Is the Holocaust Funny?

Last week's Saturday Night Live monologue from host Larry David has been met with a lot of criticism. There's also a group that knew what to expect out of him, especially if they are familiar with Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm We've seen jokes made of national tragedies, some with varying results. I'm not sure how much you can get away with making Holocaust jokes. It's also important to know that David, much like Jerry Seinfeld, is Jewish.

When David did his monologue, he talked about some of the scandals in Hollywood in a vague way. That would translate him to talking about Holocaust stuff about seeing women in them and wanting to get one. It doesn't surprise me what he's saying considering his career. I've viewed David as the type of person that is anti to the norm. He went against things that NBC had in mind at times when Seinfeld was on the air and viewers loved it. His "no hugging, no learning" aspect helped him. George Costanza is probably the greatest sitcom character ever because of how David molded him and perfected by Jason Alexander. The character is someone you could see in real life.

That being said, using the Holocaust as your crutch is not going to bode well, and it showed. I don't think it's a generational thing considering the audience for SNL and their head people being young and from the Collegehumor website. If someone made a September 11th joke, that would not fly (no pun intended) with people. Now, Seinfeld had references to Nazis in a number of episodes. Hell, two episodes were focused on Nazis. One was The Limo with the rally at Madison Square Garden. The other was The Soup Nazi.  However, they don't directly talk or joke about the Holocaust.

David's shtick could be a good indication that he needs to be more careful with what he talks about. I don't think he should give up being anti to the norm, but better choices could help. And his Holocaust joke dragged SNL to from what I've heard, a very forgettable one with the usual politics skits that they have been using throughout the year. While it's not strange for the show to do political sketches, their over reliance on that and Alec Baldwin to keep portraying Trump gets tiring. Look at South Park. They decided to not follow the trend because they knew what was going to be seen from other shows.

Getting back on point, I'm not sure how much this will impact David. SNL I would think would keep using him for Bernie Sanders and a couple other things. He's got a long way to go to repair some of his image. He would have been better off doing that bit on HBO with Curb.