Happy Warrior
Curb Your Indignation
48 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017L
ONGTIMEfans of Seinfeldknow that the buzzkill
squad at the “standards and practices” office—the
comedy Comstockers, the prom chaperones—
gave a wide berth to the show’s writers. An episode
spoofing the JFK assassination? Shrug. Thirty minutes about
masturbation? Fine. About the only thing the censors ever
nixed was an episode that began with George reflecting, “I
have never seen a black person order a salad.” NBC couldn’t
handle the risk of being tagged as salad racists.
George’s alter ego and Seinfeldco-creator Larry David
went on to create and star in Curb Your Enthusiasm, though,
and it’s pretty much all“I have never seen a black person
order a salad.” Revived for a ninth season this fall after a six-
year break, Curbkicks things off in its first episode with
Larry in trouble for failing to hold a
door for a masculine-looking lesbian,
a choice he made because he surmised
that such a person would be offended
by being treated like a lady. Naturally
he receives nothing but hostility in
exchange for being well-meaning. By
the end of the show Larry, having
made some jokes about the Ayatollah
on TV in the course of preparing a
Broadway musical called “Fatwa,”
was himself the target of an actual
fatwa. Once that news got out, all of the producers who had
signed up to back him ran for cover and Larry found himself
shunned by his secular supposed allies against the jihadists.
Curb, in other words, is so real it hurts because we’re
right there with Larry David, trapped helplessly in the
thicket of political correctness. In the six years the show
wasn’t being produced, everything Larry finds baffling got
worse. The Curbbrand of comedy became even more
important, more relevant.
Prestige comedy these days has divided roughly into two
camps. There are the late-night jokesters who sit behind desks
and riff on current events, usually meaning Trumpland’s latest
misstep. Then there are the standups, some of whom (like
David and Louis C.K.) build sitcoms around their routines.
They go deeper. The desk comics’ material is all about
them—can you believe those confounded politicians?—
whereas the standups are about us. Trevor Noah delivers
zingers. Dave Chappelle offers insight. The two camps dif-
fer the way newspaper reporters differ from novelists.
Each group presents a different diagnosis of what’s off, and
hence what’s funny, about America today. For Stephen
Colbert, it’s simple: the existence of Republicans. Sweep
them away, and everything would be fine. It’s a utopian view.
The standups are our national shrinks, calling us on our neu-
roses and hypocrisies and the self-defeating nature of our
incessant whining. They unpack how we went mad. Louis
C.K. began his 2008 special Chewed Upwith a lengthy, and
very funny, reflection on why he was determined to keepusing three slurs nobody (excepting comedians) can say any-
more: the c-word, the n-word, and the f-word for gays. He
used the words so many times in so many light-hearted and
non-hateful ways that by the time he was done it seemed
bonkers that we’ve attached such mystical, harmful proper-
ties to these terms. Dave Chappelle, in his 2017 special The
Age of Spin, muses about the Filipino politician and ex-
fighterManny Pacquiao, who lost his Nike sponsorship deal
over some rude remarks about gays. “Some people just can’t
get over themselves,” says Chappelle. He has a Filipina wife
and says a lot of men in the Philippines felt emasculated
because their wives were the breadwinners: “And then sud-
denly, a boxer rises from amongst them and reinstates their
manhood with his motherf***ing fist. This is not the guy
you’re supposed to ask, ‘What do you
think of homosexuals?’ He’s not your
champ.” Here are some headlines that
greeted Chappelle: “Dave Chappelle,
Ricky Gervais and Comedy’s ‘Ironic
Bigotry’ Problem” (theGuardian).
“Dave Chappelle Didn’t Change with
the Times—and That’s the Problem”
(GQ). “What Is Dave Chappelle’s
Problem with Gay People?” (The New
Republic). Chappelle is on notice:
He’s officially a Problem.
The comic who desires media worship will stick to
approved targets, no matter how ridiculous. John Oliver
spent most of one episode of Last Week Tonightdoing a
Chicken Little bit about the onrushing menace that is
Sinclair Broadcast Group, a right-leaning owner of local
TV stations that will expand its reach if its buyout of
Tribune Media’s network of stations goes through. That
proposed combination, Oliver warned with the kind of
frantic urgency that suggests your favorite eighth-grader
informing you that she will expire on the spot if you don’t
get her the cool sneakers today, could enable Sinclair’s
nightly newscasts to reach—deep breaths, folks—as many
as 2.2 million U.S. households, leaving only the remaining
124 million untainted by Sinclair’s pernicious messaging
on any given evening.
Against that meaningless sign-the-petition grandstand-
ing, the standups offer honesty. Chappelle tells about how
he was heading to Flint, Mich., to do a benefit for victims
of the city’s water crisis. The phone rings. It’s Chris Rock.
Does Dave want to be Chris’s guest at the Oscars? “And I
was like, ‘Sure, n****r. I’m on my way to the airport right
now.’” The audience sucks in its breath. “Come on, man,”
says Chappelle. “What am I gonna do about that water?
What am I, a f***ing superhero? I need to have fun....
I’m sorry, everybody. I’d never been to the Oscars. You’ve
seen the movies I make.” “Save the country!” cry Oliver et
al. David, C.K., and Chappelle explain that we can’t even
save ourselves.
HBOBY KYLE SMITH
Larry DavidText