Leave Larry David Alone
I am not a big watcher of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” although I’ve seen a few episodes. Nonetheless, just before the controversy arose about Mr. David apparently accidently splashing a picture of Jesus Christ with urine, I happened to tune in. After viewing it and seeing the arguments of those who felt this is the same old Catholic bashing from Hollywood, I believe Mr. David is being unfairly maligned.
The indefatigable defender of the Faith, Bill Donohue has weighed in against Mr. David but just like a cat that, sitting on a hot stove, avoids cold stoves thereafter, Mr. Donohue’s ceaseless battles against the secular enemies of Catholicism may have made him insensitive to distinctions.
For those unfamiliar with the show, Mr. David plays himself as a self-centered, hyper-critical, secular liberal of Jewish descent but not belief. His friends and acquaintances are all Hollywood liberals. When he encounters people of faith they are invariably employees or people with far less wealth and prestige than Mr. David. The only exception are a series of “bad Jews” who normally make a mockery of their own faith. Overall Abraham Foxman more than Mr. Donohue should have a beef with Larry David. His character, when he can get away with it, treats traditional religious believers with contempt. He does the same with Republicans and conservatives. On the show this is not presented as making him a finer human being, but often as a nervous tick that cuts him off from normal society and makes him an awful person.
In the episode under attack he has an employee who wears inappropriate midriff exposing clothing to work. She compounds this offense by not having the body for the ensemble. Mr. David and his friend Jerry Seinfeld confront her about this. Eventually he must go to her and her mother’s home to fix the resulting bad feelings. During this visit, having taken a drug that causes him to urinate with particular force, Mr. David inadvertently splashes a picture of Jesus Christ in the bathroom. He does not tell his hosts and runs off. The Catholic mother and daughter take this as a “weeping Jesus” picture and prepare to take it on the road as a miracle to inspire and convert. Eventually the truth comes out.
Some of this was pretty funny. None of it was anti-Catholic. First, Catholics are not Orthodox. They do not venerate icons. (Venerate is different from worship; no Christian worships icons). In other words, this devotional picture, unlike an icon, is not a part of ceremony nor intrinsic to the practice of Catholicism. It was a print of a renaissance image that did not come into vogue till after Catholicism was 1500 years old. Second, the Catholic Church itself is highly skeptical of “weeping Jesus” pictures, statues, and the like. Popular Catholicism often has an affinity for such signs, but ever since the Reformation, when the relics of the True Cross outweighed, all the forests in France the Church is leery of such items until irrefutably tested and found not to be fraudulent. The Church itself, when presented with such an item, would have had the same level of skepticism as Mr. David.
The credulity of his employee and the failure of courage and honesty of Mr. David, as well as his shallowness are the true sources of comedy in this episode. The show does not ask the viewer to laugh at Catholics in particular but human weakness and folly in general (and in Mr. David most especially). The idea that Mr. David would not make fun of Moslems is also ridiculous. Are we to monitor television shows for references to each religion now? It is an assault on artistic freedom to insist on some sort of “parody equity” rule in entertainment.
In any event, the humor would have to be done differently. Moslems do not have a large or long standing presence in America. Moslems have no tradition of “weeping Mohammad’s” for obvious reasons. The person Mr. David plays also would be far more sensitive to Moslem feeling than Catholic sensibilities, just as secular liberals are. It would take away verisimilitude for Larry David to treat adherents of the two religions the same way because those in Mr. David’s class and outlook do not do so.
HBO and television in general is, as Mr. David’s critics note, far more likely to insult Catholics than adherents of almost any other religion. Only Southern Baptists and Mormons are in the running for this dubious honor. That is because those religions go against the grain of modern liberalism more than others do, and cannot retreat into victimhood when attacked. From a Christian perspective this should be a badge of honor rather than of complaint. If Roman Catholicism acclimates itself to whatever the ideology of the moment is as well as the main line Protestant churches have, it will cease to be relentlessly criticized by the media and entertainment industry. It will also have ceased to matter. Larry David did not bash Catholicism last Sunday, but to insist that he bash other religions before he gets to do so makes no sense at all.