follows, as Benjamin Wright notes, a “victim-agitator principle.” At points, Larry is a victim of the world and circumstances around him. Despite his best efforts to do the right thing, he is thwarted by the social conditions in which he is enmeshed. Some critics have suggested that this character borrows heavily from the common Jewish archetype of the schlemiel. In 1951, Irving Howe, the great Jewish literary critic, described the schlemiel as, “the eternal innocent, and yet one is never sure if he is merely a good-natured fool or if there is a reservoir of deep and hidden wisdom beneath his foolishness”—characteristics that David seems to have amplified in Curb. Though to outsiders—people not “in” on the joke—his might prove to be a well-intentioned but poorly-applied innocence, the audience and Larry’s close friends on the show know otherwise.
Often Larry is the agitator, the man who fails to do or see what’s right, either intentionally or because he is “hardwired” to behave like an importunate gadfly. David further complicates the standard schlemiel character by basing the character off of his life as the exceptionally wealthy creator of Seinfeld, a show that was once the most popular series on television and still survives in the American popular consciousness. “That he is completely povertystricken,” Howe notes of the schlemiel, “goes without saying.” Yet Larry is not povertystricken in the least. He has reached the height of American success, but still favors a conception of himself as someone on the margins of standard societal norms.
David’s schlemiel, though it differs from Howe’s classically defined model, still embodies the core of what aschlemiel is meant to do, at least according to Howe. In his essay, the critic concludes that authors like Sholom Aleichem created schlemiel characters through which, “one may see the true and splendid expression of both a folk and its greatest artist in humor which mocks pomp and wealth, which shatters pretension and which upholds the poor and the suffering.” David strives toward this ideal in Curb Your Enthusiasm by exposing his character to various social situations set in affluent Los Angeles in order mock the strange rules swirling around and trickling down to us from the lives of America’s upper class.
Though David arguably creates a successful schlemiel in Curb Your Enthusiasm, we can ask whether he achieves the sort of comedic effect and message that Jewish humor is meant to convey. Howe specifically defines Jewish humor against the modern American archetypes he observed in the 1950s:
Strictly speaking, Jewish humor is not humorous. It does not make you laugh uproariously nor does it provoke a carefree guffaw. The usual ingredients of current American humor—stylized insult, slapstick, horseplay, cruel practical jokes—are seldom present in Jewish humor. Rather is it [sic] disturbing and upsetting, its phrases dipped in tragedy.
Surely, David’s humor disturbs and upsets, but rarely is it dipped in tragedy, a byproduct of his newly modeled “successful schlemiel.”
David also includes various styles of comedy that Howe deems “seldom present in Jewish humor.” Many episodes feature “stylized insult, slapstick, horseplay, [and] cruel practical jokes”—especially cruel practical jokes. It seems that David may have co-opted the schlemiel character to create a distinct brand of humor that Howe would recognize as decidedly un-Jewish. But Curb Your Enthusiasm still generally breeds the type of comedy, the type of message, that Howe found virtuous in Jewish humor. “Jewish humor is therefore full of acute social observations,” Howe writes, elaborating that, “[t]he group which struggles along on the margin of history is always in a better position to examine it realistically than the group which floats in mid-stream.” Through much of the vulgar alienation that Larry brings upon himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the core of David’s schlemiel remains a deeply cynical and satirical character, advancing the same sort of social criticisms that Howe idealizes.
Wright, a contemporary critic of Curb Your Enthusiasm, notes that, “David, as the cynical critic, challenges the fixity of social boundaries for his own gain.” Noting that Curb Your Enthusiasm is perhaps the most overtly Jewish show in American television history, David Gillota explores the modern-day version of the schlemielthat David creates:
In particular, Larry David’s onscreen persona serves as a contemporary manifestation of the schlemiel figure from Yiddish folklore and literature. Although David keeps the most essential aspects of the schlemiel intact, he adapts them to the twenty-first-century American culture. David’s schlemiel persona attempts to reassert the seemingly assimilated, successful American Jew as a cultural other. In doing so, the series critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary American Jews feel about their own ethnic identity.
In that sense, Howe, who died in 1993, might have approved of Larry’s character. He probably wouldn’t have liked the Larry David we see in Palestinian Chicken, though. Concern about whether or not Larry and his friends can win an amateur golf tournament frames the opening of the episode. In this first scene, the friends are practicing their short game, and they begin to talk about emasculation:
Ron: So, uh, ready to go? I gotta go.
Eddie: You gotta go? Take it easy.
Ron: I mean I just got to get back. I told Ilene I’d be back at a certain time…
Eddie: How did I know that? [Mocking voice] I told Ilene I gotta get back. On the way we’ll pick up a new cock for you, okay?
[…]
Larry: Is there anything more pathetic than a cowering, emasculated Jew
who has to run home to his wife?
Jeff: I would agree with you.
Larry: That poor fuck.
Ron is cast throughout the episode as the most thoroughly emasculated man in the group. He is unable to “stand up” to his wife, and is belittled for “cowering” before her strong personality. His emasculation is juxtaposed with the other major theme introduced on the opening green—how the strictures of organized religion impede good things from happening. Marty Funkhouser, played by Bob Einstein, is the team’s best player but he’s been absent from practice the entire week, without explanation. The group discovers shortly into the episode that Funkhouser’s been skipping practice to spend time with his rabbi, attempting to “reconnect” with his faith.
As the episode progresses, other characters appear shallow and ignorant, while Larry and his sidekick’s agent Jeff are made out to be the bearers of truth and virtue—the real men among their emasculated friends. From the start, Larry criticizes Funkhauser’s newfound religious tendencies:
[Larry, seeing Funkhauser’s yarmulke, scoffs.]
Funkhauser: Shalom!
Larry: Alright, what the hell is this?
Funkhauser: What?
Larry: The yarmulke.
Funkhauser: I went through a bit of a midlife crisis, and I rededicated my life to Judaism.
[Pregnant pause.]
Larry: Are you for real?
Funkhauser: I had a lot of spielkes in my life and I didn’t realize it. I went to Rabbi Stein, do you know her?
Larry: No I don’t.
Funkhauser: Phenomenal. I go there every night. We talk. She
reinvigorates me.
Larry: Is that why you haven’t been practicing? We’re depending on you,
I hope you got your swing.
Funkhauser: I’m ready, I’m always ready.
Larry: When’re you going to come back to earth [pointing at the
yarmulke]?
Funkhauser: I’m living under a mitzvah, you have none of that.
Like in many other episodes, Larry approaches any grand assertion of religiosity like Funkhauser’s new yarmulke with incredulity. Larry’s belittling is inline with his normal critical behavior. Here, he has a legitimate source of ire. Funkhauser’s religiosity seems put upon and suspect. He pursues his newfound devotion with a bit too much zeal as the episode progresses, but Larry’s criticism of Funkhauser also progresses, eventually intermingling with the episode’s concurrent “emasculation” theme to create a vitriolic treatmen of traditional Jewish observance. Larry is the foil to his friends’ emasculation throughout the episode. Larry has no wife to belabor points or create near-arbitrary rules like his friends do, allowing Larry to emerge in the episode as a sort of cavalier social assassin. Larry’s independence enables him to criticize a wife where a husband or daughter can’t. In the first example of “social assassination,” Ron commissions Larry to tell Ron’s own wife Ilene to stop saying “LOL”—laugh out loud—at jokes she finds funny, rather than just actually, you know, laughing out loud. Larry obliges, and though the “assassination” fails (Ilene remains unconvinced of her ridiculousness), she directs her contempt toward her husband rather than toward Larry, even though Larry was the one who made the comment. By assuming his own marginalization, Larry can launch criticism, often with a sort of secure disregard that the assertive male imagines himself to have.
David also conveys this “manliness” in his ability to transgress. Larry relishes his “boldness” at being the only Jew at a Palestinian restaurant, and to later have sex with a Palestinian woman, Shara, whom he meets there. The restaurant, Al-Abbas, is sparse, decorated with Palestinian solidarity posters that ought to make Larry and Jeff feel unwanted. But Al-Abbas serves the best chicken that either has tasted in their lives. The simple carnal pleasures of Palestinian chicken win out over any sort of ethnic hesitation that the two feel. And it is Larry’s “masculinity” that entitles him to go where others can’t. When asked by Shara, a fellow patron, whether he’s Jewish, Larry nods his head and, almost laughing, replies, “Yes, I am a Jew.” He then raises his hand and points at Shara as he confidently qualifies: “a big Jew. Big.” With a Bond-like affect, he then tells her his name: “Leib, son of Nat.” At the Palestinian Chicken joint, for Larry, taste trumps tribe.
Larry’s “masculinity,” social transgressions, and disdain for organized religion come to a head, appropriately enough, outside of the Palestinian Chicken restaurant. Funkhauser, despite his reservations, agrees to meet David and Jeff there for dinner. But trouble erupts when Funkhauser shows up wearing his yarmulke, and refuses to take it off when David tells him that it will offend the Palestinian patrons in the restaurant:
Funkhauser: You know, I thought about it all last night. If Rabin can break bread with Arafat, I can have chicken at this anti-Semitic shithole.
Jeff: [Pointing to the yarmulke.] Okay, that’s just not going to work.
Larry: Yea, that’s just no good.
Funkhauser: What’s not going to work?
Jeff: The yarmulke.
Funkhauser: I can’t go in with wearing this yarmulke?
Larry: You’re shoving it in their faces.
Funkhauser: Let’s go in.
Larry & Jeff: No, no, no… [physically restraining Funkhauser]
Jeff: It’s far too cocky a move.
Larry: What is this? The raid on Entebbe? Let’s just kind of walk in casually…
Funkhauser: What?! Proud Jews wear yarmulkes.
Larry: Be proud in the parking lot, you don’t need to be proud in there.
Funkhauser: Let’s just go…
Larry: Take it off. Take it off.
David starts grabbing at Funkhauser’s yarmulke, eventually engaging in a tug of war that ends with Funkhauser storming off back to his car. Jeff and Larry turn around and the restaurant, watching through the window, bursts out in applause. Larry is then congratulated, and Shara, who Larry will in short time take to bed, gives him her phone number. Later on in the episode, when Funkhauser tells Larry that he will not play the golf game because it is on the Sabbath, Larry pledges to confront Funkhauser’s rabbi about the problem. “You’re not even a man anymore,” yells David at Funkhauser as the latter leaves Larry’s home, “mommy rabbi says, ‘don’t play little boy.’ Get out!” When Larry confronts the rabbi, she agrees to let Funkhauser play only when Larry indulges her demand of a piece of chicken that he got from the Palestinian restaurant (though the audience only sees them fighting over the chicken).
It would seem, then, that Larry’s schlemiel in fact seeks to be the sole gatekeeper of masculinity, asserting himself over his friends and his culture. But these incidents are in fact quite appropriate for the schlemiel. When Larry refuses to let Funkhauser into the Palestinian restaurant with a yarmulke on, he does so for typical schlemiel reasons: he doesn’t want to disturb the patrons, cause a scene, or appear too prideful in a non-Jewish setting. Inherent cowardice, not manliness, is what drives Larry’s decision making, but the Palestinians in the restaurant mistake it for courage. Larry’s lovemaking with the Palestinian woman best encapsulates this pseudo-manliness. He lies vulnerably on his back while Shara grinds atop him yelling statements like, “occupy this, you occupying fuck,” and “fuck me like Israel fucks my people!” Though he is, as she yells, “occupying” her, she is the one who emasculates him by belittling him and his religion throughout the minute or so the audience sees of them having sex. And it is to these insults that Larry willingly consents repeatedly. Again, when he confronts the rabbi, Larry yields his chicken after a physical altercation presumably initiated by the rabbi, a tribute he must pay to get his way. Despite his flailing at masculinity, Larry really acts like a wimp.
His character is able to shift smoothly between two worlds until he is confronted with the final scene: a demonstration between a group of Palestinians supporting their restaurant, and Jews protesting the restaurant’s opening next to a Jewish deli. Both sides entice Larry. He’s given the choice between his ethnic loyalty and forbidden sex. The episode closes with that choice unmade, implying that, for Larry, it is an impossible one. The schlemiel defeated by his competing ethnic pride, sex drive and inability to assert himself.
Throughout the episode, Larry fulfills his victim-agitator role and works well as Curb Your Enthusiasm’s modern day schlemiel. Taken as a whole, though, these incidents negate the basic purpose of the schlemiel. Larry’s encounters throughout the episode form an overly reductive binary between the “Palestinian” side and the “Jewish” side of the issue. Though that binary may exist in the minds of many, and though David may want to make a statement by creating that binary within the episode, he fails to complicate or critique the binary with any effect. On its face, the episode is transgressive, edgy, and superficially funny. It’s funny that a Jew should find ethnic food to reach its apex in a Palestinian restaurant. It’s funny that, in the ultimate act of intimacy, David’s partner yells anti-Semitic slurs at him. It’s funny that dueling restaurants in urban Los Angeles would overly agitate two groups of people (though maybe that’s not entirely unrealistic). It is all so funny because it is so absurd, and this seems to be comic diminution at its best, making laughter out of knotty, important, scary issues.
Indeed, nearly every second of the episode tickles the gut. But, the underlying message that Howe requires the real schlemiel to convey is missing. Nothing “disturbing and upsetting,” happens in Palestinian Chicken. No real message is conveyed other than that the entire conflict is absurd. If there is any subtle message that the episode wishes to illustrate, it is that Jews and Palestinians are not really responsible for the conflict, but rather a specific type of Jew is—the religious Jew. In Palestinian Chicken, Palestinians are caricatured even more than Jews. They are willing to serve and eat undisturbed next to people who are obviously Jewish but not obviously religious. Once a Jew with a yarmulke attempts to enter their restaurant, though, they become hostile and cheer his ouster. They welcome the irreligious Jew (Larry) into their restaurant as a hero for preventing the religious Jew (Funkhauser) from coming onto what’s their territory. David’s message seems clear: without organized religion, without Israeli settlements, the conflict would not exist. Or is it so clear? After all, when Larry and Jeff first eat in the restaurant, they sense an innate hostility toward the Jews:
Larry: What about this place? Look at these posters [gesturing toward the pro-Palestinian posters].
Jeff: Yea, they do not like the Jews.
Larry: We’re probably the only Jews who ever walked in here.
[…]
Larry: Looks like they’re planning the next Intifada at this table [pointing to a table of Palestinians]…
Even Jeff and Larry, two unaffiliated Jews not wearing yarmulkes, immediately feel like outsiders—even threatened outsiders—in the restaurant. But, they do nothing to play on the outsider status they feel, other than to feel more accepted by assaulting another Jew. It seems then, that in the orbit of this episode, the Palestinian people also have some culpability in the conflict. The binary holds, and the two sides are legitimized, but David fails to poke at the binary or evolve it in any way. Here, we can recall Gillota’s note that David’s modern day schlemiel,“critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary American Jews feel about their own ethnic identity.” Calling attention to thorny issues, David nevertheless fails to critique anything of substance in Palestinian Chicken. Rather, he is the one being reductive: comic diminution, lacking the ability to present a new, nuanced, or in any way complex commentary on the conflict, only manages to diminish it. At most, David makes one wonder why the conflict is so difficult to resolve. That is where we’re left, and it feels unsatisfying.
Gillota might still be correct about Curb Your Enthusiasm as a whole. Larry David’s comic diminution works because it breaks down social norms and schisms, and exposes them for the absurdities that they are. What’s required in the normal Curb Your Enthusiasm critique is the diminishment. There’s no need for the series to add complexity to its usual analysis because the objects it criticizes deserve no added complexity. In that sense, Curb Your Enthusiasm generally creates strong social criticism by way of its oversimplification. Palestinian Chicken, though, illustrates the shortfalls of such a simplistic approach when the series focuses its critical eye on situations that are not born out of social norms. The episode uses comic simplicity to pare down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it fails—or perhaps refuses—to grant any complexity to the object once it’s diminished. Rather than creating a lesson as in other episodes, Palestinian Chicken merely documents the fissures between Jews and Arabs that seem to persist along the conflict’s usual fault lines, a rote and conventional critique of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Larry’s indecision between his heritage and his chicken is nothing new to the thoughtful viewer.
Howe begins his essay on Jewish humor by telling us what he thinks is a quintessential Jewish joke:
You tell a joke to a peasant and he laughs three times: when you tell it; when you explain it; and when he understands it. A landowner laughs only twice: when he hears the joke and when you explain it. For he can never understand it. An army officer laughs only once: when you tell the joke. He never lets you explain it—and that he is unable to understand it goes without saying. But when you start telling a joke to another Jew, he interrupts you: ‘Go on! That’s an old one,’ and he shows you how much better he can tell it himself.
Howe explains that at its surface, the joke contains a rather crude observation about “group superiority,” which favors the Jews. But digging deeper, one unearths the joke’s truth: “The anonymous narrator is really poking fun at the weaknesses of his own people nevermind their intellectual impatience and over-confidence. Though usually subtle, this persistent criticism of Jewish humor sometimes verges on self-denunciation.”
It’s true, Larry David’s humor is often less than subtle. The schlemiel character he’s created for Curb is outrageous in its schlemielness. Larry is able to so easily skewer notions of masculinity and emasculation in Palestinian Chicken because of the inherent contradictions he has constructed within his schlemiel sense of self: he’s a rich, powerful man but he’s still very much a Jewish dweeb, allowing him to dabble with his own self-effacement. When Palestinian Chicken encounters the political sphere, though, it seems to lose that self-criticism, the winking internal nod that makes Jewish jokes complex proposals, not just crude laughhungry statements. Rather than embrace the “us vs. them” binary that ethnic humor can often produce, Jewish humor turns its back on such an easy path and in the process makes strong statements about both itself and the wider society it is meant to critique. Palestinian Chicken on the other hand, uses the polar nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for laughs, but it goes no further than that—and therefore fails its Jewish comedic heritage.
Another lesson that Howe’s joke imparts is that two layers always exist within a good Jewish joke: the outer layer that immediately causes laughter, and the deeper kernel of humor that drives a joke’s animus. Palestinian Chicken is all outer layer and no kernel. Though Howe might have been proud of Larry David’s overall comedic accomplishments in reinvigorating his people’s brand of humor, he would not have recognized any Jewish humor—or for that matter, any real schlemiels—in this episode. Having said that,Palestinian Chicken is still good for a laugh or two.
The episode combines two hallmarks of Larry David’s career: the skewering of established social norms, and the comic diminution of serious issues. Palestinian Chicken rolls up issues like marriage dynamics, religious identification in America, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into an episode that is one of the most consistently funny thirty minutes in David’s long oeuvre of funny Curb moments. Executed perfectly, the episode does not miss a humorous beat as it navigates rather turbulent waters. With Palestinian Chicken it seems that Larry David accomplishes something where many others fail, reducing the importance and size of the Middle East conflict to one between neighboring restaurants in Los Angeles, and thus reducing the stakes of the conflict’s outcome. It allows us to eschew via laughter an issue that we, and many of others who have different opinions from ours, actually take very, very seriously.
This is something that David often does to social norms on Curb Your Enthusiasm, effectively illustrating the ultimate vapidity of those norms. There is a strong argument to be made that David’s criticism of the often-neurotic social rules that pervade his life is one that those rules indeed deserve. Seinfeld (which David co-wrote with the show’s eponymous star) was famously a show “about nothing,” because the everyday encounters of life that it examined and satirized were arguably worth nothing. David’s comic diminution of those social norms is a natural exposure of their own worthlessness, covered under our unwillingness to behave otherwise. Palestinian Chicken reduces the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an inconsequential level with the same effect. David’s message in the end seems similar to his social criticism: why does this stuff even matter? By choosing to satirize the conflict within that framework, however, David neglects to offer a substantive critique of the conflict itself, and thereby raises the uncomfortable prospect that we may not be able to laugh about such serious issues.
With Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David has developed a character that follows, as Benjamin Wright notes, a “victim-agitator principle.” At points, Larry is a victim of the world and circumstances around him. Despite his best efforts to do the right thing, he is thwarted by the social conditions in which he is enmeshed. Some critics have suggested that this character borrows heavily from the common Jewish archetype of the schlemiel. In 1951, Irving Howe, the great Jewish literary critic, described the schlemiel as, “the eternal innocent, and yet one is never sure if he is merely a good-natured fool or if there is a reservoir of deep and hidden wisdom beneath his foolishness”—characteristics that David seems to have amplified in Curb. Though to outsiders—people not “in” on the joke—his might prove to be a well-intentioned but poorly-applied innocence, the audience and Larry’s close friends on the show know otherwise.
Often Larry is the agitator, the man who fails to do or see what’s right, either intentionally or because he is “hardwired” to behave like an importunate gadfly. David further complicates the standard schlemiel character by basing the character off of his life as the exceptionally wealthy creator of Seinfeld, a show that was once the most popular series on television and still survives in the American popular consciousness. “That he is completely povertystricken,” Howe notes of the schlemiel, “goes without saying.” Yet Larry is not povertystricken in the least. He has reached the height of American success, but still favors a conception of himself as someone on the margins of standard societal norms.
David’s schlemiel, though it differs from Howe’s classically defined model, still embodies the core of what aschlemiel is meant to do, at least according to Howe. In his essay, the critic concludes that authors like Sholom Aleichem created schlemiel characters through which, “one may see the true and splendid expression of both a folk and its greatest artist in humor which mocks pomp and wealth, which shatters pretension and which upholds the poor and the suffering.” David strives toward this ideal in Curb Your Enthusiasm by exposing his character to various social situations set in affluent Los Angeles in order mock the strange rules swirling around and trickling down to us from the lives of America’s upper class.
Though David arguably creates a successful schlemiel in Curb Your Enthusiasm, we can ask whether he achieves the sort of comedic effect and message that Jewish humor is meant to convey. Howe specifically defines Jewish humor against the modern American archetypes he observed in the 1950s:
Strictly speaking, Jewish humor is not humorous. It does not make you laugh uproariously nor does it provoke a carefree guffaw. The usual ingredients of current American humor—stylized insult, slapstick, horseplay, cruel practical jokes—are seldom present in Jewish humor. Rather is it [sic] disturbing and upsetting, its phrases dipped in tragedy.
Surely, David’s humor disturbs and upsets, but rarely is it dipped in tragedy, a byproduct of his newly modeled “successful schlemiel.”
David also includes various styles of comedy that Howe deems “seldom present in Jewish humor.” Many episodes feature “stylized insult, slapstick, horseplay, [and] cruel practical jokes”—especially cruel practical jokes. It seems that David may have co-opted the schlemiel character to create a distinct brand of humor that Howe would recognize as decidedly un-Jewish. But Curb Your Enthusiasm still generally breeds the type of comedy, the type of message, that Howe found virtuous in Jewish humor. “Jewish humor is therefore full of acute social observations,” Howe writes, elaborating that, “[t]he group which struggles along on the margin of history is always in a better position to examine it realistically than the group which floats in mid-stream.” Through much of the vulgar alienation that Larry brings upon himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the core of David’s schlemiel remains a deeply cynical and satirical character, advancing the same sort of social criticisms that Howe idealizes.
Wright, a contemporary critic of Curb Your Enthusiasm, notes that, “David, as the cynical critic, challenges the fixity of social boundaries for his own gain.” Noting that Curb Your Enthusiasm is perhaps the most overtly Jewish show in American television history, David Gillota explores the modern-day version of the schlemielthat David creates:
In particular, Larry David’s onscreen persona serves as a contemporary manifestation of the schlemiel figure from Yiddish folklore and literature. Although David keeps the most essential aspects of the schlemiel intact, he adapts them to the twenty-first-century American culture. David’s schlemiel persona attempts to reassert the seemingly assimilated, successful American Jew as a cultural other. In doing so, the series critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary American Jews feel about their own ethnic identity.
In that sense, Howe, who died in 1993, might have approved of Larry’s character. He probably wouldn’t have liked the Larry David we see in Palestinian Chicken, though. Concern about whether or not Larry and his friends can win an amateur golf tournament frames the opening of the episode. In this first scene, the friends are practicing their short game, and they begin to talk about emasculation:
Ron: So, uh, ready to go? I gotta go.
Eddie: You gotta go? Take it easy.
Ron: I mean I just got to get back. I told Ilene I’d be back at a certain time…
Eddie: How did I know that? [Mocking voice] I told Ilene I gotta get back. On the way we’ll pick up a new cock for you, okay?
[…]
Larry: Is there anything more pathetic than a cowering, emasculated Jew
who has to run home to his wife?
Jeff: I would agree with you.
Larry: That poor fuck.
Ron is cast throughout the episode as the most thoroughly emasculated man in the group. He is unable to “stand up” to his wife, and is belittled for “cowering” before her strong personality. His emasculation is juxtaposed with the other major theme introduced on the opening green—how the strictures of organized religion impede good things from happening. Marty Funkhouser, played by Bob Einstein, is the team’s best player but he’s been absent from practice the entire week, without explanation. The group discovers shortly into the episode that Funkhouser’s been skipping practice to spend time with his rabbi, attempting to “reconnect” with his faith.
As the episode progresses, other characters appear shallow and ignorant, while Larry and his sidekick’s agent Jeff are made out to be the bearers of truth and virtue—the real men among their emasculated friends. From the start, Larry criticizes Funkhauser’s newfound religious tendencies:
[Larry, seeing Funkhauser’s yarmulke, scoffs.]
Funkhauser: Shalom!
Larry: Alright, what the hell is this?
Funkhauser: What?
Larry: The yarmulke.
Funkhauser: I went through a bit of a midlife crisis, and I rededicated my life to Judaism.
[Pregnant pause.]
Larry: Are you for real?
Funkhauser: I had a lot of spielkes in my life and I didn’t realize it. I went to Rabbi Stein, do you know her?
Larry: No I don’t.
Funkhauser: Phenomenal. I go there every night. We talk. She
reinvigorates me.
Larry: Is that why you haven’t been practicing? We’re depending on you,
I hope you got your swing.
Funkhauser: I’m ready, I’m always ready.
Larry: When’re you going to come back to earth [pointing at the
yarmulke]?
Funkhauser: I’m living under a mitzvah, you have none of that.
Like in many other episodes, Larry approaches any grand assertion of religiosity like Funkhauser’s new yarmulke with incredulity. Larry’s belittling is inline with his normal critical behavior. Here, he has a legitimate source of ire. Funkhauser’s religiosity seems put upon and suspect. He pursues his newfound devotion with a bit too much zeal as the episode progresses, but Larry’s criticism of Funkhauser also progresses, eventually intermingling with the episode’s concurrent “emasculation” theme to create a vitriolic treatmen of traditional Jewish observance. Larry is the foil to his friends’ emasculation throughout the episode. Larry has no wife to belabor points or create near-arbitrary rules like his friends do, allowing Larry to emerge in the episode as a sort of cavalier social assassin. Larry’s independence enables him to criticize a wife where a husband or daughter can’t. In the first example of “social assassination,” Ron commissions Larry to tell Ron’s own wife Ilene to stop saying “LOL”—laugh out loud—at jokes she finds funny, rather than just actually, you know, laughing out loud. Larry obliges, and though the “assassination” fails (Ilene remains unconvinced of her ridiculousness), she directs her contempt toward her husband rather than toward Larry, even though Larry was the one who made the comment. By assuming his own marginalization, Larry can launch criticism, often with a sort of secure disregard that the assertive male imagines himself to have.
David also conveys this “manliness” in his ability to transgress. Larry relishes his “boldness” at being the only Jew at a Palestinian restaurant, and to later have sex with a Palestinian woman, Shara, whom he meets there. The restaurant, Al-Abbas, is sparse, decorated with Palestinian solidarity posters that ought to make Larry and Jeff feel unwanted. But Al-Abbas serves the best chicken that either has tasted in their lives. The simple carnal pleasures of Palestinian chicken win out over any sort of ethnic hesitation that the two feel. And it is Larry’s “masculinity” that entitles him to go where others can’t. When asked by Shara, a fellow patron, whether he’s Jewish, Larry nods his head and, almost laughing, replies, “Yes, I am a Jew.” He then raises his hand and points at Shara as he confidently qualifies: “a big Jew. Big.” With a Bond-like affect, he then tells her his name: “Leib, son of Nat.” At the Palestinian Chicken joint, for Larry, taste trumps tribe.
Larry’s “masculinity,” social transgressions, and disdain for organized religion come to a head, appropriately enough, outside of the Palestinian Chicken restaurant. Funkhauser, despite his reservations, agrees to meet David and Jeff there for dinner. But trouble erupts when Funkhauser shows up wearing his yarmulke, and refuses to take it off when David tells him that it will offend the Palestinian patrons in the restaurant:
Funkhauser: You know, I thought about it all last night. If Rabin can break bread with Arafat, I can have chicken at this anti-Semitic shithole.
Jeff: [Pointing to the yarmulke.] Okay, that’s just not going to work.
Larry: Yea, that’s just no good.
Funkhauser: What’s not going to work?
Jeff: The yarmulke.
Funkhauser: I can’t go in with wearing this yarmulke?
Larry: You’re shoving it in their faces.
Funkhauser: Let’s go in.
Larry & Jeff: No, no, no… [physically restraining Funkhauser]
Jeff: It’s far too cocky a move.
Larry: What is this? The raid on Entebbe? Let’s just kind of walk in casually…
Funkhauser: What?! Proud Jews wear yarmulkes.
Larry: Be proud in the parking lot, you don’t need to be proud in there.
Funkhauser: Let’s just go…
Larry: Take it off. Take it off.
David starts grabbing at Funkhauser’s yarmulke, eventually engaging in a tug of war that ends with Funkhauser storming off back to his car. Jeff and Larry turn around and the restaurant, watching through the window, bursts out in applause. Larry is then congratulated, and Shara, who Larry will in short time take to bed, gives him her phone number. Later on in the episode, when Funkhauser tells Larry that he will not play the golf game because it is on the Sabbath, Larry pledges to confront Funkhauser’s rabbi about the problem. “You’re not even a man anymore,” yells David at Funkhauser as the latter leaves Larry’s home, “mommy rabbi says, ‘don’t play little boy.’ Get out!” When Larry confronts the rabbi, she agrees to let Funkhauser play only when Larry indulges her demand of a piece of chicken that he got from the Palestinian restaurant (though the audience only sees them fighting over the chicken).
It would seem, then, that Larry’s schlemiel in fact seeks to be the sole gatekeeper of masculinity, asserting himself over his friends and his culture. But these incidents are in fact quite appropriate for the schlemiel. When Larry refuses to let Funkhauser into the Palestinian restaurant with a yarmulke on, he does so for typical schlemiel reasons: he doesn’t want to disturb the patrons, cause a scene, or appear too prideful in a non-Jewish setting. Inherent cowardice, not manliness, is what drives Larry’s decision making, but the Palestinians in the restaurant mistake it for courage. Larry’s lovemaking with the Palestinian woman best encapsulates this pseudo-manliness. He lies vulnerably on his back while Shara grinds atop him yelling statements like, “occupy this, you occupying fuck,” and “fuck me like Israel fucks my people!” Though he is, as she yells, “occupying” her, she is the one who emasculates him by belittling him and his religion throughout the minute or so the audience sees of them having sex. And it is to these insults that Larry willingly consents repeatedly. Again, when he confronts the rabbi, Larry yields his chicken after a physical altercation presumably initiated by the rabbi, a tribute he must pay to get his way. Despite his flailing at masculinity, Larry really acts like a wimp.
His character is able to shift smoothly between two worlds until he is confronted with the final scene: a demonstration between a group of Palestinians supporting their restaurant, and Jews protesting the restaurant’s opening next to a Jewish deli. Both sides entice Larry. He’s given the choice between his ethnic loyalty and forbidden sex. The episode closes with that choice unmade, implying that, for Larry, it is an impossible one. The schlemiel defeated by his competing ethnic pride, sex drive and inability to assert himself.
Throughout the episode, Larry fulfills his victim-agitator role and works well as Curb Your Enthusiasm’s modern day schlemiel. Taken as a whole, though, these incidents negate the basic purpose of the schlemiel. Larry’s encounters throughout the episode form an overly reductive binary between the “Palestinian” side and the “Jewish” side of the issue. Though that binary may exist in the minds of many, and though David may want to make a statement by creating that binary within the episode, he fails to complicate or critique the binary with any effect. On its face, the episode is transgressive, edgy, and superficially funny. It’s funny that a Jew should find ethnic food to reach its apex in a Palestinian restaurant. It’s funny that, in the ultimate act of intimacy, David’s partner yells anti-Semitic slurs at him. It’s funny that dueling restaurants in urban Los Angeles would overly agitate two groups of people (though maybe that’s not entirely unrealistic). It is all so funny because it is so absurd, and this seems to be comic diminution at its best, making laughter out of knotty, important, scary issues.
Indeed, nearly every second of the episode tickles the gut. But, the underlying message that Howe requires the real schlemiel to convey is missing. Nothing “disturbing and upsetting,” happens in Palestinian Chicken. No real message is conveyed other than that the entire conflict is absurd. If there is any subtle message that the episode wishes to illustrate, it is that Jews and Palestinians are not really responsible for the conflict, but rather a specific type of Jew is—the religious Jew. In Palestinian Chicken, Palestinians are caricatured even more than Jews. They are willing to serve and eat undisturbed next to people who are obviously Jewish but not obviously religious. Once a Jew with a yarmulke attempts to enter their restaurant, though, they become hostile and cheer his ouster. They welcome the irreligious Jew (Larry) into their restaurant as a hero for preventing the religious Jew (Funkhauser) from coming onto what’s their territory. David’s message seems clear: without organized religion, without Israeli settlements, the conflict would not exist. Or is it so clear? After all, when Larry and Jeff first eat in the restaurant, they sense an innate hostility toward the Jews:
Larry: What about this place? Look at these posters [gesturing toward the pro-Palestinian posters].
Jeff: Yea, they do not like the Jews.
Larry: We’re probably the only Jews who ever walked in here.
[…]
Larry: Looks like they’re planning the next Intifada at this table [pointing to a table of Palestinians]…
Even Jeff and Larry, two unaffiliated Jews not wearing yarmulkes, immediately feel like outsiders—even threatened outsiders—in the restaurant. But, they do nothing to play on the outsider status they feel, other than to feel more accepted by assaulting another Jew. It seems then, that in the orbit of this episode, the Palestinian people also have some culpability in the conflict. The binary holds, and the two sides are legitimized, but David fails to poke at the binary or evolve it in any way. Here, we can recall Gillota’s note that David’s modern day schlemiel,“critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary American Jews feel about their own ethnic identity.” Calling attention to thorny issues, David nevertheless fails to critique anything of substance in Palestinian Chicken. Rather, he is the one being reductive: comic diminution, lacking the ability to present a new, nuanced, or in any way complex commentary on the conflict, only manages to diminish it. At most, David makes one wonder why the conflict is so difficult to resolve. That is where we’re left, and it feels unsatisfying.
Gillota might still be correct about Curb Your Enthusiasm as a whole. Larry David’s comic diminution works because it breaks down social norms and schisms, and exposes them for the absurdities that they are. What’s required in the normal Curb Your Enthusiasm critique is the diminishment. There’s no need for the series to add complexity to its usual analysis because the objects it criticizes deserve no added complexity. In that sense, Curb Your Enthusiasm generally creates strong social criticism by way of its oversimplification. Palestinian Chicken, though, illustrates the shortfalls of such a simplistic approach when the series focuses its critical eye on situations that are not born out of social norms. The episode uses comic simplicity to pare down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it fails—or perhaps refuses—to grant any complexity to the object once it’s diminished. Rather than creating a lesson as in other episodes, Palestinian Chicken merely documents the fissures between Jews and Arabs that seem to persist along the conflict’s usual fault lines, a rote and conventional critique of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Larry’s indecision between his heritage and his chicken is nothing new to the thoughtful viewer.
Howe begins his essay on Jewish humor by telling us what he thinks is a quintessential Jewish joke:
You tell a joke to a peasant and he laughs three times: when you tell it; when you explain it; and when he understands it. A landowner laughs only twice: when he hears the joke and when you explain it. For he can never understand it. An army officer laughs only once: when you tell the joke. He never lets you explain it—and that he is unable to understand it goes without saying. But when you start telling a joke to another Jew, he interrupts you: ‘Go on! That’s an old one,’ and he shows you how much better he can tell it himself.
Howe explains that at its surface, the joke contains a rather crude observation about “group superiority,” which favors the Jews. But digging deeper, one unearths the joke’s truth: “The anonymous narrator is really poking fun at the weaknesses of his own people nevermind their intellectual impatience and over-confidence. Though usually subtle, this persistent criticism of Jewish humor sometimes verges on self-denunciation.”
It’s true, Larry David’s humor is often less than subtle. The schlemiel character he’s created for Curb is outrageous in its schlemielness. Larry is able to so easily skewer notions of masculinity and emasculation in Palestinian Chicken because of the inherent contradictions he has constructed within his schlemiel sense of self: he’s a rich, powerful man but he’s still very much a Jewish dweeb, allowing him to dabble with his own self-effacement. When Palestinian Chicken encounters the political sphere, though, it seems to lose that self-criticism, the winking internal nod that makes Jewish jokes complex proposals, not just crude laughhungry statements. Rather than embrace the “us vs. them” binary that ethnic humor can often produce, Jewish humor turns its back on such an easy path and in the process makes strong statements about both itself and the wider society it is meant to critique. Palestinian Chicken on the other hand, uses the polar nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for laughs, but it goes no further than that—and therefore fails its Jewish comedic heritage.
Another lesson that Howe’s joke imparts is that two layers always exist within a good Jewish joke: the outer layer that immediately causes laughter, and the deeper kernel of humor that drives a joke’s animus. Palestinian Chicken is all outer layer and no kernel. Though Howe might have been proud of Larry David’s overall comedic accomplishments in reinvigorating his people’s brand of humor, he would not have recognized any Jewish humor—or for that matter, any real schlemiels—in this episode. Having said that,Palestinian Chicken is still good for a laugh or two.