How is it that the people who want to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee because it evokes the painful legacy of slavery give Larry David a pass on his crude riffs on the Holocaust? Here is an article that states it well:
Larry David Goes One Cringe Too Far BY Thane Rosenbaumhttp://jewishjournal.com/opinion/227019/larry-david-goes-one-cringe-too-far/
With his appearance on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, Larry David, the undisputed king of cringe-comedy, may have finally crossed a line. It is a symbolic line, admittedly, one that artists draw for themselves both morally and aesthetically. But it is a line nonetheless.
Of course, it’s not a line David would ever hesitate crossing again. He’s taken that same devilish step many times in the past—all for laughs.His monologue on SNL, however, doubled down on a theme that properly deserves to be forever buried and left alone. That’s what we do with the dead, especially the victims of mass murder. A certain amount of piety is expected, and one never dreams of desecration with such nightmarish events.
David pivoted from the recently disclosed sexual predations of certain men in the entertainment industry, making the unpleasant association that many of them happened to be Jews, to his own unseemly wolfish behavior. Apparently, so indiscrete are his sexual urges that he can imagine checking out Jewish women in a concentration camp. In fact, he gave a national audience a glimpse of David hypothetically approaching an attractive woman with death in her immediate future, and testing out pick-up lines.
Appalling, but perhaps not surprising. David has been flirting with the Holocaust for many years. And he keeps coming back, not taking no for an answer, a nebbish with a libido for bad taste. Except the Holocaust is not a love interest. It is an unsightly atrocity, incapable of attraction of any kind, and on any human scale.
This is the same man who conceived a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry was making out with a girl during a screening of Schindler’s List. And another in which a disagreeable fast-food proprietor was renamed “The Soup Nazi.” An episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm riffed on the Reality TV show, The Survivor, in which a winning contestant squared off at a dinner party with an actual survivor of a death camp, comparing their relative suffering. In still yet another, a man with numbers tattooed on his forearm turns out not to be a Holocaust survivor, but rather just someone who temporarily inks his lotto ticket number each week so as not to forget.