Larry David‘s 2017 Saturday Night Live monologue was almost very different, he said, because show boss Lorne Michaels—and the network censor— wanted him to cut some of his “offensive” material.
David hosted the show once in 2016 and then again in 2017, at which time the Curb Your Enthusiasm star said he was “called up to Lorne’s office” to talk about his monologue just 30 minutes before the show was set to go live.
David’s opening remarks called out what he noticed as a “very disturbing pattern” that “many of the predators” in Hollywood, “not all, but many of them—are Jews.”
David didn’t specify to SNL alums Dana Carvey and David Spade on their Fly on The Wall podcast which parts of the monologue had the censor worried, but he did notably make some controversial comments that year at the height of the #MeToo movement.
The comedian used his monologue to highlight that “very disturbing pattern” that “many of the predators” in Hollywood, “not all, but many of them—are Jews.”
“The censor said that I couldn’t do this bit,” he explained, “There were two bits they didn’t want me to do.” To add insult to injury, it was “a half hour before the show, at 11 o’clock” when he heard the complaint for the first time. David wouldn’t budge though. “I said, ‘Yeah, I can’t” make changes, “‘I have to do it,” he recalled. But that didn’t stop him from arguing his point.
“I go, ‘What? Why is it offensive? I don’t get it. Who’s gonna be offended by this?’” David said he argued so fiercely that “after five minutes of this” Michaels gave up. “He said to the censor, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna win this one.’”
Michaels was right, of course, and David went on to deliver his material about not wanting Jews to be “in the headlines for notorious reasons,” just as the Harvey Weinstein scandal was unfolding.
“I want Einstein discovers the theory of relativity. Salk cures Polio. What I don’t want: Weinstein took it out,” he joked then. He took the jokes even further when he joked about whether he’d be able to resist checking out women if he’d been in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. “Of course, the problem is, there are no good opening lines in a concentration camp.”
To the censor’s point, backlash to David’s monologue was swift—as Holocaust survivor organizations and the Anti Defamation League condemned the jokes at the time, with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeting that David “managed to be offensive, insensitive & unfunny all at same time. Quite a feat.”
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