Last year, I was teaching a class on Kafka. I like to joke that the experience, not unlike the circumstances in Kafka’s stories and novels, caused me to surrender bits of my sanity. Going to bed every night and waking up in the morning and walking into town and writing in a brutalist-style library or in a coffee shop with tiny stools and tiny tables, I thought only of Kafka. Kafka was everywhere. In dealings with the bureaucratic side of academia. In cruel wrenches hurled into travel plans. In the grains settled at the base of my coffee cup (not really, but he may as well have been). What was this German-speaking, Prague-born, gaunt-looking man doing in contemporary life?
I pored over the infinite reserve of scholarly texts on JSTOR, amassing an iceberg of minute and esoteric knowledge of which my students saw only the tip. All of these texts are still on my desktop, organized in a file for easy perusal when I want to stroll down insanity lane.
Once, plummeting down a daily rabbit hole, I stumbled onto a delectable archive of papers that explored the role of humor in Kafka’s work. For the layperson, humor is not usually the first word that comes to mind when they hear “Kafka.” Macabre, depressive, enigmatic may be closer to the ones that do. But when you read Kafka and pay attention to his tone, accept the absurdity of the situations, listen to the inflections of the dialogue, you’ll see just how well he fits the profile of comedian.
Further still, I unearthed a section of literature devoted to the similarities between Kafka and Larry David. A match made in heaven.
Before we get into that, to appreciate the presence of humor in Kafka’s fiction, one must also consider the relationship between comedy and Jewishness, as well as Kafka’s Jewish identity.
For the most part, Kafka’s protagonists are often the little men of society. Heroes blighted by irrational, unearned authority. We see this in The Trial: Josef K is arrested without explanation, dragged through an inexplicable ouroboros of a justice system, and in the end, stabbed to death with a butcher’s knife.1 One of the most arresting final lines in literature: “Like a dog!” Within The Trial, there is a famous fable called Before the Law, which merits an essay-long dissection, so rich it is with contradiction and avenues of interpretation. Read it here and see for yourself. In The Castle, the titular chateau is introduced as a mirage, obscured by the darkness and the clouds, sitting atop a faraway hill. The highest figure of authority is elusive; the protagonist, K., is unable to secure a meeting with him, despite being hired by him as a land surveyor. The Metamorphosis has been analyzed and referenced so often that I need not elucidate how it, too, serves to exploit the “little man.” There are few Kafkian protagonists that escape their situations alive or even unscathed. Try and try as they might to explain themselves in the face of irrationality, they fail.
It is the downfall of Kafka’s characters that they insist on being rational instead of accepting the absurdity and dark humor of their situations. H. S. Reiss writes on Kafka’s comedic approach:
Kafka’s laughter at the absurd struggle of his characters then expresses his preoccupation with the problem of a rational understanding of the universe which is always eluding his grasp. There two attitudes basically prevail: the laughter of despair or the smile of serenity. They reflect the moods of despair and hope between which he alternated continuously.2
Were Josef K to resist seeking an explanation for his arrest or K. to stop searching for answers from the purported castle authorities, they might have survived or enjoyed a brighter fate. That is the cruel joke that Kafka plays on his characters and on his readers: to be rational is a futile pursuit in a reality that is inherently and so obviously irrational. We are better off simply laughing at ourselves.
Throughout his life, Kafka struggled to find an identity. Born in Prague to a German-Jewish family, he grew up attending German schools at the behest of his father. The Kafka patriarch was an abusive, tyrannical figure in Kafka’s life—a relationship he explored often in his fiction and directly in a letter called “Dearest Father.” One must not forget the deep well of inspiration that was Kafka’s work. Perhaps already widespread knowledge among the literary-inclined, Kafka toiled (unpaid) as a law clerk then went on to find employment at an insurance firm where he worked the graveyard shifts. All those tales of unnecessary, unjust bureaucracy are rooted in these psychologically harrowing but artistically fruitful experiences.
Despite Kafka’s uncertain identity, it is worthwhile to consider him a Jewish writer. After all, Philip Roth—a writer whose Jewishness is inextricable from his work—held the opinion that “Kafka ranks unrivaled as the funniest Jew ever.”3 Everyone knows of the uproar that Portnoy’s Complaint caused upon its release in 1969. It didn’t just leave those members of a diminishing puritanical society outraged; it left Jews outraged. Accusations of anti-semitism and moral corruption swarmed Roth in a deluge of vitriol. But Roth knew Jewish guilt to be a source of great comedy and to be a form of liberation. Though Kafka himself may not have written with the intention of reflecting his Jewishness, his subjects and style predated the modern tenets of Jewish comedy.
Jewish humor is often characterized as self-mockery—a quality that serves as a coping mechanism, a way to stay alive despite horrific circumstances.4 For Kafka and his characters, locating the comedic core of any situation helps to lessen the pain. It is the tipping point, when the horrible becomes so horrible that it turns into humor.5
There are two words in Yiddish that bolster this notion of the horrible equating to the humorous: “schlemiel” and “schlimazel.” The schlemiel is the “unintentional perpetrator of wrongdoing” while the schlimazel is the “unlucky recipient of wrongdoing.”6
Do you know of any more quintessential schlemiel and schlimazel than Larry David?
One critic, prior to the premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s third season, posited that “Franz might possibly come up with a TV series along the lines of, or even exactly like, Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The debacles that Larry finds him in are not unlike those of a Kafkian character: “David’s [existence] is repeatedly interrupted for absurdities, calamities and imbroglios.”7
What is the construction of a typical episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm? Larry does or says something that he believes to be rational and righteous, society does not agree, and he is punished. Always, no matter how logical and fundamentally right Larry is, he receives the butt end of the stick. Circumstances consistently play out in ways that relegate him to the role of loser, that leave him the victim of misinterpretation.
Consider the seventh episode of season two, “The Doll.” A certified classic. It starts at a dinner party thrown by an ABC executive, with whom Larry and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have agreed to do their new series. Larry has to go upstairs to use the bathroom because the downstairs one doesn’t have a lock. Who can blame him? How can you be expected to do your private business in a place that balks privacy? On the second floor, the exec’s daughter is playing with her doll, Judy, and complains to Larry that the doll’s hair is too long. He offers to give it a trim, gentleman that he is. The girl seems to love it. A little Dorothy Hamill thing. Moments later, a deafening shriek is heard and the girl comes running downstairs, crying to her mom that Larry cut off her doll’s hair. Misunderstanding #1. His manager, Jeff, comes to the rescue: Jeff’s daughter, Sammy, has a tremendous collection of dolls, including the much-coveted Judy. Sneaking past the suspicious leer of Susie, Larry and Jeff manage to locate the long-haired Judy, whose head Larry rips off and sticks down his pants. Her auburn, synthetic locks bring on a bit of a rash. Later, when Larry is back at the ABC exec’s house to restore order with Judy version 1.0, he asks to use the bathroom. This time, it has a lock—in fact, Larry even sees the handyman installing it. Peace at last. While he’s investigating that pesky rash, a woman walks in on him (the repairman, it seems, never finished the installation). What does she think he’s doing? Masturbating. Misunderstanding #2. And so, we approach a denouement, one that we know will not end happily. All of the dominoes have been arranged so that one flick of a mischievous finger will send them tumbling down. The ABC executive invites Larry and a slew of other guests to a screening of a film. At the theatre, Larry is informed that he cannot bring his water bottle (doctor’s orders, for his dehydration) inside, by the same woman who caught him masturbating. Understandably vexed, he puts the bottle into his pocket so he can use the bathroom before the screening. But he doesn’t go to the men’s bathroom because it’s been left in a revolting state, an “olfactory nightmare”—he goes to the women’s. Who comes wandering in but the exec’s daughter. She hugs him and thanks him for replacing the shorn Judy. Doing so, however, she feels what we know, what Larry knows, to be the water bottle in his pocket. Of course, that’s not what the little girl thinks: “Mommy, mommy, that bald man is in the bathroom and there’s something hard in his pants!” As we hear the mob brewing and rumbling outside, Larry is stranded in the bathroom and his only escape route is the tiny window nestled just below the ceiling. Cue the tuba.
Certainly, there are episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is the schlemiel—a source of headaches and stress as he attempts to refine the accepted rules of society. But in “The Doll,” Larry has done nothing wrong. He is the schlimazel. Wherever he turns, whatever he tries to do and rectify, he is fated to be the loser, the Kafkian hero who grasps for the rational in a reality where no such thing exists.
Everything ties together in the end. Ties together in the sense of a well-constructed joke. Not in the sense that Larry comes any closer to redemption or convincing society to accept his rational perception. No, that could never be the case. Larry, like the Kafkian protagonist, is doomed from the start. And what can one do, when failure is all but guaranteed, except laugh.
Is Larry David our generation’s Franz Kafka? 100 years down the road, will scholars dissect episodes of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm as we dissect the novels and stories of Kafka now? All signs point to yes. There is evidence that Larry David is a modern-day philosopher. From the orchestration of his jokes to the grappling with the pain of human existence, he has discovered a way to combat suffering. Laughter is the best medicine—the age-old, frivolous adage that, for Franz Kafka and Larry David, holds true. By laughing in the face of injustice and cruelty, we strip them of their power. If we don’t, if we indulge them by countering with rationality and reason, all we do is stoke the fire. Let us, then, chuckle and giggle and titter, and take matters into our own hands. Laughter is not just the best medicine—laughter is the path to immortality.
I need not point out that the infamous finale of Seinfeld is a trial in which our four friends are scrutinized for all the harm they’ve caused, and subsequently jailed. For those of you up to date on the latest and last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you know that Larry, too, confronts the justice system.
H. S. Reiss, “Franz Kafka’s Conception of Humour,” The Modern Language Review, 541.
James Bloom, quoted in “Larry David’s ‘Dark Talmud’: or Kafka in Prime Time.”
According to Sarah Blacher Cohen, quoted in “Larry David’s ‘Dark Talmud’: or Kafka in Prime Time”: “‘self-mockery was the most distinguishing feature of Jewish humor’ and that this ‘self-mockery,’ rather than humiliating, is ‘liberating’ as well as ‘the principle source of [Jewish] salvation’” (167). Later, Cohen defines the goals of Jewish humor as 1) to help the Jewish people to survive, 2) to confront the indifferent, often hostile universe, 3) to endure the painful ambiguities of life, 4) to retain a sense of internal power despite their external impotence (171). How Kafkian!
Mark Horowitz, “Why Are Jews Funny?,” Review of Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, by Jeremy Dauber, The New York Times, 1 December 2017.
Roberta Rosenberg, “Larry David’s ‘Dark Talmud’,” 170.
Tom Shales, “‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’: We Can’t! We Can’t!,” The Washington Post, 14 September 2002.