“I’m a Survivor!” - The Holocaust and Larry David’s Problematic Humour in Curb Your Enthusiasm
“I’m a Survivor!” - The Holocaust and Larry David’s Problematic Humour in Curb Your Enthusiasm

Summary/Abstract: In 2004, Larry David’s HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm aired an episode entitled The Survivor, which featured two storylines-one about Hasidic Judaism and one about the Holocaust. In his writing for the comedy series Seinfeld, David created a world that had Jewish coding, but overt references to Jews and Jewish history were more oblique (“soup Nazi” and Schindler’s List episodes aside). In Curb Your Enthusiasm, David’s follow-up show about “nothing”, David frequently launched frontal assaults on everything Jewish, and many viewers found the Survivor episode beyond the pale. This paper investigates this particular episode as a case study to evaluate the broader issue of representing the Holocaust through the medium of comedy.

• Details
• Contents