Global Paradigms

"Palestinian Chicken," the most recent episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" was hysterically funny and provided a mishmash of equal-opportunity bashing of almost anyone who comes to mind. I liked this review by Meredith Blake: Shara: I like you. Larry: What’s not to like? Shara: Eh, you’re a Jew. Some day in the not-too-distant future, lazy undergrad students will be writing lengthy essays about Jewish-American male identity based on little more than this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Who needs Portnoy’s Complaint when you’ve got “Palestinian Chicken”? A few years back, New York magazine ran a cover story about the evolution of Jewish humor. The gist of the piece, which was pegged to the release of Woody Allen's Whatever Works, was that Jewish comedy is slowly dying out after a century of gradual assimilation. In the article, Larry David claimed that he doesn’t think of himself as a distinctly Jewish comedian. At the time, I thought he was being a tad disingenu...